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Ladataan... Give Me Everything You Have: On Being StalkedTekijä: James Lasdun
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Kirjaudu LibraryThingiin nähdäksesi, pidätkö tästä kirjasta vai et. Ei tämänhetkisiä Keskustelu-viestiketjuja tästä kirjasta. This is his side of being stalked by a former student via the internet. He is detached as he tells the stalking tale. It maddened me. Why didn't he change his e-mail address? Why didn't he go to the local police first? I didn't care about the stalking part. It was unresolved by the end of the book. What made the book worth reading was when he left the stalking part behind and told stories of his father, of Jerusalem, his train ride, and history of places and people he met. I got lost in those stories. His writing was excellent. James Lasdun is one of those extremely rare writers who can write superb fiction, poetry and non-fiction, in this case a memoir of being stalked by a former student. While his prose might seem quiet and understated he has the ability to the felicitous word, the one that makes you shiver because it is so precisely what must be said. This is a departure for him but one necessitated by the disruption of his life when a young Iranian woman, who he had gone out of his way to help, became obsessed and demonic, not only to him but to the editor he recommended her to. There is a middle section in which Lasdun takes a train ride by himself out West to visit DH Lawrence's last home and during the trip we are privy to Lasdun's extraoridnary and unsparing ability to tease out themes and reactions in a way that reminded me of the meticulous unpacking that Freud demonstrates. It does not matter that I agree, that is immaterial, but the process indicates how he thinks and that was perhaps the most impressive quality of the book - how he thinks. He did not as far as I could tell do himself any favors nor hide any faults. He realizes too late that he colluded in the friendship, even to the point of the power relationship between the friendship. He enjoyed her attention until he didn't enjoy it anymore as she set about ,as she says, trying to ruin him. The book, however, weakens at the end in his exploration of the anti-Semitism of the assault, not because it isn't true but because he begins to recede from view. The subject matter, his trip to Israel, etc overpower the more intimate aspects of his self-revelation. I would never have thought a memoir sold as the harrowing account of a man stalked by a former student could have so much self-important navel-gazing and so many irrelevant digressions. Lasdun comes off as a pretentious, arrogant, entitled jerk, which I can't imagine was his intention. He went through something tough, and I would have been interested to learn about it, but instead I'm wading through whole sections of "unrelated things I thought about on the train." Ugh. Another complaint: it's like a man had to be stalked and a man had to write about it for stalking to be taken seriously, when women are the likeliest victims of stalking, and by far the likeliest victims of violence from it. Lasdun is getting a lot of annoying and cryptic emails. That sucks. She even posted negative book reviews on his novels on Amazon and Goodreads! The horror! But where's the context? There's never a note that other people also experience this or how it can escalate. I'm not asking for a lit review chapter here, but maybe a lit review paragraph so we can understand the scope of the problem? Or does he not realize the problem exists outside of his inbox?
It might be just a horror story if left to another to tell; in Lasdun’s hands, it also becomes a meditation on the value of reputation. With literary commentary on works—Gawain and the Green Knight, Patricia Highsmith’s wonderful Strangers on a Train—and a couple of bits of excellent travel writing, as well as a memoir of Lasdun’s father, a noted architect, and some insightful writing about the ongoing struggles between Israel and the Palestinians, it’s a far-ranging work that stretches the boundaries of the memoir. Inevitably, perhaps, it is a vexing book. A memoir, it reads like a literary novel based on material that the playwright David Mamet might use in one of his polemical assaults on political correctness. It begins as a straightforward account of being cyberstalked but evolves into a post-modernish meditation on identity and anti-Semitism. . . . Mr. Lasdun deftly evokes the chill power of cyberstalking.
A true story of obsessive love turning to obsessive hate, "Give Me Everything You Have" chronicles the author's strange and harrowing ordeal at the hands of a former student, a self-styled "verbal terrorist", who began trying, in her words, to "ruin him." Kirjastojen kuvailuja ei löytynyt. |
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I confess I wasn't too interested in the last third or so of the book, where Lasdun visits Israel and has many deep insights about his Jewish heritage. I wanted to know more about what happened to his stalker, how his life went on, was she ever stopped -- but perhaps it's because his nightmare seems unending that Lasdun needed to pause and reflect. I hope I understand his need, but it made for a very good book with a dull, anticlimactic ending.
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