A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

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Summary: Just when he starts to get indulgent...
Review: Just when Eggers starts to get indulgent, he acknowledges what he's doing and turns the book on a dime. He knows how to manipulate the reader with honesty. At times a tad too reliant on tricks, I give him credit for totally warning the reader that he is just that. And may I say...what an ending. This book is worth reading.

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Summary: It falls apart
Review: As other reviewers have said, the book starts out strong, but it becomes so self-indulgent I abandoned it. It's interesting how little we find out about Toph when the book is ostensibly about the art of raising him. Other family members are also only sketchily drawn. The really big personality is the narrator's, and his testiness and self-loathing become tiresome. While a promising first work, HWSG is over-rated.

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Summary: Eggers: the Kerouac of the slacker generation?
Review: As Jack Kerouac was to the Beat Generation, so is Dave Eggers to "slackerdom" (or Generation X, or whatever other meaningless title one would be attempted to bestow upon that particular age group). All the while I was reading this book of less than staggering genius, I marvelled at all the 5-star reviews it was getting. Was I missing something? Is the problem that I may be at the wrong age (44) to appreciate something like this? Surprisingly, by the time I finished the book, I had to admit there were sections that touched me deeply, especially dealing with the death of the author's mother and the aftermath. There were also parts I found amusing (like the Adam Rich death scam). These helped offset the totally boring, tedious parts, including the faux-interview with the casting director of MTV's "The Real World". During most of the book, I kept wondering "Why should I care about these people?" By the end, I realized that, somehow, I cared very much. And that a book can make me feel that way despite the fact that I found much of it pretentious and dull shows that it may be closer to a work of genius than I'd like to admit. But it would be more "sneaky genius" than "staggering genius".

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Summary: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Boredom!
Review: While this book had a lot of promise, humor and obsure Gen X references, it has somehow its fallen woefully short of its mark. The first 100 or so pages were entertaining. Eggers has a great sense of self-depricating humor. But a lull in the book hit mid-way and it never quite recovered. As one who typically finishes every book until the end, I can't seem to get through this one. I've stopped caring about his plight, the humor is tired, and ultimately I lost all interest in Egger's story. While some might compare this to Naked by David Sedaris, they should not. Naked is funnier, better thought out and less rambling. (In all fairness, Naked was comprised of short stories.) In all, my patience became worn and I could no longer muddle through when so many other good books await me.

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Summary: A Brilliant Book, Brother - Up to a Point
Review: Tnis is a daring 'autobiographal novel' about a young man's life after he loses both his parents, his determination to live energetically, creatively, and responsibly whilst bringing up his younger brother Toph to the best of his abilities. As Eggers explains early in the novel, his predicament is in some way every child's fantasy. Eggers' finds hismelf in the extraordinary position of voyager, someone able to sound out the depths of this fantasy and expose its lies and its truths because he has been there. He speaks to us as someone who knows, someone authentic, but someone who is also hypersensitive to the ways in which he is being perceived hismelf. Eggers is both empowered by his loss and plagued by fears and anxieties about vulnerability and mortality, and the themes of bereavement and responsibility are approached with an infectious humour and self-consciousness. Right from the start Eggers knows that through his fate he has been cast in a boundlessly theatrical role as well as a brutally real and cruel one, and a great part of the humour derives from his expectations about how people he meets will react to his predicament as orphan-cum-parent, and his wry self-heroizing.

The first thiry pages or so are beautifully written and extremely sad, detailing with great detachment and skill the deaths of his parents, the next seventy brilliant, bold and liberating, but from then on the book seems to lose some of it's intensity and the more Eggers writes about his work on Might Magazine and his circle of friends and their problems, the more we are drawn away from the central relationship with Toph the subject on which Eggers is at his best. All Eggers really needed to do was write these first hundred pages. The notes at the beginning are amusing, but unnecessary, but then part of the point of the novel is that for Eggers, for the writer on his own everyhting is necessary and important and he'll do what the hell he wants. Anyway, it is hard to be critical of a book so honest and forthright and funny and original, and Eggers is such a charming and intelligent narrator that you stick with him through his lapses and worry about the events that befall him in the same way that he hismelf worries about Toph in the novel. Read it, and then buy a copy for your brother. If you don't have a brother, buy it for somebody else.

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Summary: Eggers' Naked Truth
Review: If you're looking for an action-packed read, find something else. But if sarcastic, off-beat, and rawly emotional is enough action for you, do not miss this book. In "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," Eggers holds back nothing, either factually or emotionally. Whether he's describing the death of his parents, or running naked on a beach, Eggers never deviates from his honest, simple tone. You can't help but respect him for the way that he unapologetically and unpretentiously holds up not only his life, but his inner monologue for public inspection. The book is also quite funny- Eggers has a dry, almost unintentional, humor that makes the situations he describes even funnier. This book is not for the reader who prefers plot-driven novels, or dislikes extremely smart, 20-something, pop-culture obsessed authors. Anyone else, read this book immediately.

Rating:
Summary: Not half bad considering...
Review: Yeah, it's a good read. Who wouldn't like the casual narration, the less-clever-every-time-it-appears drift into meta-nonfiction, the facts of the story that underlie its goofier aspects? As the title reflects, Eggers was most likely approached by S&S before he had finished (or even begun) the writing of this book as we see it. Despite its thoroughness, there's a hint of the author rushing through moments of his life, not always sure where to stop and make us smell his flowers, or whatever. Still, it was an enjoyable book, I don't think anybody can really disagree with that. And by god that's what i want out of a book. If lingering thoughts of Dave's untold wealth from this tome plague you, don't fret; i walked by his apartment the other day and i can report it's a fairly modest affair, no gates or valets attendant.

Rating:
Summary: Hoplessly sophomorific
Review: We all live with this dream of sharing our every moment, fantasy, or emotion with a vast public. Mr Eggers has a nimble way with words, and someone at Simon & Schuster fell for this imposition on all our time and patience.

The lad is clever. He just needs a good editor - make that a good college English teacher - to better channel his talent.

There are 8 million stories in the Big City - this is (merely) one of them.

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Summary: Best Understood by Gen X'rs, but good nonetheless
Review: This was a birthday gift from my son. He thought, I'd like it, and wasn't wrong. Rearly have I read a story that takes me on a complete trip across the full emotional spectrum. I couln't help wondering what I'd have done at 22 had both my parents died within a month of each other. And then I found myself wondering if I have left my affairs in order should I die today (leaving my 23 and 22 year-old behind). If I had one piece of advice for Dave, and I'm certain he scours these reviews to find advice, it would be to capitalize on his comedic genius. Parts of this book were roll-on-the-floor funny.

Rating:
Summary: circularly eggering
Review: so yeah, this book is really something else alltogether. you see that the author himself has called "heartbreaking" and "staggering," and man, is that ever, not arrogant because he cant mean it, but still pretty self conscious and gimmicky; then you read in the introduction how he admits that its gimmicky, he is conscious of its self-consciousness. then he admits that its gimmicky to admit how gimmicky it is. hmm. well then.

then you read the book, and parts of it *are* heartbreaking, but is that genius? no, you say, but he WANTS it to be. the author wants so badly, so terribly, to tell a story that is so heartbreaking and full of genius, so much that he calls his work just that--heartbreaking and staggering, and genius. and goes to such great lengths to do just that. its so sad, so pathetic that it almost does rip your heart in two, just seeing how much this guy yearns to write something heaertbreaking, and how painfully obvious he is about it, and then it breaks your heart AGAIN to see how obvious he makes the obviousness.

he just wants it so bad. so it *does* end up being heartbreaking. which is exactly what the author called it. which is why it breaks your heart in the first place. which is what he had in mind all along. which is heartbreaking in a whole diferent way.

well, maybe that IS genius. the chicken or the eggers?

read this book. it will tear your heart in two for no other reason than that it simply wants so badly to tear your heart in two. for my money, that's brilliant.