A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is a memoir following the author's life in the years following his parents' cancer-related deaths. He must take responsibility for his younger brother, Toph, who is only 8 when their parents pass away. Thrust suddenly into the role of parent, he has to try and deal with the fact that his new responsibilities prevent him from a lot of activities that he would like to do as a man in his early-twenties.
I haven't actually finished A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I honestly tried, but the thought of trying to slog through any more of this tripe is just depressing. Until this point, I couldn't understand how there are people out there who genuinely don't like reading, but I think this book has made me realise how they feel.
So, I suppose the big question is what made me not want to finish this one. What it was that made me break the one rule that I have had since starting this blog in January 2011. It was the writing style. While I have expressed a liking for postmodern fiction in previous blog entries, there was something a little too manufactured and artificial about the way that it was presented in A Heartbreaking Work. Metafiction is just one of those things that needs to be properly signposted, instead of thrown into the mix whenever you feel like it. Eggers also seemed to have a grudge against the humble full stop, as his book was full of sentences that went on for-fucking-ever. I get it, you like fragments. How about a sentence that doesn't make me want to throat punch you and force you to draw breath like a regular human being. Overall, I just got an impression of some dumb twenty-something who is trying to be way too clever in order to compensate for some deep-seated issues that he really should have worked out with a therapist beforehand. Maybe that's exactly the sort of impression that I was meant to get, but it doesn't do anything for my enjoyment of the novel. And it's sort of a shame, because from what I've read of him, Eggers seems like a nice guy, with a lot of worthy philanthropic causes that he supports. I feel like he could have given a better account of himself.
So there's a thing that I feel that I should probably address. Why did this book make me DNF and not one of the other books that I have rated 1/5? It's a fair question. I think the reason that I got through some other terrible books successfully because they invoked an active emotion out of me. Most of the time my response to my 1/5 rated books has been anger, or occasionally horrified amusement. Regardless of which, both of those states make me feel energised, make me feel like my mind is going a mile a minute, and I absolutely love those moments when I can get that on paper. Since starting this blog, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the first book that made me feel like my soul was being sapped with every extraneous fragment and with every time he referred to himself or his brother as god-like. Usually my less pleasant reads leave me feeling shaky or overwrought, but never before have I felt sapped of energy. The only word that I can think of for this is grey, like it's wrung out all the interest in my brain and left me with dishwater for a soul. If this is what some people's experience of reading is, then I can see why you wouldn't want to try it again. So yeah, I'm altering my rule. I will now allow for DNFs if a book makes me actively wonder why I like reading in the first place.
Never before has a book left me so drained of enthusiasm. Usually I get angry at books I don't like. This time, I just don't have the energy. It's the first book I've DNF'd in over 7 years, and I am just stunned that I found something that could beat even my stamina for not-so-great books. I'm sure there's an audience for this, but I couldn't even begin to understand who it would consist of. 1/5
Next review: Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett
Signing off,
Nisa.
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