"Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before. To the End of the Land is a book of this magnitude. David Grossman may be the most gifted writer I've ever read; gifted not just because of his imagination, his energy, his originality, but because he has access to the unutterable, because he can look inside a person and discover the unique essence of her humanity. For twenty-six years he has been writing novels about what it means to defend this essence, this unique light, against a world designed to extinguish it. To the End of the Land is his most powerful, shattering, and unflinching story of this defense. To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being."
-Nicole Krauss' blurb for the new David Grossman novel is… something else. It's often noted how much more difficult it is to express enthusiasm than to render criticism, but apparently that is not a universal problem.
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Ladies, be careful reading David Grossman novels! (via Feld)
All I could think reading this was "Ow. Ow. Ow." Not for the writing (essence, anyone?) so much as the relentless metaphors of dismemberment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KcoOkXy2Pk
But is it better than Cats?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uaebojaxt3s
Well, somebody got laid.
Jonathan Safran Foer?
This is already a meme on the AV Club, with topical substitutions being made for key phrases. THANK GOD.
I think I find the use of the word "absence" the most troubling. The subject wasn't "absent" when she wasn't a "human being"; she was just non-human. The phrase might (might!) be better if it read "it is to be turned back, as if after a long cæsura, into a human being." Except that the phrase can't be better because it is 2florid and the concept of being some kind of weird beast that becomes human again due to some werds is so William Blake (but not in a good way).
Always!
Hope she was on E when she wrote this.
Can we please switch to the form "Nicole Krauss's blurb" instead of the unpronounceable "Nicole Krauss' blurb"?