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Ladataan... A Frolic of His Own (1994)Tekijä: William Gaddis
   Ei tämänhetkisiä Keskustelu-viestiketjuja tästä kirjasta.   ) dllh | Jan 6, 2021 |  And, now, finished. A wonderful, rich, delightful, sad, emotional, unique except to Gaddis novel. ( ) tmph | Sep 13, 2020 |  ) MichaelBarsa | Dec 17, 2017 | I get what Gaddis is trying to accomplish here. This story of a curmudgeonly old academic who’s simultaneously embroiled in two lawsuits (in one, he’s trying to sue the manufacturer of his car after he somehow manages to drive over himself; in the other, he’s trying to sue a big-name Hollywood producer over his gratuitously gruesome new Civil War film, the screenplay of which Oscar believes to have been plagiarized from his own Civil War play) is a witty skewering of modern society - primarily our convoluted and inherently unjust legal system, but also Hollywood, the marketing/advertising profession, wealthy upper class liberals, artists, gold-diggers, tree-hugging PETA liberals, the real estate industry, television, and the relentless march of suburbia. In college I remember studying the great Augustine satirists – Alexander Pope (The Rape of the Lock), John Gay (The Beggar’s Opera), and Jonathan Swift (whose “A Modest Proposal” explored the idea of turning the Irish into food, thereby solving the “Irish problem” and alleviating hunger simultaneously) – and am comfortable positing that in the afterlife, Gaddis will be welcomed with open arms within their ranks. So what’s my problem with this? My first issue, as I mentioned earlier, is that it’s at least 250 pages too long. Slogging through all 500+ pages of this felt like sitting through a 40-minute fireworks show: eventually, no matter how dazzling the pyrotechnics, there comes a point where you start checking your watching and wondering if the grand finale will ever come. Gaddis’s looooong narrative diversions – the 40pg long transcript of Szyrk v. Spot (in which an oddly obtuse dog wanders into a statue and can’t be bothered to extricate himself, provoking the townfolk to sue the artist for permission to destroy the statue to remove him), the 40+pgs of excerpts from Oscar’s play – are especially tedious; one wishes an editor had had the nerve to remind Gaddis that satire is best served fresh and steaming, never dragged out so long that it cools and grows stale. My other major quibble with this novel? Gaddis’s deliberately laborious narrative style. I get that it takes a certain genius to create characters with voices so distinctive that they don’t require identification, which Gaddis has accomplished here. This doesn’t, however, justify his decision to entirely abandon the use of quotation marks and dialog tags. The effort required to ensure one understands who is speaking at any given time slows the pace of reading to a crawl. (See my previous remark about satire needing to be served fresh and steaming.) But apparently this is Gaddis’s “shtick” – or so I gather from this passage lifted from a New York Times review: “With "JR" (1975) Mr. Gaddis developed and ruthlessly exploited a technique of almost nonstop, scarcely punctuated dialogue, which he continued to employ in his next two novels. It is a technique that demands unflagging vigilance on the reader's part.” Again, one wishes that an editor had had to nerve to suggest to Gaddis that, having already earned his National Book Award, he might lighten up a little and cut his readers some slack in this outing. There is genius here, I don’t dispute. (For instance, there’s this on-going bit about a lawsuit between the Vatican and RC Cola over the rights to use the initials RC (“Roman Catholic”) that eventually devolves into discussions of a joint marketing campaign – which should be outrageous but which, like all authentically acerbic satire, leaves the lingering taste of bile in one’s throat as it goes down). But whether the payoff was worth the time I spent slogging my way through all 500 pages of this, I’m still not entirely convinced. (  )1  Dorritt | Jul 1, 2017 | ) DavidO1103 | Sep 23, 2015 |
 Never a word out of place, never a clinker or clunker of a book, [Gaddis] was a comic genius who skewered both reason and ridiculousness in almost equal measures, until you were unsure which is which. A Frolic of His Own is written almost entirely in dialogue with little punctuation. Gaddis is an inventive, sophisticated writer. The argument he has prepared for and against Oscar Crease is a dizzy romp of a novel—important, original and intelligent. PalkinnotDistinctions
With the publication of the Recognitions in 1955, William Gaddis was hailed as the American heir to James Joyce. His two subsequent novels, J R (winner of the National Book Award) and Carpenter's Gothic, have secured his position among America's foremost contemporary writers. Now A Frolic of His Own, his long-anticipated fourth novel, adds more luster to his reputation, as he takes on life in our litigious times. "Justice? - You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law." So begins this mercilessly funny, devastatingly accurate tale of lives caught up in the toils of the law. Oscar Crease, middle-aged college instructor, savant, and playwright, is suing a Hollywood producer for pirating his play Once at Antietam, based on his grandfather's experiences in the Civil War, and turning it into a gory blockbuster called The Blood in the Red White and Blue. Oscar's suit, and a host of others - which involve a dog trapped in an outdoor sculpture, wrongful death during a river baptism, a church versus a soft drink company, and even Oscar himself after he is run over by his own car - engulf all who surround him, from his freewheeling girlfriend to his well-to-do stepsister and her ill-fated husband (a partner in the white-shoe firm of Swyne & Dour), to his draconian, nonagenarian father, Federal Judge Thomas Crease, who has just wielded the long arm of the law to expel God (and Satan) from his courtroom. And down the tortuous path of depositions and decrees, suits and countersuits, the most lofty ideas of our culture - questions about the value of art, literature, and originality - will be wrung dry in the meticulous, often surreal logic and language of the law, leaving no party unscathed. Gaddis has created a whirlwind of a novel, which brilliantly reproduces the Tower of Babel in which we conduct our lives. In A Frolic of His Own we hear voices as they speak at and around one another: lawyers, family members, judges, rogues, hucksters, and desperate men (and women) looking for a buck. Above all these is Oscar's voice - the outraged cry of the new anachronism, the self-proclaimed "last civilized man" rendered frail before the behemoth of the law, the servant and warrior of the soul of our century: money. Kirjastojen kuvailuja ei löytynyt. |
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Google Books — Ladataan... (3.67)| 0.5 |  2 |
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