Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This half life is a total pleasure, June 8, 2007
Here's my suggestion, put down that 600 page tome on what's happening behind closed doors at the White House, take a pass on the latest "woe is me" memoir and just sit back and let a smart, funny, and always stimulating conversationalist engage your mind with fresh insights into fascinating topics in impeccable style. It is the rare essayist who combines a cultivated and informed intellect with an enthusiastic and playful wit. Arthur Kyrstal does just that and more in this collection. The essays on Laziness and Sin are absolute gems, and the ones on Beauty, Faces, The Typewriter, and Boxing Writing are all first rate. For me, this is literary entertainment of the highest order--stimulating, surprising, challenging and smart.
When you're done, you can go back to that 600 page political pundit expose, or get Krystals' other essay collection, Agitations, and continue to treat yourself to the kind of reading that reminds you of what great writing is all about.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Little Masterpieces in the Genre, August 16, 2007
Arthur Krystal's second collection of essays, "The Half-Life of an American Essayist," confirms the opinion of his writing that I came to after his first collection "Agitations" appeared. He has an instinctive grasp of the essay as genre and produces some of the very best contemporary examples of that misunderstood category. Now, we all wrote essays in school, some of us have even composed op-ed pieces or, at least, letters to editors. We know one when we see it. We know how to put an essay together, right? What's so intricate and demanding about writing essays? And just where does this sarcastic, name-dropping, self-indulgent, wrong-headed comedian get the right to call himself an "American Essayist?"
We should not react so hastily or give ourselves so much credit. About ten years ago, a contemporary Russian critic (Lidiia Ivanova) told me, "A successful essay should always be based on a paradox." I have kept this in mind for a decade, but the only essays I have read that really measure up to Ivanova's description are Krystal's. (As far as I know, the two have never met). Let's see how this works in Montaigne's essay on cannibals by using a syllogism:
a) Civilized people have refinements and human values.
b) Montaigne's cannibals have refinements and values, many that we lack;
c) The cannibals fall into the category of . . . wait a minute!
Montaigne throws us against the wall of his paradox. Krystal uses paradox effectively in an essay that appears at the beginning of "Agitations," "Closing the Books." Here he announces that he is throwing away his reading glasses, renouncing the reading of artistic fiction and erudite non-fiction, because he no longer reacts as passionately to books as he did in his younger years. Let's look at the syllogistic spine of this essay:
a) Intellectuals and writers always read good books with fervor.
b) Arthur Krystal is an intellectual and writer.
C) Arthur Krystal always . . . ??
He offers himself as an exception, his renunciation of books makes a paradox out of his own identity and career. This essay elicited a flood of angry responses from readers, who saw it as an attack on intellect and creativity, on civilization itself. Krystal carried the mark of Cain, the brand of the heretic. He had left the church. Nobody seemed to get it, to understand that he was manipulating his reader with apparently confessional prose, and that his essay, far from containing an attack on culture, emerges as a poignant elegy on transcience. If the reader thinks beyond the essay, he/she will realize that the renunciation of reading is rhetorical, and that only such an extreme gesture will register his grief over the loss of the intensity that accompanies one's first meetings with the great texts. Instead, readers covered a perceived attack on the humanities with the same abuse that met Rousseau's "Discourse on the Sciences and Arts," and Tolstoy's "What is Art?"
The essay as a genre survives, but just barely. This is unfortunate, for no other genre so successfully separates the clever and literate from the fools. It needs to be revived by readers who know how to read. We must first keep in mind the use of paradox as an eliciting tool and we must remember that the essayist uses personas and masks to manipulate the astute reader beyond the literal content to questioning his/her assumptions. The less astute, those who really believe that Jonathan Swift advocated cannibalism in his "Modest Proposal," will soon begin to call the writer names for having such stupid opinions. In Russia in 1841, Mikhail Lermontov wrote in the preface to the ssecond edition of his novel, "Our [reading] public resembles a provincial who, upon overhearing the conversation of two diplomats belonging to two warring Courts, is convinced that each envoy is betraying his government in the interests of a most tender mutual friendship." Unfortunately, the words describe too many readers in present-day America as well.
Buy and read this book, and buy "Agitations" while you are filling out your order. Among their many other attractions, these pieces provide an education in the way to read essays.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An eclectic and thought-provoking assortment, October 5, 2007
Essayist Arthur Krystal's work has previously appeared in such respected publications as "The American Scholar", "The New Yorker", "The Wall Street Journal", and more. The Half-Life of an American Essayist is a selection of twelve literary essays, written in a conversational tone yet addressing both political and semiotic precepts. Topics range from the growth of the Holocaust industry, to the life of Raymond Chandler, to the history of boxing. "While scholarly books and serious documentaries about the Holocaust are invaluable in learning about what happened and why, a certain kind of excess breeds indifference, and even this essay may be in some measure a form of betrayal. There is a part of me that feels that whatever I say for public consumption somehow cheapens the suffering of those who died and those who survived. If I have any justification for writing this, it is that I promised my father I would present his alternative to the pomp and circumstance of remembrance." An eclectic and thought-provoking assortment, recommended for intellectual and casual readers alike.
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