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Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 809
EAN: 9780865475403
ISBN: 0865475407
Label: North Point Press
Manufacturer: North Point Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: June 16, 1999
Publisher: North Point Press
Studio: North Point Press
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Editorial Review:
Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence is the best book about not writing a book about D.H Lawrence ever written. Other people have written untraditional, even loopy tributes to the priest of love before--including boon companions Anais Nin and Henry Miller--but no one has done it with Dyer's chutzpah, or with such fantastic success.
Dyer started out with the intention of writing either a sober academic study of Lawrence or a novel based on his subject's life but couldn't seem to do either. The academic study, he realized, was really just an excuse to read Lawrence's work, and the novel never even acquired a rudimentary shape in his mind. Instead, he somehow convinced his publisher to pick up the tab for his lengthy globetrotting pilgrimage, which took him from Paris to Rome to Greece to Oxford--not to mention such Lawrentian hotspots as Taos and Mexico and San Francisco. The result is an extended, often hilarious, meditation on seafood, English TV, Dyer's own creative impulses, and occasionally even Lawrence.
In Lawrence's seminal prose he finds some justification for his own capricious indulgences: "What Lawrence's life demonstrates so powerfully is that it actually takes a daily effort to be free.... There are intervals of repose but there will never come a state of definitive rest where you can give up because you have turned freedom into a permanent condition. Freedom is always precarious." Yet he refuses to read Lawrence's novels, confining himself to letters, travel reportage, and other casuals. Indeed, "[o]ne gets so weary watching authors' sensations and thoughts get novelised, set into the concrete of fiction, that perhaps it is best to avoid the novel as a medium of expression."
Dyer's fascination with Lawrence's minorabilia suggests not only an oblique criticism of the contemporary novel, but a promising direction for the memoir. Perhaps clean, well-lighted subjectivity is a dead end, and the future lies with eccentric, provisional works along the lines of Flaubert's Parrot and How Proust Can Change Your Life--or Out of Sheer Rage. After all, Dyer's bright (and brilliantly shambolic) book of life reminds us of why we read in the first place: to see the surprising ways one person can be brought to life by another. --Michael Joseph Gross
Geoff Dyer had always wanted to write a book about D. H. Lawrence. He wanted, in fact, to write his "Lawrence book." The problem was, he had no idea what his "Lawrence book" would be, though he was determined to write a "sober academic study." Luckily for the reader, he failed miserably.Out of Sheer Rage is a harrowing, comic, and grand act of literary deferral. At times a furious repudiation of the act of writing itself, this is not so much a book about Lawrence as a book about writing a book about Lawrence. As Lawrence wrote about his own study of Thomas Hardy, "It will be about anything but Thomas Hardy, I am afraid-queer stuff-but not bad."
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - beyond catagory
Not especially distinguished as a storyteller, or a travel expert, or a memoirist, what Mr Dyer is primarily is a writer - he has the rare quality of rendering anything he alights on into literature, no matter what the genre. His wide-ranging interests, reflected in his bibilography, are a result of his admitted indolence, his oft-stated desire to run away from any kind of graft and 'watch telly'. A curse for him perhaps, but a blessing for all who read him. Every sentence which isn't simply descriptive ... Read More
Rating: - Fasten your seatbelt- you're off to a splendid reading!
Read this book after Joyce Carol Oates mentioned it on CSPAN as a hilarious memoir. Hadn't read anything funnier in years and have been recommending the book since! Coincidentally, the June 4, 2007 issue of New York Magazine has an article titled, "The Best Novels You've Never Read - Sixty-one Critics Reveal Their Favorite Underrated Book of the Past Ten Years" and Out of Sheer Rage is mentioned. I couldn't agree more!
Rating: - Out of Sheer Rage
It is actually disturbing to think that I might have lived my entire life without knowing about Dyer and this book had not a friend recommended it to me. Dyer's memoir/rumination/travelogue/indictment/paean is one of the most brilliant, original and engaging books I've ever read. I'm amazed that it is so little known.
Rating: - Don't procrastinate--read this!
This is a funny, brilliantly written book about not being able to get on with writing a study of D.H.Lawrence. If you're a writer too you will groan and wince with recognition (unless you're a model of Trollopean industry)--though you're unlikely to take writerly procrastination to Dyer's wild extremes. The book is endlessly self-referential and yet--in spite of this or because of it?-- is interesting, compelling, compulsively readable, and laugh-out-loud funny. How does he get away with it? Well, it's ... Read More
Rating: - The literature of anxiety, fretting, and complaint
Geoff Dyer's study of D.H. Lawrence was conceived as a distraction. Dyer wanted to read Lawrence with a purpose. Preparation postponed the task. The Lawrence project was supposed to take him out of himself. Lawrence wasn't too keen on islands and Geoff Dyer isn't either. Dyer and Rilke both had difficulty doing nothing but work. To Dyer it seemed that making a start on the Lawrence book seemed more boring than doing nothing. After a moped accident and on the mend Dyer began to believe again in his ... Read More
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