Peruse Eat The Document Depicted By Dana Spiotta Provided As PDF
ambitious and powerful story about idealism, passion, and sacrifice, Eat the Document shifts between the underground movement of thes and the echoes and consequences of that movement in thes.
A National Book Award finalist, Eat the Document is a riveting portrait of two eras and one of the most provocative and compelling novels of recent years.
Tre stelle e mezza: non è riuscito a coinvolgermi emotivamente, La descrizione migliore di questo romanzo si può fare usando le parole della stessa protagonista: "E' il modo in cui ti senti, o meglio la sensazione che ti dà.
Di un'America rancida, capisci, un po' stantia, "
Terribile la traduzione del titolo, proprio non gli rende giustizia, Buoni il ritmo, la scansione temporale, l'intreccio e il modo in cui alla fine alcuni tasselli tornano al loro posto, Ottimo il linguaggio: ho idea che questo libro più di tanti altri necessiti di una lettura in lingua originale per meglio coglierne le sfumature e i giochi di parole e di significati.
Ottimo anche nel soffermarsi ad analizzare la Storia e la società contemporanee, il modo in cui la modernità e le tecnologie arrivano a compenetrarsi con quello che può apparire vintage.
Quanto allo stile, concordo con lorin sul fatto che la mano sia un po' troppo femminile anche laddove la voce narrante dovrebbe calarsi in panni prettamente maschili.
L'ispirazione che ha fatto nascere questo romanzo ha evidentemente una forte affinità con quella che ha dato vita a "Le ragazze" della Cline, A partire da quella magica e/o maledetta estate del ', attraverso gli anni settanta e ottanta e fino ai giorni nostri, si inanellano gli episodi che sono tutti flashback e flashforward, zigzagando tra i decenni.
Tantissimi gli ingredienti presenti nel romanzo, forse è questo il suo punto debole, una moltitudine di temi ed elementi che finiscono giocoforza per galleggiare in superficie senza il dovuto approfondimento: l'uso di agenti chimici in Vietnam, le sindromi da stress posttraumatico, la dipendenza da psicofarmaci, l'identità ovvero l'annullamento dell'identità in nome di un ideale o un'ideologia, la ribellione e l'anticonformismo, attivismo e paraattivismo, la provincia e i sobborghi americani con relative architettura e urbanistica, hackers figli di papà sabato in barca a vela e lunedì al leonkavallo, c'è un gruppo femminile di autocoscienza, c'è finanche una comune che è una sorta di albergo per le donne tristi, c'è la globalizzazione e le multinazionali con le loro scorribande nell'ambito del sociale, il capitalismo e il consumismo e la manipolazione psicologica del consumatore.
Troppa carne al fuoco per sole trecento pagine: la veduta d'insieme è brillante, e mi viene il sospetto che con un più corposo lavoro di approfondimento di questi temi, sarebbe stato un romanzonecapolavoro di tutta la letteratura e della storia contemporanea americana.
Anche le storie personali e psicologiche dei due protagonisti mi sono piaciute, : e anche questo aspetto meritava un po' di sviluppo in più.
Lettura soddisfacente anche se con una punta di amarezza per le vette che poteva arrivare a toccare ma che invece non raggiunge,
This one crept up on me as I read it, It starts simple, and then moves back and forth in time sketching out the narrative and the characters, One of the best examples of "show, don't tell" that I've ever come across, Maybe my interest in the old's romantic revolutionaries flavored my initial attraction, I don't know, But before I knew it, I was drawn incaring about the characters, And it used just the right level of Mimentolike flashes to pull you along without losing you in excessive complexities of detail, I would love to read more by THIS author, I just love Dana Spiotta, I preferred Innocents amp Others, but this was still good, Recommend reading in one sitting, This is a very touching, ingenious, and often hilarious study of idealism, protest, violence and obsession among the countercultures of two generations in the US built around a longtime fugitive's life in hiding.
Loosely based on real events, Spiotta's novel takes us back and forth between the years of Nixon and the Weather Underground to the absurd plethora of antiestablishment movements and vandals of youthful Seattle in the lates.
Most of the focus of the iconoclasts we meet is on music and other media, and by its end this story is much more about capitalist virtual reality and irony than about idealism.
. In a desperate attempt to draw attention to the apparently unending horrors of the Vietnam War, Bobby Desoto and Mary Whitaker plant an explosive device in the unoccupied summer house of a munitions manufacturer.
When a housekeeper is inadvertently killed in the blast, Bobby and Mary must separate never to meet again, repeatedly changing their identities, living a whole series of lives, alone and apart from each other.
Thirty years on, now living as Louise, Mary must decide whether to give herself up when her teenage son, Jason, discovers her secret, . .
Dana Spiottas extraordinarily prescient and influential novel recreates a time when ordinary people actually did things, Things that affected, however tangentially, history, Comparing then with now, Spiotta exposes thest century narcotic of all pervasive consumerism and dares to wonder whether extraordinary action by ordinary people is even possible within the stranglehold of capitalism.
Putting Vietnam under the spotlight forces the reader to draw parallels with today Nixon was a crook then, Trump is a worse crook now where is todays radical action This powerful recreation of what now seems a lost world highlights the extent to which radical culture of thes ands has become commodified, rendered harmless and sold back to
consumers as hippy culture, Woodstock, sex and drugs and rock n roll.
What would you do, Spiotta suggests, if your government continued to wage an unpopular war, conscripting thousands of young men to senselessly send to their deaths And what would you do if it happened today Conceptually, Eat the Document is a masterpiece narratively it can be tortuous, with the alternating timeline structure making it difficult to lose yourself entirely in the text.
Nonetheless, a hugely important book that dares to challenge the reader with some very uncomfortable questions, I must be officially done with school because I am reading again! Well, not quite, but I did read this surprising novel today,
Although I was interested in reading Eat the Document, my expectations for it were not very high at the outset, I suppose I was expecting mainly a character study of an exradical and her teenage son, Instead, I was surprised to find that this book grapples with the pervasive moral ambivalence of American culture, Spiotta questions whether it is possible to oppose the system while existing within it, If not, what is the alternative Her depictions of offthegrid extremism the women's commune, the Black House squat are in the end unacceptable to the characters in the novel and to the reader.
Within the novel, even the notion of offthegrid revolution is commodified and made kitschy which, of course, is just a heightened version of reallife Che posters, Also, the novel makes us question to what degree our objections to the current world order are merely aesthetic, The brilliance of Nash's unperformed actions is that they allow those who participate in thinking about them to feel subversive without actually subverting anything, and this is the exact point at which a counterculture becomes simply a subculture.
Reading about Nash's ideas feels rewarding in a way that acting them out never would, Creating Nash's installations would force you to confront the fact that maybe the best you can ever do is to feel subversive, That suggestion relates back to Mary's assertion that intentions do matter because if you intend to revolutionize the world, maybe it doesn't matter that the revolution never happens.
Spiotta's other major theme is identity, I found a lot here to relate to my recent readings of Shakespeare because a lot of Shakespeare concerns identity as a mask that one wears, and the character of Mary/Freya/Caroline/Louise is just mask upon mask.
The identity changes are synonymous with external changes, yet they seem to precipitate changes in the character's personality as well, Spiotta's exploration of the degree to which the internal shifts to match the external for all the characters is fascinating, Nash seems to be the sole character whose inner life remains the same and forces his exterior existence to conform to that through what he refers to as "luck.
"
I'm making this book sound like a novel of ideas, which it is, but it also has the virtue of being eminently readable, Spiotta masterfully weaves the various narrators and plotlines, giving each section a unique voice, I especially enjoyed young Jason's essayistic journal entries, in which he sounds like a DFWlite, They also made me want to listen to Pet Sounds, even I've never really gotten the whole Beach Boys as cult figure phenomenon, I also kept admiring the seemingly endless correlations between the different stories, whether it was the recurrence of Bobby's rug in Nash's apartment or the similarities between Mary and Miranda.
I mulled over rating Eat the Document for a while, The story of as radical, Mary, who has to go underground, it bounces between her past and the lates where she lives as a single mom to a musiciphile son.
The other major thread follows activists in Seattle in thes and how they shadow and mimic the movements of thes ands, I found thes sections less gripping than Mary's flight and struggles with what she had done and how she had to live as a result, But, Spiotta brings everything together very well, leading to a subtle, yet strong conclusion, A quick twoday read predictable yet well done, Nothing was wrong with the book: decent characters, an interesting premise's political activists gone underground after one of their protests turns deadly, . . good headline stuff!Nothing was exceptionally great either, . . I read this in the airports, between planes and conferences, . . It was good enough for me to want to go back to immediately during downtimes but not good enough that I would hesitate to close the book and proceed with my day.
Is there such a thing as a utilitarian book This is the second novel I've read by Dana Spiotta, I only recently discovered this author after reading and loving sitelinkher recent novel Wayward, The same things I appreciated about Wayward show up in this much earlier novel, too: the masterful attention to psychological detail the willingness to go down nerdy rabbit holes in search of some random, wonderfully obscure detail and the sheer beauty and brilliance of the writing.
I can't wait to read her other three novels, "Eat the Document" has an interesting premise Mary and Bobby, two sixties radicals, are forced to separate and go underground when their scheme to blow up the summer home of an executive whose company produces napalm and/or Agent Orange goes awry, killing an innocent victim.
Thirty years later, both are living unbeknownst to one another in the Seattle area, Mary, who now goes by the name Louise, is raising ayear old son, Jason, Bobby, now known as Nash, runs an alternative book store for his friend Henry, who is dying of cancer, Mary has always intended to tell Jason the truth, and turn herself in, "as soon as he is ready", But Jason is a smart kid, What if he figures things out for himself first
Spiotta develops the story beautifully, essentially using it as a vehicle to explore questions of identity, as well as providing a fairly astute analysis of thes ands counterculture.
The novel is not as tightly constructed as it could have been a couple of story arcs Henry's deteriorating health and the glib explanation offered for it, the MayDecember attraction between Miranda and Nash added little.
And while the main characters were believable and interesting, some of the minor characters Mirandas boyfriend Josh, Jasons loser geek neighbor Gage, Mary/Carolines travel companion Berry were just cartoons.
But these are occasional lapses for the most part, Spiotta tells the story with subtlety and skill, Intentionally or not, it's the story of Mary and Jason that forms the emotional heart of the book Nash is not unsympathetic, but he's not very interesting either.
The book raises some very interesting questions, and Spiotta is an engaging and skillful writer, For those who enjoy that kind of thing, there are regular doses of “High Fidelity”style geekishness, mainly centering on Jasons obsessive interest in The Beach Boys.
Spiotta delivers these with such brilliance that its hard not to be beguiled the choice of the Beach Boys as the focus of Jasons obsession is inspired.
It also allows the hilarious scene in which, to Jasons mounting horror, a slightly buzzed Mary reminisces about the time she danced with Dennis Wilson in a grungy surfer bar in Venice Beach.
Despite its minor flaws, I really liked “Eat the Document”, for the skill with which Spiotta unfolds the story, for the pitchperfect portrayal of the relationship between Mary and Jason, for the acuteness of her examination of the counterculture of both generations, and for the interesting questions it raises about the construction of personal identity in the U.
S. Predictably enough, I wasnt particularly keen on the whole demonization of the big pharmaceutical company story arc, but I cant necessarily criticize it as coming out of left field.
When I was typing up this review in the horrible Microsoft Works word processor, it refused to allow me to type this word, changing it each time to "deionization".
Is this some kind of new sinister automatic bowdlerization feature that is being included with Microsoft programs It was really creepy,
.