A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Pulitzer Prize Finalist - Softcover

Eggers, Dave

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375725784 ISBN 13: 9780375725784

Publisher: Vintage, 2001

Synopsis

A respected magazine editor/founder and onetime spokesman for Generation X offers a satiric, eloquent, and thoroughly tradition-shattering memoir that discusses the deaths of his parents from cancer, his raising of his younger brother, and more. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 300,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

At the age of 22, Dave Eggers became both an orphan and a "single mother" when his parents died within five months of one another of unrelated cancers. In the ensuing sibling division of labour, Dave is appointed unofficial guardian of his eight-year-old brother, Christopher. The two live together in semi-squalor, decaying food and sports equipment scattered about, while Eggers worries obsessively about child-welfare authorities, molesting babysitters and his own health. His child-rearing strategy swings between making his brother's upbringing fun and performing bizarre developmental experiments on him. (Case in point: his idea of suitable bedtime reading is John Hersey's Hiroshima.) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is also, perhaps less successfully, about being young and hip and out to conquer the world (in an ironic, media-savvy, Generation-X way, naturally). In the early 1990s, Eggers was one of the founders of the very funny Might Magazine, and he spends a fair amount of time here on Might, the hipster culture of San Francisco's South Park and his own efforts to get on to MTV's Real World. This sort of thing doesn't age very well--but then, Eggers knows that. There's no criticism you can come up with that he hasn't put into A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius already. "The book thereafter is kind of uneven," he tells us regarding the contents after page 109, and while that's true, it's still uneven in a way that is funny and heartfelt and interesting. All this self-consciousness could have become unbearably arch. It's a testament to Eggers's skill as a writer--and to the heartbreaking particulars of his story--that it doesn't. Eggers comes from the most media-saturated generation in history--so much so that he can't feel an emotion without the sense that it's already been felt for him. What may seem like postmodern noodling is really just Eggers writing about pain in the only honest way available to him. Oddly enough, the effect is one of complete sincerity, and--especially in its concluding pages--this memoir as metafiction is affecting beyond all rational explanation. --Mary Park

Review:

"A virtuosic piece of writing, a big, daring, manic-depressive stew of a book that noisily announces the debut of a talented--yes, staggeringly talented new writer." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

" Exhilarating.... Profoundly moving, occasionally angry and often hilarious.... A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is finally, a finite book of jest, which is why it succeeds so brilliantly." --The New York Times Book Review

"Eggers evokes the terrible beauty of youth like a young Bob Dylan, frothing with furious anger.... He takes us close, shows us as much as he can bear.... His book is a comic and moving witness that transcends and transgresses formal boundaries." --The Washington Post

"[F]unny, wildly intelligent.... What's consistent throughout is the full-throttle voice: the sensibility of the man who grieves his parents, who safeguards his brother, who knows that his own presence here can walk the line between 'self-conscious' and 'self-devouring." --The Boston Globe

"Eggers crafts something universal here, something raw and real and wonderful that transcends any zeitgeist and manages to deal trenchantly with 'big issues' that often prove too daunting for younger writers: mortality, youth the artifice of writing, the Zen of Frisbee. This is a beautifully ragged, laugh-out-loud funny and utterly unforgettable book." --San Francisco Chronicle

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0375725784
• ISBN 13: 9780375725784
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496