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Summary: "Collage is the slowest route between two points."
Review: That's my favorite line from an essay by John D'Agata. He just visited my school, and his reading has inspired me to finish this book weeks ahead of time for class. I never thought I would get into a book like this before, but I'm loving it! He makes the werid ways it's written in easy to digest, but clear why he's doing it. If you know anything about the poor lonely guy named Henry in his book, then you know why the essay about him called "Collage History of Art" is written in all fragments. Collage maybe the slowest route between two points, but I'm so happy now it is! I hope the book never ends. Thank you!! (oh, and he's a cutie! :)
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Summary: Saving Nonfiction One Essay at a Time
Review: If you like Anne Carson, read John D'Agata. If you like Ben Marcus, read John D'Agata. If you like Michael Ondaatje, read John D'Agata. If you like Borges, Annie Dillard, Robert Coover, Michael Palmer; care about literature; love to be challeneged; hear music in words; see beauty in irony; consider yourself a reasonably intelligent person who nonetheless still wants to be entertained when you read...then read John D'Agata.
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Summary: the sound of poetry
Review: if there is any question still as to whether this book is poetry or prose, go hear john dagata read. it's about thirty hours since first hearing d'agata read from this first book and i'm still in a daze--a good one! he reads hypnotically, and pulls out rhythms from the prose that i never even knew were there. but they really are. he explained the metrical techniques that cicero used to use in ancient rome and how prose writers all have that tradition in their backgrounds, whether or not they know it. and so when he read, pausing each time to turn a page, my heart just sank, hoping it wasn't the end of the reading. just breathtaking. now i have his voice in my head; now these essays are with me forever.
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Summary: On My Run-In With Martha Graham
Review: I was skeptical, because of the hype, but this kid is the real thing. And in fact it was only after reading the book that I realized that I had actually encountered his stuff before, at a dance recital no less! A friend of mine in Santa Cruz was part of an amazing tribute to past choreographers and dancers one night at her school, during which there was this breathtaking...biography I guess it would be called on Martha Graham. It spanned her life, and was heroic and realistic and empathetic and bitchy all at the same time. It pretty much reminded me why she was so huge a figure in the lives of so many artists of my generation. The most amazing part of the performance, though, wasn't really the dancing, but instead the choice of accompaniment for the dance. Instead of music, someone stood on the side of the stage and read a long poem about Martha Graham, moving in and out of myth and reality, history and fantasy...it was like music itself, the reading. Since that night, that single poem is truly the only thng that I remember from the experience--and this at a dance recital! Now, five years later, imagine how surprised I am to pick up this book in Bloomington and find that very same poem included! (Except this time it's being called an essay!) Suffice it to say, I am John D'Agata's newest fan. Any writer who can sustain not only so complicated a story but a whole DANCE also with mere words, is a writer I want to follow. His words are music, and such a beautiful tribute to the High Queen of Modernism.
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Summary: "Halls of Fame"
Review: Eschewing the flash-in-the-pan sensationalism or oozy sentimentality found in most personal essay collections published these days, John D'Agata's first book harkens back to an older generation of essay writers; in fact, it's fitting that two of today's best essayists, Annie Dillard and Phillip Lopate, both have offered up blurbs for the back cover of this book. (It is even more telling that they both essentially said the same thing about the book and its author--that D'Agata is either "pushing the envelop" or "redefining" the modern American essay.)Their blurbs seem fitting because the book is straddling aesthetic eras just as it seems to be straddling genres too. Structurally vivacious, formally almost metrical at times, the book borrows much from poetry and fiction, but remains steadfastly in the realm of essays--almost as if through some sacred allegience to the ancient nigh-bygone form. It's almost as if D'Agata were scribbling away in a netherworld library alcove somewhere all these years--a library stocked with the wackiest of contemporary fiction and poetry, but with only the best of classical essays to choose from. He's got one foot planted firmly in the tried-and-true traditions of Emerson, Thoreau, Woolf, and Orwell, and the other foot toe-tapping to the wildest contemporary innovations in Meta-Fiction, Language Poetry and the like. The combination makes for one of the most intriguing debut publications in years, and maybe the most stunning debut in nonfiction, specifically, in decades. Particularly notable are his two word-portrait biographies on Martha Graham and Henry Darger, two of the best artist biographies I have read in a long time. Learned, humorous and moving all at once, they present not traditional chronologies of these artists' lives but instead conjure up a kind of living atmosphere that is inviting enough to surround the reader with their lyricism, but complex in their thinking and responsible in their research. A book surely worthy of reading if for only these two finds.
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Summary: Finding Himself a Form
Review: Truly this is one of the best debuts in Creative Nonfiction's recent past. Clearly it is one of the most exciting and meaningful from the last decade's memoir-enhanced Nonfiction craze. The book is wily, weird, well researched and highly--hugely--intelligent. The "forms" employed in HALLS OF FAME, while unlike anything we've seen in the genre to date, are profound. They make sense. Get to know the man who calls himself the President of the Flat Earth Society and you'll realize why D'Agata chose to write the essay almost entirely in footnotes. Read through a few of the short peices in the title essay, "Hall of Fame," and you'll understand completely why D'Agata needed to write about these pathetic little museums in one-sentence paragraphs and line breaks. To dismiss this book because of its complexity would be a great blunder indeed, but that doesn't seem to be a problem here, considering its reviews so far. What amazes me and gives me hope is the fact that so odd a book is touching so many people. Maybe American literature isn't dead after all. Good for us.
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Summary: SHHH! Just read the thing, ok?
Review: The book's just great reading--that's all you reviewers have to say. Like half road trip and half something else. Not sure what, maybe into his head or something. But really I doubt the writer intended all of what you're saying he's doing. To me it's a straight forward travel writing kind of thing, likes been done hundreds of years up till now. Maybe just a little more postmodern or whatever. So stop worrying about what this or that style means or where he puts his commas. I mean just enjoy the book and be quiet already!
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Summary: Peek into the Future ----->
Review: Calling all Nonfiction Lovers! If you'd like a glimpse into the future to see what the practitioners of nonfiction will be doing ten years from now, check out this book! D'Agata is clealy years--no, decades--ahead of his time. But that's perhaps the understatement of the new millenium! "John D'Agata," as Annie Dillard has said, "is redefining the modern American essay." Right on, Girl!
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Summary: Raving for this New Star
Review: An exaggeration this is not: John D'Agata is truly one of the greatest new original literary talents to come along in years! His lyrical use of words and innovative writing formats, combined with his attention to facts and insistence on exploring the world instead of just himself and his own psyche, makes for a beautiful and profound book. This is Nonfiction the way Thoreau intended it! The thoughts that go through his head as he's visiting these real-life and made-up halls of fame across America are at once shocking and serious (eg: check out "Cowboy Hall of Fame" for a sad list of all the kinds of barb wire manufactured in America, or the last one "August Hall of Fame" is a funny combination of the different etymologies of "mercury"). His are words that seem to spill from nowhere, and yet they set up camp in your head because they are so apt. Not only is this book standing in a class by itself because of D'Agata's stunning writing but also because it is, plainly stated, a great story of a young man's observations of the world as he makes his uncomfortable way through it. This is most definitely a book not to be missed. Definitely also not for the weak-minded. Reading it will be a joy once you catch on to his totally new way of interpreting Nonfiction.
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Summary: My husband laughs at nothing.
Review: Hands down one of the most electrifying reading experiences of my reading life! It looks daunting at first, with all those big gaps in the prose, and maybe boring too, with all the footnotes, but what "saves" the book is the fact that the stories D'Agata is telling are funny and smart. They're also very sad sometimes too. One night in bed I started reading a whole one of these out loud to my husband, a man whose usual idea of literature is the Sunday Times Magazine (if that), and he started hollering at the ceiling in laughter! Then the next thing you know he's dead silent listening to me read through the tragic life story of that miserably lonely artist named Henry Darger. The prose in this book makes turns as fast as life itself, and that's what's exciting about it. The reading is difficult, and the style it's written in is a challenge, definitely. But I think that's the point. I think this writer is trying to find ways of exloring the world through stories (and through styles) that are somehow similar to how we experience life normally. So this isn't an easy, breezey, Oprah Book Club kind of read like most traditional narrative books. It's going to ask you to work hard, but then it's going to pay you off. Big time! (By the way, my husband has now taken the book away from me and is hording it. I think he's hiding it in the bathroom.)
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