Out of Sheer Rage
Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence
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ISBN10: 0312429460
ISBN13: 9780312429461
Trade Paperback
256 Pages
$18.00
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
Geoff Dyer had always wanted to write a book about D. H. Lawrence. He wanted, in fact, to write his "Lawrence book." The problem was, he had no idea what his "Lawrence book" would be, though he was determined to write a "sober academic study." Luckily for the reader, he failed miserably.
Out of Sheer Rage is a harrowing, comic, and grand act of literary deferral. At times a furious repudiation of the practice of writing itself, this is not so much a book about Lawrence as a book about writing a book about Lawrence. As Lawrence wrote about his own study of Thomas Hardy, "it will be about anything but Thomas Hardy, I am afraid—queer stuff—but not bad."
Reviews
Praise for Out of Sheer Rage
"A potently distilled treatise on literature."—The New Yorker
"Smart and furious enough to justify its many detours. This book is a rant—not a meditation, never a meditation!—on pique and procrastination but primarily on that chronic, commonly occuring brand of perversity that defies psychiatric classification . . . [Dyer is] a comic antihero well-suited to our time."—Kelly Murphy Mason, The Washington Post
"Out of Sheer Rage is about something other than Lawrence or Not Lawrence . . . Its real point is Dyer's roundabout, tricky, discursive, and often witty ramblings on what it means to make a work of art or even an artistic statement in postmodern culture."—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times
"In the spirit of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage keeps circling its subject in widening loops and then darting at it when you least expect it to . . . A wild book."—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times
"His brand of imaginative criticism illuminates a direction where literary criticism might go. If only we could have more fresh, insightful, energetic works such as Dyer's."—Jenifer Berman, Bomb
"Marvelous . . . gives a better picture of Lawrence than any biography I know."—James Wood, The Guardian (UK)
"An intriguing, magnetic, genre-rattling book."—Viola von Harrach, The Sunday Times (London)
"There are well over 1,000 books on D.H. Lawrence, but this one has an unconventional angle. On the first page, one is disabused of the notion that this will be yet another critical analysis or biography, perhaps brilliant, perhaps jargon-ridden, but destined to join all the others. Instead of his planned academic 'Lawrence Book,' Dyer gives us a splendid study on procrastination, denial, rationalization, and writer's block. As he travels around Paris, Greece, Oaxaca, and other locales, he agonizes over such things as what books to bring along and which to leave behind; either way, they become excuses for not writing. There is the irony that the self-admittedly undisciplined Dyer did indeed manage to produce this book, even if not the learned tome he had intended. It deserves to be called his 'Lawrence Book,' and it's probably all the better for the manner in which it was written. Heartily recommended."—Janice E. Braun, Mills College, Oakland, California, Library Journal
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About the author
Geoff Dyer
