A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering GeniusA Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
by Dave Eggers

1.5 Stars

Maybe I’m just too old. Maybe I’m just not cool or hip enough. It has to be me, right? After all, this book was a book of the year according to the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today among others. But I found it unreadable. Really. Sixty pages into this book and I wanted to just give up on it. Both of Eggers’ parents died of cancer within a few months of each other and this is his memoir of their death and his raising of his younger brother. It actually starts off OK but fairly early in the book Eggers runs out of things to say. This probably could have been a good short story but at over 400 pages it just drags on and on endlessly.

Even the writing style is annoying as he writes these long, boring run on sentences that go on to discuss how he and his brother are the coolest people on the planet and how he can throw a Frisbee higher and farther than anyone which the San Francisco Chronicle thinks is the Zen of Frisbee but that I think it is just attempting to write stream of consciousness sort of like you are James Joyce but Joyce took years to write Ulysses and the paragraphs here read like they were written in an afternoon after a couple of beers while Oprah’s playing in the background and you really wish that you were back in the car driving to the nude beach because hanging out with your brother is a lot more fun than writing a book even if you know that people are going to spend their money to read it but you did warn them in the preface so if they are bored beyond tears then too bad because they were warned and so they really have no right to complain about the dreary and pointless paragraphs about imagining that your brother is killed in some insanely tragic way like being run over by a van in slow motion or the uninspired complaints about neighbors or women at the little league games or any of the other dull, lackluster, pedestrian, spiritless, and unimaginative paragraphs that grace this tedious book.

Anyway, I am sure you are much cooler than I am so you will love this book so don’t pay any attention to this review and go out and buy the book and be fascinated by stories of warehouses and starting magazines and excrement coming out of backed up toilets and meeting Bill Clinton and wanting to kill people because they don’t treat you and your brother like the horrible tragic victims of the worst thing that has ever happened to anyone because God knows that no one has ever lost their parents before and that no one has suffered as much tragedy as you and your family so writing a memoir and whining for 400 pages makes perfect sense and this reviewer is just a big jerk who doesn’t get it.

 

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