Customer Reviews

The Effort to Fall

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The somewhat aphoristic form of these writings is the perfect vehicle for the quick, sharp, and profound thrust of the knife into the whatever of existence. This work is brilliant, in every measure of the word. Extraordinary.

It's quite simple: The Effort To Fall is a book written excusively for the sensitive, the perceptive, and the intelligent. (Ultimately not a single one of these three qualities can exist in a person without the others, but that is another matter entirely).

The only negative opinion I have ever heard about this book was expressed, quite obiously, by someone lacking in all of these qualities.

This is to date one of the top works of this and last century. It's nothing short of a crime that more people haven't been exposed to its beauty.

book of epigrams, essays and outbursts on various subjects, like
literature (see the section: "The Word Defiled), music (see: "
Dialogues with Silence") and love.

Here are a few of my favorites, to give you a taste:

If there is a pleasure involved in looking at things, it is the
pleasure of being neither them nor ourselves. Sight allows us to slip
between the weight of our own being and that of the world and to unwind
in the emptiness between them.

Crucifixion is a piece of extravagance which only a god of Christ's
caliber could have gotten away with. Could a Jupiter or a Vishnu have
retained his clout nailed to a cross?

The ultimate thief, music steals from us our dreams, our emotions, and
our memories, and then disappears without a trace.

After spending the day in solitude, you desire to go out in the evening
with friends, and after going out in the evening with friends, to spend
the rest of your days in solitude.

The more debauched one becomes, the more one's fantasies revolve
around chastity.

God does not have the monopoly on omnipresence: this is a privilege
enjoyed by Injustice as well.

The writer, making every effort to appear innocent and noble, takes his
revenge with the pen; while the murderer, less hypocritical, takes it
with the sword.

Truly one of the most beautiful, profound and hilarious works of literature in the past....forever.

Christopher Spranger takes a sadly forgotten genre (the aphorism) and infuses it with his unique brand of pathos and hilarity.

One of a kind.

Fantastic book -- smart, funny, dark, and completely original.
Great little book by a terrific young author!

Vert few writers have expressed the vacuous nature of existence with so much insight, honesty, and brilliantly dark humor as Christopher Spranger in, "The Effort To Fall".

A lover of wisdom both disillusioned and courageous enough go see that his love will forever go unrequited, Spranger abandons the approach of the systematic philosopher, and lashes out with aphorisms, epigrams, maxims and fragments resounding enough to awaken even the stuffiest academic from his career-long slumber.

While Spranger's venomously penetrating assaults on the human condition propel "The Effort To Fall" to new heights of brilliance. However, by infusing his work with a singular cominbation of dark hilarity and frivolity, he strikes a perfect balance between despair and laughter.

It is not just his humor which saves the reader from suffocating beneath the weight of the subject matter, but the grace with which he expresses his thoughts. Spranger's prose style betrays his young age. Rather than resort to the sensationalism and shock value that many lesser young writers would do in order to imbue their thoughts with force, Spranger does so by maintaining a composure that would fill even the classical writer with envy. He proves that poetic expression and stunning beauty, do not have to reside at the antipodes of clarity and directness--traits which for too long have been viewed as exclusive in the world of philosophy.

But to define "The Effort To Fall" as a work of philosophy is to do it a grave injustice; for it is just as much, and just as importantly, a brilliant work of prose poetry and literature.

"The Effort To Fall" is a book for the intellectual, the literary and even the stuffy academic. But far more importantly it is a book for the melancholy, the hopeless, and the despairing; it is, in a few words, for anyone sensitive enough to appreciate the struggle of the thinking man. END