The Gatekeeper: A Memoir

Rating:
Summary: Humour with a Point
Review: Eagleton has long been a major and uncompromising thinker. But, just as much, he is also an excellent writer. This is a good book to read as a 'refresher' if you have read other books by Eagleton, and a good book to begin with if you have not. You might or might not always agree with Eagleton, but he will make you think, laugh and, if you are honest with yourself, perhaps rethink some of your convictions. Above all, he is one of those very few important thinkers whose intricate thinking does not plough their prose into turgidity.

Rating:
Summary: Engagingly told, yet detached and oblique
Review: Eagleton's recent work finds him claiming the "professional Irishman" mantle, first in literary investigations, then satirical observations directed towards his once-removed, newly reclaimed homeland in "The Truth About the Irish," and now in this rather unrevealing memoir. True to the Hibernian stereotype, he talks your ear off for hours yet you come away dazzled by his wit...only realizing after your "intimate" conversation how little you've actually learned from your nimbly eloquent and now fleeting acquaintance.

I found his opening two chapters on Irish Catholicism the best, in which he balances fault-finding with sensitivity and compassion. His chapters on far-left politics and "losers" reveal not so much his own intellectual and political thoughts as his take on the wider community of thinkers, posers, and activists in all their idealism and philistinism both.

His mentor at Oxford proves in his student's eyes repelling and appealing, but the whole dislocation I presume Eagleton felt at Oxford here becomes refracted into some Wildean scene that, not having had the privileges Eagleton earned, I could not fully share. His recollections on the page seemed angled at those within the charmed circle, as those in the leftist campaigning, and if you're removed at a distance as I am, the detachment only grew as I read his entertaining but--in these latter sections--ultimately disengaged recollections.

Still, as with his literary and satirical work (seek out his novella "Saints and Sinners"), Eagleton's worth reading, for the energy of his mind and the enthusiasm of his intellect. You won't find much about his personal side here, but he does deliver what he wishes to share on the page, frankly and tersely.

Rating:
Summary: Engagingly told, yet detached and oblique
Review: Eagleton's recent work finds him claiming the "professional Irishman" mantle, first in literary investigations, then satirical observations directed towards his once-removed, newly reclaimed homeland in "The Truth About the Irish," and now in this rather unrevealing memoir. True to the Hibernian stereotype, he talks your ear off for hours yet you come away dazzled by his wit...only realizing after your "intimate" conversation how little you've actually learned from your nimbly eloquent and now fleeting acquaintance.

I found his opening two chapters on Irish Catholicism the best, in which he balances fault-finding with sensitivity and compassion. His chapters on far-left politics and "losers" reveal not so much his own intellectual and political thoughts as his take on the wider community of thinkers, posers, and activists in all their idealism and philistinism both.

His mentor at Oxford proves in his student's eyes repelling and appealing, but the whole dislocation I presume Eagleton felt at Oxford here becomes refracted into some Wildean scene that, not having had the privileges Eagleton earned, I could not fully share. His recollections on the page seemed angled at those within the charmed circle, as those in the leftist campaigning, and if you're removed at a distance as I am, the detachment only grew as I read his entertaining but--in these latter sections--ultimately disengaged recollections.

Still, as with his literary and satirical work (seek out his novella "Saints and Sinners"), Eagleton's worth reading, for the energy of his mind and the enthusiasm of his intellect. You won't find much about his personal side here, but he does deliver what he wishes to share on the page, frankly and tersely.