How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken: Essays [Hardcover]

Daniel Mendelsohn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 12, 2008

Whether he's on Broadway or at the movies, considering a new bestseller or revisiting a literary classic, Daniel Mendelsohn's judgments over the past fifteen years have provoked and dazzled with their deep erudition, disarming emotionality, and tart wit. Now How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken reveals all at once the enormous stature of Mendelsohn's achievement and demonstrates why he is considered one of our greatest critics. Writing with a lively intelligence and arresting originality, he brings his distinctive combination of scholarly rigor and conversational ease to bear across eras, cultures, and genres, from Roman games to video games.

His interpretations of our most talked-about films—from the work of Pedro Almodóvar to Brokeback Mountain, from United 93 and World Trade Center to 300, Marie Antoinette, and The Hours—have sparked debate and changed the way we watch movies. Just as stunning and influential are his dispatches on theater and literature, from The Producers to Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, from The Lovely Bones to the works of Harold Pinter. Together these thirty brilliant and engaging essays passionately articulate the themes that have made Daniel Mendelsohn a crucial voice in today's cultural conversation: the aesthetic and indeed political dangers of imposing contemporary attitudes on the great classics; the ruinous effect of sentimentality on the national consciousness in the post-9/11 world; the vital importance of the great literature of the past for a meaningful life in the present.

How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken makes it clear that no other contemporary thinker is as engaged with as many aspects of our culture and its influences as Mendelsohn is, and no one practices the vanishing art of popular criticism with more acuity, humor, and feeling.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this elegant collection of essays mostly from the New York Review of Books, NBCC award–winning author Mendelsohn reveals intellectual breadth in his ability to draw on his training as a classicist to look at contemporary culture, from movies like Kill Bill to Broadway musicals like The Producers, and the novels Middlesex and Everyman. They are springboards for Mendelsohn's agile mind to examine subjects like gender, homosexuality, war and peace. In Victims on Broadway I he eloquently peels back layer after layer of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie and criticizes not only the 2005 Broadway production as stripped of the nuances of character and sensibility but also the audience for what he sees as their inability to perceive pathos. In a magisterial essay, Mendelsohn finds the same flaw in the blockbuster movie Troy that he believes marred the ancient, lost Greek epics the Cypria and the Little Iliad: unlike Homer's Iliad, they have not a single unifying action, but a single unifying notion lacking in epic grandeur. These essays richly repay the time readers spend in their company. (Aug. 12)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“Mendelsohn takes on contemporary culture with humor and incisive analysis.” (The New York Sun )

“An elegant collection of essays. . . . Mendelsohn reveals intellectual breadth in his ability to draw on his training as a classicist to look at contemporary culture. . . . These essays richly repay the time readers spend in their company.” (Publishers Weekly (starred review) )

“Brilliant. . . . Masterful. . . . Wise, funny. . . . A wonderful collection.” (Time Out New York )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1 edition (August 12, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061456438
• ISBN-13: 978-0061456435
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #372,714 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Daniel Mendelsohn was born on Long Island in 1960 and was educated at the University of Virginia and at Princeton, where he was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. After completing his Ph.D. in Classics in 1994, he began a career in journalism in New York City, and since then his articles, essays, reviews and translations have appeared frequently in numerous national publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, Newsweek, The New York Review of Books, and Travel + Leisure, where he is a contributing editor. From 2000 until 2002, he was the weekly book critic for New York magazine, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Criticism. Mr. Mendelsohn's other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the George Jean Nathan Prize for Dramatic Criticism.

His first book, "The Elusive Embrace," published by Knopf in 1999, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. In 2002, he published a scholarly study of Greek tragedy, "Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays." In 2006 Mr. Mendelsohn's international bestseller "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million," was published in the United States to extraordinary critical acclaim. A New York Times Notable Book of 2006 and a 'Best of the Year' pick in a dozen other newspapers, The Lost won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Salon Book Award, and a number of other honors; in its foreign translations it has been awarded the Prix Médicis (France), the ADEI-WIZO Prize (Italy) and was short-listed for the Duff Cooper Prize (UK). With now over half a million copies in print, it has been translated into a dozen other languages for publication throughout Europe and in Israel.

In August, 2008 a collection of Mr. Mendelsohn's critical essays about books, theater, and film, entitled "How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken," most of them from the New York Review of Books, was published by HarperCollins, and was subsequently named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2008. In April 2009, his two-volume translation, with commentary, of the complete works of Constantine Cavafy, including the first-ever translation of the poet's "Unfinished Poems", was published by Alfred A. Knopf and immediately hailed as "extraordinary" (The New Yorker), "the definitive Cavafy for some time to come" (Publishers Weekly), and "a work of art in its own right" (The New York Times Book Review). He currently working on a new book, "Odysseys: Adventures in Reading the Greeks," to be published in 2012.

Mr. Mendelsohn divides his time between homes in New York City and in New Jersey, where his family live.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very stimulating and thought-provoking read, October 9, 2008

By 

Armchair Interviews (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken: Essays (Hardcover)

Readers of the New York Review of Books will be familiar with the writings of Daniel Mendelsohn, who has written dozens of reviews of literature, movies and theatre. How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken pulls together many of those reviews, covering everything from movies like "Kill Bill" and "The 300" to Broadway plays such as "The Glass Menagerie" and "The Producers" to books like "The Hours," "Middlesex" and new academic books on history.

Why would anyone want to read a book of old reviews? Well, Mendelsohn is perhaps the best example of how this form can be used as a launching pad for examining large subjects like war and its culpabilities, sex and homosexuality, and human nature. That Mendelsohn does all of this by invoking a lens of the great classicists - Euripides, Homer, Sophocles - is a feat of a great and pointed intelligence.

These are not just reviews, though they are that too. Mendelsohn is a critic, and a stringent and demanding one. Swayed by the opinions of neither the public nor other critics, he deftly, and with great care, strikes at the heart of faults of many books, plays and movies. Despite this, these reviews are not rants, nor are they petty or arrogant. Their power comes from the combination of Mendelsohn's intelligence with his great love of writing, movies and theatre. It is only with the greatest respect that he points out the failings, of both the works of art themselves, and of our culture.

You might expect essays that invoke Sophicles and Homer to be difficult. Another great talent of Mendelsohn is his ability to write of these classic subjects in a very conversational manner - to, in fact, draw in readers who are not familiar with the classics the way he is, to serve as a bridge between the great ideas of history and the popular culture of today.

As I read his essays, I found myself simultaneously intrigued, entertained, and educated - and interested in going back to read, and see, some of these books and movies again.

Armchair Interviews says: An educational and fascinating read.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant!, September 14, 2009

By 

T. J. Monika "Spocks Bro" (Los Angeles area) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken: Essays (Hardcover)

OK, so why put this on your "must read" list? To start, Mendelsohn is a brilliant critic who writes insightfully and without condescension to author, work or audience (reader, movie-goer, etc.). Even when he utterly demolishes his subject, he never descends to snark or gratuitous sniping. Many times, I got the sense of a man exasperated with how close these artists get to creating something of real meaning/value but keep missing the target.

In his introduction, Mendelsohn explains the criteria by which he judges -

(1) Meaningful coherence of form and content;
(2) Precise employment of detail to support (1);
(3) Vigor and clarity of expression; and
(4) Seriousness of purpose (p. xv)


Quite independent of Mendelsohn, I'm happy (and perhaps a bit smug) to say my own judgments have come around to these selfsame points, even regarding the "brain candy" I may read when the "big issues" get tiresome. I find it nearly impossible to read a book anymore (or watch a movie for that matter)where the author can't write, doesn't take her job seriously, or both - even when it's "just" book #347 in Space Bimbos of the Black Sun series.

Oh, but we live in a "dark age" of culture where far too often we eschew wrestling with real tragedy for sentimentalism; melodrama; and feel-good, Lifetime movie endings. This is a common theme in many of the essays found here, from the first essay on Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones through stagings of Tennessee Williams and Euripides, reviews of Quentin Tarantino and Pedro Almodovar, to Oliver Stone's World Trade Center. (Regarding the latter, Mendelsohn compares Stone's film to Aeschylus' The Persians, and makes the point that, even writing of a glorious Hellenic triumph (Marathon & Salamis), the Greek playwright chose to portray the reactions of the Persians, asking his Athenian audience "to think radically, to imagine something outside of their own experience, to situate the feelings they were having just then...in a vaster frame" (p. 452), whereas Stone's "pretty much exclusive emphasis thus far on the `good'...in these entertainments is noteworthy, because it reminds you of the unwillingness to grapple with and acknowledge the larger issues...which has characterized much of the natural response to this pivotal trauma (9/11)." (p. 451))

Mendelsohn has inspired me to try opera - a genre for which I have little liking. I don't know why. I understand neither Italian nor French but it's not like I object to subtitles - I love Hong Kong martial arts flicks. And I dated a woman who adored opera and enthralled me with her enthusiastic descriptions of the medium. Whatever the case, the author's analysis of the Met's recent staging of Lucia di Lammermoor "forced" me to check out a DVD of Joan Sutherland's version from the library, and as I write this review, listen to a CD of Ion Marin's version with Cheryl Studer and Placido Domingo. Who knows where this could lead?

And, having read Mendelsohn's reviews of Troy and Alexander - the recent "epics" based on The Iliad and the life of Alexander the Great - I was again compelled. In this case to add them to my Netflix queue if only to see how badly they failed to capture their subjects. (Mendelsohn includes his review of 300 here as well but there are limits. The trailers were stomach churning enough.)

Lastly, I'm rereading Euripides' Medea in light of Mendelsohn's review of Deborah Warner's "vulgar, loud, and uncomprehending" (p. 418) Broadway staging of the play.

At the risk of spoiling your ability to enjoy guilty pleasures like Stephanie Meyer, I strongly recommend this book to one and all.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a celebration in vivisection, September 23, 2008

By 

Matthew (NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken: Essays (Hardcover)

While Mendelsohn has a gift for critical understanding of a work, I'd say he has an even greater gift for conveying that understanding in a relevant manner to his audience.

People (often times rightfully) attack critics often for being "haters" but, as Mendelsohn demonstrates so well here, good criticism is really about a careful consideration and love.

By treating a work seriously on its terms, setting it in cultural context, and questioning its greater implications, one is not dragging down an individual work but treating a work with the dignity it deserves and honoring the intelligence of its audience and the nuances in the history of the work's medium. To do all that with clear yet conversationally-engaging language is what this book offers many times over. From Brokeback Mountain to Almodovar to Olive Stone and Alice Sebold's bestseller The Lovely Bones... Mendelsohn sees what we are too mired in ourselves to view objectively.

Now, if I could only get him to consider the cultural relevance of my book (also available on amazon.com) On Toilets. One day! :)