David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay . Cioran: “Whatever his merits, a man in good health is always disappointing. Impossible to grant any credence to what he says, to regard his phrases as anything but excuses, acrobatics. The experience of the terrible—which alone confers a certain destiny upon our words—is what he lacks, as he lacks, too, the imagination of disaster, without which no one can communicate with those separate beings, the sick. Having nothing to transmit, neutral to the point of abdication, he collapses into well-being, an insignificant state of perfection, an impermeability to death as well as of inattention to oneself and to the world. As long as he remains there, he is like the objects around him; once torn from it, he opens himself to everything, knows everything: the omniscience of terror.” When Richard Stern and his wife, the poet Alane Rollings, were walking home from dinner one night in Paris with Cioran, Rollings had a painful blister on her foot. She was bleeding badly. Cioran refused to slow down for her or even acknowledge her discomfort. Maybe he thought she was learning something.

Bernard Cooper, Maps to Anywhere . The first part of Maps to Anywhere was selected by Annie Dillard as one of the best essays of 1988, but the book as a whole won the PEN/Hemingway Award for the best first novel of 1990, while in the foreword to the book Richard Howard calls the chapters “neither fictions nor essays, neither autobiographical illuminations nor cultural inventions.” The narrator—Howard calls him “the Bernard-figure (like the Marcel-figure, neither character nor symbol)”—is simultaneously “the author” and a fictional creation. From minisection to minisection and chapter to chapter, Bernard’s self-conscious and seriocomic attempts to evoke and discuss his own homosexuality, his brother’s death, his father’s failing health, his parents’ divorce, and southern California kitsch are delicately woven together to form an extremely powerful meditation on the relationship between grief and imagination. When a self can (through language, memory, research, and invention) project itself everywhere, and can empathize with anyone or anything, what exactly is a self? The book’s final sentence is an articulation of the melancholy that the narrator has, to a degree, deflected until then: “And I walked and walked to hush the world, leaving silence like spoor.”

Alphonse Daudet, In the Land of Pain . A contemplation of dying, rendered in dozens of preobituaries for himself.

Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm . “Deep inside, you know you’re him.”

Annie Dillard, For the Time Being . Literary mosaic is an alluring and difficult form: you gather a bowl full of jagged fragments, and you want each one to take you somewhere slightly new or hurt in a slightly different way.

Marguerite Duras, The Lover . When someone is searching, being cautious, solving a problem, the brain releases dopamine—the neurotransmitter that controls reward and pleasure. As soon as she finds what she’s looking for, the release of dopamine shuts off.

Frederick Exley, A Fan’s Notes . Trying to create in others an image of himself in which he can believe, Exley imagines various versions of potential success, none of which he respects and all of which he tries to court.

Brian Fawcett, Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow . On the bottom of each page, Fawcett runs a book-length footnote about the Cambodian war. The effect of the bifurcated page is to confront the reader with Fawcett’s central motif: wall-to-wall media represent as thorough a raid on individual memory as the Khmer Rouge. By far the most popular novels of our era are interactive, plot-driven video games: 11 million people subscribe to World of Warcraft alone, and there are dozens of other massively multiplayer games that are nearly as popular. All the people who play a particular game are in the same virtual space and interact with one another; it’s not exactly fiction or fantasy, and it’s not exactly reality, either. It’s a middle ground—quasireality, fictional nonfiction. When I’m standing poolside in my flip-flops, I’m comfortable, and when I’m swimming in the pool, I’m relatively comfortable. When I’m transitioning into the pool, I’m uncomfortable, but I definitely know I’m alive.

Amy Fusselman, The Pharmacist’s Mate . The book fluctuates wildly and unpredictably from Fusselman’s attempt to get pregnant through artificial means, her conversations with her dying father, and his WWII diary entries. I don’t know what the next paragraph will be, where Fusselman is going, until—in the final few paragraphs—she lands on the gossamer-thin difference between life and death, which is where she’s been focused all along, if I could only have seen it.

Mary Gaitskill’s essay “Lost Cat.” Far and away the best thing she’s written, asking as it does in its every sentence, “Is love real?”

Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces . Galeano marries himself to the larger warp and woof by allowing different voices and different degrees of magnitude of information to play against one another. A mix of memoir, anecdote, polemic, parable, fantasy, and Galeano’s surreal drawings, the book might at first glance be dismissed as mere miscellany, but upon more careful inspection, it reveals itself to be virtually a geometric proof on the themes of love, terror, and imagination, perhaps best exemplified by this minichapter: “Tracey Hill was a child in a Connecticut town who amused herself as befitted a child of her age, like any other tender little angel of God in the state of Connecticut or anywhere else on this planet. One day, together with her little school companions, Tracey started throwing lighted matches into an anthill. They all enjoyed this healthy childish diversion. Tracey, however, saw something which the others didn’t see or pretended not to, but which paralyzed her and remained forever engraved in her memory: faced with the dangerous fire, the ants split up into pairs and two by two, side by side, pressed close together, they waited for death.”

Vivian Gornick, The End of the Novel of Love . The very embodiment of the critical intelligence in the imaginative position: literary analysis as farewell to feeling.

Simon Gray, The Smoking Diaries . A man, whose friends are dying and who by the final book of the tetralogy is dying himself, stands before us utterly naked and takes account: Rembrandt’s late self-portraits, in prose. The gravitation is very extreme to always make himself look bad, and in so doing, of course, he renders himself lovable. Each minisection of Gray’s four-volume work is typically only a few pages long, the subsections connect in beautifully oblique ways, and each book is held together by an understated but brilliantly deployed metaphor. An entire life, an entire way of thinking, comes into being. Having read the diaries, I feel less lonely.

Barry Hannah, Boomerang . The stakes, shifting from “character” to “author,” get raised. Hannah exposes his own flaws, extends them, and frames them as tragedy.

Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights . Modularity mirroring and measuring sleeplessness.

Amy Hempel, “In the Animal Shelter.” Beautiful women, abandoned by men who don’t want to get married and have children, go to an animal shelter to cuddle with “one-eyed cats,” to imagine mothering these homeless pets—to reverse the rejection they experienced by the men—but also to reexperience that rejection. “Is mama’s baby lonesome?” the women ask the abandoned animals.

Robin Hemley, “Riding the Whip.” An autobiographical story in which a boy’s older sister commits suicide. Attending a fair with a girl on whom he has a crush, he pretends not to care about his sister. He comes to feel, viscerally, his guilt, his close identification with her, and their shared masochism.