Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence

By Geoff Dyer

Book Overview

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD "In the spirit of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage keeps... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312429460
• ISBN13: 9780312429461
• Release Date: November 2009
• Publisher: Picador
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.7" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Fabulous!

This was simply the most entertaining book I have read in many a year! You should read it in private. Reading it in public, your uncontrollable laughter may cause you significant embarassment.

briliant examination of culture,travel and creativity

Art imitates life and Dyer tries to wrestle with both the need to write versus the need to experience; and by reflecting on both we simultaneously experience both. A wonderfully written, on the mark experience.

A very funny trip around the world with Geoff and Bert

Out of Sheer Rage was a very entertaining. I heard the NPR interview with the author and went to find the book... It's not about Lawrence in the way that Watergate's not about Nixon. Mr. Dyer can document malaise like no other -- he has a strange obsessive way that puts him in sympathetic tandem with his subject. I still laugh when I think about Dyer's take on deconstruction early in the book, and his views of academia are dead on. Not to be forgotten, the travel aspect of this is great as well. The things that make Dyer funny and charming (or not, depending on your sense of humor) are also the reasons Dyer finds Lawrence funny and charming -- in his own cranky way. I too have no new desire to read Lawrence, but I can't wait to read more of Geoff Dyer.

Incredible and enjoyable

Geoff Dyer has written a book that seems to create its own categories. Literary criticism, travellog, and a ranting confessional weave in and out, and the reader is swept into the writer's world. The minutae and day to day aggravations of the writer's life are given the spotlight, and one gets an intimate picture of how this incredibly creative mind can be frozen by the dizzying choices of the late 20th century world, grapple and struggle furiously and often compulsively with them, and ultimately produce something highly and hilariously original. I heard the author on a radio interview and went immediately to the nearest bookstore to pick up a copy. Before reading this book, ostensibly about D. H. Lawrence, it occurred to me that the fact that I had never read a word of D. H. Lawrence might detract from my enjoyment of the book. It didn't. Incidentally, I still have no inclination to read books by D.H.Lawrence, although I do want to read more books by Geoff Dyer.