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OverviewWhen he became interested in literature at grammar school, it was D.H. Lawrence who fired Geoff Dyer's imagination, and it was the figure of Lawrence, the miner's son who spent his life travelling, living by his pen, which made it seem possible to him to become a writer. The work is as much a travel book as a biography, as Geoff Dyer retraces Lawrence's journeys and, using Lawrence's own writings, life, and crucially, photographs as clues, learns much about matters close to his own heart as he does about Lawrence himself. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Geoff DyerPublisher: Little, Brown Book Group Imprint: Abacus Edition: New edition Dimensions: Width: 12.60cm , Height: 1.60cm , Length: 19.70cm Weight: 0.202kg ISBN: 9780349108582ISBN 10: 0349108587 Pages: 256 Publication Date: 07 May 1998 Audience: General/trade , General Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: No Longer Our Product Availability: Awaiting stock The supplier is currently out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you and placed on backorder. Once it does come back in stock, we will ship it out for you. Table of ContentsReviews'The kind of book that gives literary criticism a bad name. Hilarious!' John Berger **'An intriguing, magnetic, genre-rattling book' THE TIMES **'If there was a prize for the year's funniest book then it would win hands down' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY **'A masterpiece.' MAIL ON SUNDAY **'Marvellous.a glorious truant from study ...gives a better picture of (Lawrence) than any biography I know' James Wood, GUARDIAN Dyer writes two books at once, his own life and a challenging life of D.H. Lawrence, in this unique performance. This wrestling match with Lawrence reveals the author and his subject as finely matched opponents who ultimately shake hands on the nature of life and art. Dyer's record of his time spent exhaustively studying Lawrence is both tormented and comic. He rages at his very goals and against the compulsion to write, while also tracing, intermittently, Lawrence's own life's itinerary. In a sense, the project is a doomed undertaking. For could there be any less auspicious literary pursuit than formalizing the process of going from making notes on Lawrence to making notes for my novel, by which I mean not working on my book about Lawrence to not working on the novel because all of the to-ing and fro-ing and note-taking actually meant that I never did any work on either . . . ? Chagrined by his ambivalence, seduced by his indecisiveness, Dyer aspires to the floaty indifference of contentment and comes to prefer Lawrence's manuscripts to the final texts. He longs for freedom, yet his gateway into Lawrence comes in a moment of raging indolence. Convinced that Lawrence's writing urges us back to the source, Dyer traces the other writer's footsteps. Taos and Oaxaca, Sardinia and Eastwood are important backdrops along the way. Such scenery lures Dyer into a dialogue with Lawrence's mentors and tormentors and into the heat and chill of the arguments they waged. Larkin, Brodsky, and Julian Barnes are poetic referees in the ring. The push-me-pull-me here of the text and the sub-text, of biography and autobiography, turns up the volume on this fascinating symbiosis, which casts a new light on creativity and the importance of destiny. (Kirkus Reviews) Author InformationGeoff Dyer was born in 1958. His book BUT BEAUTIFUL, about jazz, won the Somerset Maugham Prize & was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. His essays & reviews appear in the INDEPENDENT, NEW STATESMAN & other periodicals. He writes regularly for the GUARDIAN & is a contributing editor of ESQUIRE. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |