Receive Your Copy 22:04 Envisioned By Ben Lerner Distributed As Booklet
for one thing, I can't stand this title,:Who'd pick that My favorite time is:, That's when all my shows start coming on, Judge Judy, Judge Joe Brown, The People's Court, and Cops, Then the news! I love the news, But I did NOT love this book, Sorry, Ben. There's a bunch of pictures in here, This isn't a photography book, What are you, Ben A photographer NO YOU'RE NOT! A POET, AND POETS ARE SUPPOSED TO RISE ABOVE, Ben did not rise above, This character just seemed petty to me, Like nobody wants to hear about this, People want to hear about girls having bad sex with writers they know, child rape, spouses dying, postapocalyptic language games, books written by teenage heartthrob TV that kind of stuff! I mean from what I hear Ben has worked a long time, and now here he goes just throwing it all away.
I'm SURE this book will ruin his career! All he worked for! They were going to make statues of you, Ben.
What
the heck happened. You're not even in this book, Which is funny, since the main character has your name, What are you on Are you on psychiatric medicine Will you tell me what kind I'll listen, Dottie always listens. This book makes me feel like when you're trying to comfort a friend because they're crying, who you've been friends with for so many years, and then they try to French Kiss you.
I hate those Frogs. Or when you're sitting with a friend at a bar and they start asking for drugs, Just say no! Anyway, I feel better now, Thank you for listening. Go Buckeyes! You think you have problems Ben, the narrator of Ben Lerner's sarcastic, intelligent new novel,:, has you beat.
While he's struggling to write a followup to his first novel now that he's gotten a generous advance, New York is under threat of two serious hurricanes Irene and Sandy, and his longtime best friend wants to have a baby with himwhether he wants to be involved or not.
Oh, and at any time, his aorta could rupture, so he's convinced himself he has every symptom imaginable,
:follows this tumultuous time in Ben's life, But more than merely a litany of his problems, this book is a razorsharp meditation on our socially hyperaware yet pretentious culture, as he skewers the literary world, social movements, and fine dining.
Believe me, if you've ever been so inclined before, this book may make you swear off eating octopus for a while.
This is a novelwithinanovel, so at times you're not sure whether Ben is recounting what is actually happening or fictionalizing what is happening to the Benlike character in his novel.
"Say that it was standing there that I decided to replace the book I'd proposed with the book you're reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them I resolved to dilate my story not into a novel about literary fraudulence, about fabricating the past, but into an actual present alive with multiple futures.
"
The above quote demonstrates Ben's and Ben Lerner's preoccupation with the blurred line between the present, past, and future.
:refers to the time that Marty McFly returns to the past in the movie Back to the Future,
Some books hold you in their thrall with gripping plot and characterization, while some mesmerize you with their use of language and narrative.
This book definitely falls into the latter category, Lerner's writing dazzled me at times, and while the plot wasn't always easy to follow because of the blurring between fact and fiction, I couldn't stop reading because I was so impressed by his talent.
Here's another example:
"Emerging from the train, I found it was fully night, their air excited by foreboding and something else, something like the feel of a childhood snow day when time was emancipated from institutions, when the snow seemed like a technology for defeating time, or like defeated time itself falling from the sky, each glittering ice particle an instant gifted back from your routine.
"
This is a fascinating, thoughtprovoking, often funny book, It's not an easy read, because Lerner's writing is densely packed although not in a bad way, but it's definitely a worthwhile read.
kasırga beklentisiyle birlikte oluşan tükenişyıkım duygusunun kuşattığı bir şehir, şehirde bir şairyazar kahraman, kahramanın geçmiş ile gelecek, gerçek ile kurgu, hayat ile sanat arasında savrulması: hikayeden çok günümüz dünyasını yansıtan kaygılı, şüpheli, belirsiz, tekinsiz atmosferi ve dağınık, kalabalık, parçalanmış yapısıyla öne çıkan bir roman.
bugünü, günümüzün dünyasını romanla anlatmanın zorluğu malum, lerner hikaye içinde yürüttüğü geçmiş ve gelecek düşüncelerini, farklı bir “şimdiki zaman” kavramını romanın biçimine de uygulayarak bu zorluğu aşmayı başarıyor.
benzer olarak hikayenin diğer iki hattı gerçekkurmaca, hayatsanat biçimle paralel, şairyazar kahraman yaşadıklarını kurgulayıp yazarken biz de lernerin gerçekkurmaca sınırındaki:ünü okuyoruz.
muhtemelen.
Plüton ne kadar gezegense ben de o kadar işe yarar bir yetişkindim,
.
Dünyanın sonu geliyor, Kesin bir tarih veremesek de her birimiz bunu hissediyoruz, Bazılarımız hazırlıklar yapıyor, İnananlar dualarına ekliyor hislerini, Bazılarımız ise kulak arkası ediyor dinlediklerini, tüm pislikleri halının altına saklayanların yaptığı gibi.
Sonrasında dünya dönüyor yahu öyle ya da böyle diyoruz, Günümüzü bitirip çıkacak sonrasını da düşünmeyeceğiz sanki, Ama hala üretenler, düşünenler de var, Ve yazanlar. Yazdıklarını paylaşıp bir evreni paylaşmayı sürdürenler de var, Ben Lerner da onlardan biri,
.
Birkaç ay önce kitap alışverişimde Topeka Okulunu edinmiştim, Yazar hakkında da eser hakkında da bir şey bilmememe rağmen, Geçen hafta ise bir kitapçıda aynı yazarın:adlı eserine rastladım, Bu kitap ile yazarı tanımak istedim ve okumaya başladım, Kısaca bir yazarın kendisiyle ve yaşadığı dünyayla iletişimini anlatıyor:, Yazacaklarına odaklanan ama bunun yanında yakın arkadaşının anne olma isteği, ekolojik kriz, yarın ne olacak kaygısı gibi sorunların içinde kalan bir karakteri tanıyoruz.
Deneme, roman, şiir, kimi yerlerde günlük tadı aldığımız bir metin sunuyor Lerner, Çok etkilendim. Kendimde de gördüğüm farkına vardığım çekişmeleri bu kitapta gördüğüm için sanırım.
Büyük bir keyifle okudum,
.
Hakan Toker çevirisi, Nahide Dikel kapak tasarımıyla Ben Lerner's first novel, "Leaving the Atocha Station" was one of the most powerful reading experiences I've ever had, largely for purely personal reasons I started reading that book set mostly in Madrid and Barcelona literally a day after I myself had concluded a visit to Spain, and seeing almost all of the places I had just visited serve as the background for that books gorgeous, misanthropic, elegantly sad narration was an extremely potent experience like having a much more cynical, much more intelligent older sibling whispering a dark interpretation into my ear of some of what I had just experienced on my own.
Lerner himself spent time in Spain on a poetry fellowship the source of much of the novel's inspiration,
His new novel,:has an even stronger biographical focus than his first one, We follow the narrator, an up and coming writer and poet living in New York, as he wanders around the city in the space between hurricanes Irene and Sandy, the large, fauxmeteorolgical apocalypses that shook New York in the lastyears yet failed to produce the great post/disaster that was predicted.
Between those storms whose sense of tension and communal worry/excitement Lerner evokes with a cool, meditative hysteria, we see a young intellectual in full postmillenial flower.
He, worries about how to write his second book, tries to conceive a child first artificially and then in the old fashioned way with his female best friend, deals with an ambiguously fatal heart condition, simultaneously appreciates and loathes NYC's coop/ethic food culture, goes to parties at artist colonies, lets an occupy wall street protester use his shower, the sort of experiences that one could imagine almost anyone living in a large city in the last half decade might have.
But what makes this book stand out from the endless and endlessly dull pack of other "slackerish young person who lives in New York" novels which has become something of an entire genre these days, is the depth and calm of his thoughts.
Lerner has a meditative style, he is completely unafraid to have his narrator lose himself in a chain of gorgeous, ubermodern reveries about the world we live in, about our perpetual sense of impending crisis, our tangled attempts to live morally and ethically in a time when the ugly truth behind even the most wellintentioned product or practice is just one smart phone search away.
And above all, what it means to think on, care about, and create art in the midst of all of these dicey perspectives.
His willingness to grapple, sincerely and deeply, with the impossible complexities of issues like these is what makes him, in this reviewers opinion, one of the finest American fiction writers working today.
That being said,:does have one weakness: Lerner suddenly includes a short story in the middle that was originally published in the New Yorker, and that story has all the typical lack of imagination and brilliance your average New Yorker story does, but which the rest of:contains in spades.
It seems meant to be this sort of cute metafictional disruption showing how the narrator who is not Lerner but sort of also is fictionalizes his life and by extension how the actual Lerner does and the lives of those around him.
Maybe there is some brilliant theoretical/aesthetic justification for it I don't really care because it disrupts apage novel withpages of pathetically neutered pap that reads all the worse considering how scintillating all of the prose surrounding it tends to be.
It's simply an authorial decision that doesn't really work,
That single flaw aside, there are many parts of:that made me actually giggle out loud with the casual brilliance and the sorts of gorgeous musings that refuse easy answers which Lerner seems to have basically mastered.
Highly recommended. .