Rate this book

[sic] (2011)

by Joshua Cody(Favorite Author)

3.17 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0393081060 (ISBN13: 9780393081060)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

review 1: This book has rave reviews all over the place and I can't figure out why. Reading this left me breathless, trying to follow along on this ADHD ramble about everything a young white man thinks about when he thinks he might be dying. There's sex and music and books and art and it all could be really interesting if he just slowed down for a second and stopped viewing and judging the world through his own sexist, distracted projections. Just when I could settle into one topic he is pontificating on, he abruptly shifts to something else. This kind of stream-of-consciousness writing can be really interesting and have a thread we, the readers can follow, but that's just not the case in this book. It really is like he just photocopied pages from his personal journal and didn't edi... moret a single thing. It's completely exhausting and ultimately I finished the book feeling like I had just been a really long bad first date, where the guy only knew how to ramble about himself while I patiently tried to follow along.
review 2: I thoroughly enjoyed this book, though there were moments where I felt like I had accidentally ended up in an upscale lounge somewhere where men wear $2000 suits, and drink $1000 bottles of wine and discuss their art collections, and where they invested their fortunes. (In short, privileged and over educated, and unaware of their own narrowness.)There were pieces of it that were great. Fragments. But the story of illness, I barely saw it. Maybe that's the beauty of it. The story of his illness is the story of life - the ups and downs of it, the people who come in and out of it, the moments where it is glorious and vivid, and the moments it's just heaviness, and there's the thought of ending it.To explain feelings he uses metaphors or analogies, long, intellectual and fascinating, metaphors that are thoughts complete in themselves and don't necessarily lead back to the feeling. The golden ratio, Citizen Kane, Klee, Ezra Pound - these are where he goes to make sense of things, his language for understanding the self.These references, and the detours into artists and art and lyrics and girls are, told in this rambling, exploring way -- are captivating, but in the most intense situations, where he is trying to convey something particular, it comes across flat.My favorite passage, only because it pertains to me:"But she had to assume this identity as she had to assume her other roles: girlfriend, New Yorker, freelance designer, person walking down the street, person eating breakfast, person engaged in conversation, person giving someone a hug.None of her actions was in the least inauthentic but her degree of alienation from goals, actions, simple states of being - the acute inescapable self-surveillance of the addict - resembles that rareified ontological space of the depressive, the anxious, the ill, the poet."That describes me too well. And I would venture, based on his own writing that it describes Cody, to some degree, as well. less

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