Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir
Average Customer Rating:  
List Price:
$15.00
Austria Hotels Travel Price:
$10.20
Your Savings: $ 4.80 ( 32% )
Subject To Change Without Notice
Availability: N/A
Manufacturer: Penguin
|
|
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.1968530092
EAN: 9780142000069
ISBN: 014200006X
Label: Penguin
Manufacturer: Penguin
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 240
Publication Date: 2001-10-01
Publisher: Penguin
Release Date: 2001-10-02
Studio: Penguin
|
|
|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
"[Slater has] the playful mind of a philosopher and the exquisite, unique voice of a poet." (The Washington Post Book World)
In this powerful and provocative new memoir, award-winning author Lauren Slater forces readers to redraw the boundary between what we know as fact and what we believe through the creation of our own personal fictions. Mixing memoir with mendacity, Slater examines memories of her youth, when after being diagnosed with a strange illness she developed seizures and neurological disturbances-and the compulsion to lie. Openly questioning the reliability of memoir itself, Slater presents the mesmerizing story of a young woman who discovers not only what plagues her but also what cures her-the birth of her sensuality, her creativity as an artist, and storytelling as an act of healing.
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: Doesn't live up to Slater's reputation.
Comment: Prior to this book, I'd read Prozac Diary and Welcome to my Country, both of which were quite good. This book, although an interesting concept, does not live up to Slater's better works. Satire-like, memoir-like, fiction-like.... But it fits none of these, is fairly incoherent, and does not really thread the story together adequately. If you want some fictional-type, possibly-true, almost-factual words, try this book. It is a fairly quick read and mildly entertaining. Personally, I'd save my time for Welcome to my Country. Reminds me of Blank: The Power of Not Actually Thinking at All (A Mindless Parody)
Customer Rating:
Summary: Clever and Slippery As Promised
Comment: Hmmm? What to say? What to think about this book?
Obviously Lauren Slater is very clever, I enjoyed her story. But mostly when I read this book I felt fortunate to have endured only the so called normal or typical teenaged angst growing up.
She offers us a history of her life that may or may not be a complete fictionalization. It's an interesting angle from which to write a memoir.
I have to say that I read Love Works Like This by Lauren Slater and I really enjoyed it. Lying was clever but I didn't love it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Brilliant prose from a trickster of a narrator
Comment: Slater insists that her book be characterized as a non-fiction memoir, despite that fact that she freely admits that her account of her epilepsy is factual, symbolic, real, and fantastical all at once. Slater herself isn't always sure which of her memories are true and which are vivid but invented. If the reader can let themselves free in this alternate reality, Slater's memoir makes for fascinating, touching, and chilling reading. She truly brings the reader inside her own confusions about how much of her disease is real and how much fabricated. The short length of the book allows Slater's literary trickery to work well.
As an adult, Slater confesses to her adolescent neurologist that she frequently exaggerated her seizures and symptoms right before her corpus callostomy surgery. He dismisses her guilt, saying it was well-known that she was an exaggerator. "Okay, you lied. But really, Lauren, I don't want you to feel guilty. In a sense you lied, but in another sense you didn't, because trickery is so hinged on your personality style, and, therefore, you were only being true to yourself."
Also as an adult, Slater finds salvation in AA, despite the fact that she's hardly a drinker. She enjoys the comraderie and the structure of the 12 steps. The climax of Slater's coming to terms with her disease is a stunning confessional at an AA meeting, spoken entirely metaphorically, which has a huge impact on her group and the reader.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Well done, but not quite enough feeling
Comment: Lauren Slater's tribute to postmodernism in her "metaphorical memoir" is an interesting exploration of the role of fact in what is true. Where we may tend to regard the objective facts of a situation to be the truth of it, Ms. Slater takes a much more subjective view. She asserts her point, explicitly and in a masterful way woven seemlessly throughout the text, that there may be a more truthful way to relate a situation, a character, an anecdote, than to simply relate the facts.
So she leads us to wonder even about the most central elements of the story. Does she really have epilepsy? Has she ever really had a seizure? Does the doctor she cites throughout her story really exist, or is he a metaphor also?
While fascinating questions I found their deliberate effect a bit too successful: I couldn't trust the narrator. Unfortunately for me, that meant also that I was ultimately unable to feel close to the narrator and really understand her motivations -- perhaps, in my eyes at least, the most important role of a memoir.
It's a bit of a quandry that I'm left in. She's succeeded fully in doing what she set out to do. She's presented herself as something of a chronic lier; a trickster at the very least. But since I know this about her so soon, and I'm so frequently reminded, I have difficultly staving off the need to push her away. So as a memoir, instead of a piece of literary theory, I found Slater's book a bit distant.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Another triumph for Slater.
Comment: Lauren Slater, Lying (Random House, 2000)
I picked up Lauren Slater's first book, Welcome to My Country, on a whim in 1997, and instantly fell in love with Slater's impeccable prose. That she related case studies without descending into the smarmy self-help realm of, say, Oliver Sacks helped immensely. Welcome to My Country was on my best-I-read list that year.
Fast forward to 2005, and I start wondering what Slater's been up to since releasing it. I check her out at Amazon, and am thrilled to find she's released two books since. Lying is the first of them I picked up, and it's great to see she's still at the top of her game.
Billed as "a metaphorical memoir," we are given an autobiography of Lauren Slater, an epileptic who's had a rather extreme surgical procedure performed to counter her epilepsy. It controls the physical aspects-- the seizures-- but hasn't controlled any of the mental. This, of course, is the stuff popular memoirs are made of; the dysfunctional childhood sells.
What Slater brings to the table that sets her apart from the others is that, while there is always the understanding that the memoir is colored by the perceptions of its author, Slater recognizes this as much as any reader, and has decided to play with it-- to the point where the reader (and the person who wrote the cover copy, as well) realize that by the time we reach the first of Slater's revelations that she's written a fantasy as an actual event, we can no longer even be sure she has epilepsy. This opens up whole worlds of discussion in the larger genre of memoir, and that in itself makes Lying a singularly important work in its field; if taken as a greater meditation on memoir, the reader should come away with this book with a new way of looking at the form.
All that aside, though, the best reason to read Lauren Slater's books is simply that she's a fine, fine writer. Lying also has a very, very good chance of landing on this year's best-I-read list, despite the quality of my reading having skyrocketed in recent years. **** ½
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Austria Hotels Travel Books
Austria Hotels Travel DVD
Austria Hotels Travel Softwares
Austria Hotels Travel Magazines
Austria Related Sites
Austria Posters
Austria Art Prints
Austria Travel 2008 Calendars
2008 Monthly Calendars
Austria Hotels Travel Special Resources
Austria Arts
Austria Entertainment
Austria Business
Austria Culture
Austria Education
Austria Government
Austria Health
Austria Map
Sports & Recreation
Travel & Tourism
Austria Travel Destinations
Vienna, Austria
Wels, Austria
Rennweg, Austria
Salzburg, Austria
Linz, Austria
Ossiach, Austria
Innsbruck, Austria
Portschach, Austria
Graz, Austria
Lienz, Austria
Anthering, Austria
Bregenz, Austria
Imst, Austria
Kitzbuehel, Austria
Rankweil, Austria
St. Anton, Austria
Stockerau, Austria
Telfes, Austria
Kustein, Austria
Zurs am Arlberg
Bad Gastein, Austria
Eisenstadt, Austria
Wien, Austria
|
Austria Hotels Travel
Maintained by: Marketer Solutions | Link Building
