Readings - Softcover

Birkerts, Sven

3.52

29 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555972837 ISBN 13: 9781555972837

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 1999

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Readings combines the best of Sven Birkerts's previously published criticism with vital new essays. A dazzling writer whose clarity, rigor, and far-flung intellectual curiosity have been widely praised, Birkerts the literary critic is in top form in these pages. Whether discussing Elizabeth Bishop or Don DeLillo, Rilke or Kerouac, Keats or The Great Gatsby, he brings fresh insight, sharp thinking, and reflective sensitivity to each of his subjects.

A brilliant cultural commentator, Birkerts also addresses broader, more associative topics, such as biography and the enigma of poetic inspiration, contemporary nostalgia, our modern sense of time, and the future of the creative spirit. As Jonathan Franzen wrote in The New Yorker, "Birkerts on reading fiction is like M.F.K. Fisher on eating or Norman Maclean on fly casting. He makes you want to go do it." This is writing about reading at its best.

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Review:

Sven Birkerts got his start as an expert appraiser of such European imports as Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, and Witold Gombrowicz. Yet he soon expanded his scope to literature of all stripes, and turned out to be a particularly pungent critic of American fiction. His thoughts on individual writers were invariably eloquent and refreshingly cant-free. But Birkerts also had a gift for cultural trend-spotting: his superb deflation of Gordon Lish and his acolytes was the high point of his first collection, An Artificial Wilderness. More recently, however, he has mutated into something of a gloom-and-doom specialist. First came The Gutenberg Elegies, in which Birkerts defended the printed word against all electronic comers (i.e., CD-ROMS, audiobooks, and the Internet). Then he edited an anthology of essays by like-minded technophobes--although to be fair, at least a few participants confessed to a secret online addiction.

Now Birkerts has published Readings, which resembles a greatest-hits package but is heavily skewed toward the author's Chicken Little side. In the first essay, for example, he ponders the "millennial warp"--his sense "that our old understandings of time--and, therefore, of life itself--are in many ways useless." "The Idea of the Internet" is a eulogy to the solitary self, soon to be engulfed by the "massive electronic nervous system" of the Net. It's not that these aren't provocative ideas. The problem is that when the author diverts his attention from a particular text, his customarily lucid prose can turn to sociological fudge. The good news, however, is that Readings does contain a generous helping of vintage Birkerts. There are shrewd and enlightening pieces on Rilke, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Don DeLillo, as well as such deep-focus delights as "When Lightning Strikes." And in an essay on Seamus Heaney's sonnet sequence "Clearances," Birkerts puts his finger on one of the primary rewards of literature: "Reading the end of the poem, I feel as though some obstacle in my own life has been removed." Even better, he conveys why--and a critic who can so eloquently analyze his own sense of elation is one we'd better listen to. --James Marcus

About the Author:

Sven Birkerts is also the author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. He teaches at Mount Holyoke College, is a member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars, and lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.

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