A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
What a very strange book, I thought, as I closed this one. I liked it, sure, but it was very strange.
I like talking about books with other people. I mean, I really like it. I think I’m especially fond of it because it’s not very often that I get to just sit and talk books. But my friend Krister and I went to an event about a month ago and on the way home, we were talking books.
“Do you like Dave Eggers?” he asked me. I knew who Dave Eggers was, but at that moment it occurred to me that I’d never actually read anything he’d written. So, on Krister’s recommendation, I picked up a copy of Eggers’ first work, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.”
AHWOSG is a memoir, about Eggers’ own experience losing both his parents to cancer within about 6 weeks of each other, and then becoming the guardian of his young brother, Toph. It’s a great story, and Eggers certainly tells it well.
The way he tells it made my head spin, however. His storytelling is very stream-of-consciousness-driven, and to support this, he writes in extremely (EXTREMELY) long sentences.
One of the things Krister said to me while endorsing the book was: “No one can write a three-page sentence like Dave Eggers.”
I agree. No one can, I suppose. But the act of reading three-page sentence after three-page sentence becomes very exhausting after a short period of time, and it’s not a short book.
Good for the story, good for the honest and imaginative introspective moments, good for the occasional very, very dark joke. But you need to be ready to commit to long sentences in order to power through this one.