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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
stimulating and thought-provoking, June 2, 1998
By A Customer
I thought Ms. Dillard distinguished herself with this literary piece of literary criticism. She got into some pretty deep and convoluted places with this book, but I felt that every point was well-made and well-taken. I feel the book is an education in itself. Loved it!
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Art Is Interpretation, October 21, 2005
"Living By Fiction" is in essence a treatise by Annie Dillard that attempts to interpret art, and thereby includes fiction as art, and as an interpretation. The book is well constructed and the sentences are beautifully crafted. The treatise starts by discussing in vast detail, the styles and forms of writing. Then it concentrates on "modernistic" fiction. This type of fiction takes numerous and varied forms.
Annie distinguishes between styles of writing. She does this very much by example. She uses the work of many, many authors as her examples and illustrations of the different manners in which a writer can craft a work. Specifically, she describes works of fiction. After detailing these different styles and their characteristics, she then turns to the purpose of fiction as a subcategory of art.
She posits that art is an interpretation. It is the artist's perspective on the relationship between something in the universe and a representation of that vision of the item. Her analysis inevitably leads her to state that art and religion are the modes by which people explain and interpret the unexplainable. Art produces an interpretation of a vision that is meant for others to see.
The interpretation, interestingly enough, is in fact non-existent without the reader and the critic to observe. While opining that fiction needs readers and critics to be interpreted, the interpretation is the very purpose of the creation. Without the reader and the critic, the work does not really exist. It exists in form, but not in value. The work is a creation that only carries a message if someone reads it; and more so if someone such as a critic helps us to interpret it.
In a fascinating "diatribe" to use her designation, she discusses the complexity of interpretation. In addition, she discusses a concept that art is the ordering of disordered and decaying existence. Basing her discussion of this concept on Newton's Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that all things become randomly distributed, unless acted upon by some external force; Annie argues that fiction and art in general are an ordering of this theory of disorder or entropy. She in fact suggests that perhaps art, including fiction, is the purpose of man. And that this purpose is for man to make order of the universe around him. Does art create meaning or does it expose it? In essence Annie says the distinction does not really matter. What matters is that it is a depiction; which is open to anyone who wishes to interpret it. Without an observer, it carries no real meaning. It is just an object. Only through its interpretation does it gain meaning. Thus, art and fiction necessitate interpreters, and it is through these interpreters, the reader, that it gains meaning and substance.
While complex in her contentions, she is also sublime. The treatise truly is a thing of beauty, but that is not sufficient to Annie. Nor is it really sufficient to a reader or a critic. What is sufficient and valuable is that the art object presents the reader with an interpretation. And whether the reader's interpretation is in accordance with the artist's is really of no account. Its value is in its illustration of a message. That message is open to all to interpret as they see it, and as it relates to life and existence. This book is recommended to all readers of complex fiction. It is truly a picturesque look at the art of writing and also the purpose thereof.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Literary criticism"..., March 18, 2011
... the subject phrase grates like chalk pulled across an English classroom's black board. At least for me. It conjures up images of writing critical papers on a school-assignment novel, struggling with concepts like symbolism, and at more advanced levels, "deconstructionism." All in an effort to get the "right" answer, which was how the teacher wanted us to "see" a particular novel. I still remember giving a verbal "book report" to the class on Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (P.S.), and the "right" answer was to assure the teacher that drug use was bad. In the sciences the "right" answer seemed to come easier, and certainly more objectively. Which was why I only "had" to take two years of English in college, which may be a key reason why I still read.
Annie Dillard is best known to me for her excellent Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper Perrennial Modern Classics) and An American Childhood. My appreciation of these works helped me overcome my natural aversion to the "subject" of literature. And I was richly rewarded. She wrote this book almost 30 years ago, when she was about 35, and just her erudition is dazzling (and humbling). Not only had she read so many of the major and minor contemporary writers, but she can deftly compare their strengths and weaknesses. There is Carlos Fuentes, Marcel Proust, James Agee, Nabokov, Borges and on and on. As she says in the introduction, she "...attempts to do unlicensed metaphysics in a teacup."
Dillard examines the transformations of various elements in modern fiction, noting that time is no longer linear, and that characters have changed from the familiar depictions of Charles Dickens to the more outlandish ones of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Thomas Pynchon. The point of view of the novel can now be multitudinous, from Faulkner's As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text (Modern Library) to Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet.
The author's style is dense and rapid fire. There is a lot to "chew over." Consider the following concept, which seems to become truer with every passing year: "Fuller's assertion was roughly to this effect: the purpose of people on earth is to counteract the tide of entropy described in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Physical things are falling apart at a terrific rate; people , on the other hand, put things together." (Or, I guess that is the optimistic interpretation.)
As for the issue of our schooling in English literature, Dillard has the following observation: "Students also study Joyce, Faulkner, and Woolf in the classroom, but they usually read Nabokov and Pynchon on their own, just as our professors a generation ago read Joyce on the sly." She goes on to explain that modern language departments, fighting for their lives, insist that students need to read authors in the original language, and thus English students may therefore lack genuine knowledge of European and Latin American fiction. Oh, how true.
The novel most cited in this book is Nabokov's Pale Fire (Everyman's Library (Cloth)), enough so to place it high on my "to-read" list, and is just one of the reasons this stimulating book on the very nature of contemporary literature merits 5-stars.
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