The Complete Perfectionist [Hardcover]

Christopher Maurer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 17, 1997

Perfection is an ideal that makes life worth living--the internal applause as you hit the perfect note, write the perfect piece, reach the goal you once thought unattainable.  Yet many of us abandon that pursuit and settle for less than what we secretly want: perfect work, perfect love, perfect selves.  

Few have courted perfection like Nobel Prize winner Juan Ram¾n JimÚnez, who felt both fear and exhilaration before his own high standards and negotiated shrewdly with his own personal best.  

Drawing upon Juan Ram¾n's aphorisms, Christopher Maurer meditates upon his struggle and gives us a guide to the pursuit of life's ultimate pleasure: the dream of doing perfect work.  Juan Ram¾n's relentless quest for the perfect poem leads here to an inspiring new vision of how to reach perfection in any endeavor.

Juan Ram¾n analyzes the most radical elements of perfection: how to create and revise, reconcile noise and silence, listen to dream and instinct, learn from nature, seize the moment, and calm the fear of death.  

The Complete Perfectionist provides advice and encouragement for anyone for whom mere excellence is not enough.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Jimenez (1881-1958) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956 and influenced such writers as Federico Garcia Lorca and Jorge Guillen. He is recognized as one of the greatest Spanish poets of the 20th century, and Spanish children grow up learning his sayings. Maurer has selected and translated some of Jimenez's famous sayings, arranging them here around the theme of what makes up a good work (e.g., instinct, memory, and revision). He also furnishes an enthusiastic introduction and conclusion, as well as introductions to each section. Jimenez worked in a cork-lined room and tore up his newly published books to make improvements. He viewed work as a means of self-definition and social renewal. On "Revision," for example, he says, "In the papers in my wastebasket, what beauties of rhythm and color! What a restless, dull kaleidoscope!" Readers and writers who want an introduction to the poet might find this work of interest, and comprehensive collections of Spanish literature might want to include it.?Nancy P. Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville,
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

The Nobel Prize^-winning Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez sought perfection in his work. His was no stale and static perfection, however, but an organic one that permitted deviations from regularity, and the pursuit of it was an ever-changing quest for the right action at the right time. For much of his life, Jimenez recorded his thoughts about this quest in aphorisms that redoubtable translator Maurer (his version of the seventeenth-century Jesuit Baltasar Gracian's Art of Worldly Wisdom [1992] was something of a best-seller) here gathers and categorizes. Maurer also provides ample context for Jimenez's maxims, so that we begin to know Jimenez as a person and a poet as well as a philosopher. The aphorisms are marvelous nuggets of wisdom--"Treat the least significant things you do as though they were permanent, and they will endure," for example, and "When a noise breaks into your silence, make it immediately a natural part of your silence." Jimenez redefines perfectionism by embracing a marvelously natural type of perfection. Patricia Monaghan

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday Business; 1st edition (February 17, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385480229
• ISBN-13: 978-0385480222
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,219,256 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)