Out of Sheer Rage cover art

Out of Sheer Rage

In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence

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Out of Sheer Rage

By: Geoff Dyer
Narrated by: Tom Hollander
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About this listen

Sitting down to write a book about his hero D. H. Lawrence, Geoff Dyer finds himself compelled to write about anything else. He is in fact compelled to do more or less anything else instead of write.

In Sicily he is too preoccupied by his hatred of seafood to follow the great writer's footsteps; in Mexico he cannot get beyond a drug-induced erotic fantasy on a nudist beach...and yet, incredibly, this attempt to write a 'sober academic study' reveals the hold Lawrence and his work still exert on us today.

Out of Sheer Rage is a complete one-off, a richly comic study of the combination of bad temper, procrastination and the uncanny power of obliquity.

©2018 Geoff Dyer (P)2018 Canongate Books Ltd Art & Literature Authors Rage

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Critic reviews

"An intriguing, magnetic, genre-rattling book." (The Times)

"Marvellous...a glorious truant from study...gives a better picture of [Lawrence] than any biography I know." (James Wood, Guardian)
"The kind of book that gives literary criticism a bad name. Hilarious!" (John Berger)
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One of Geoff Dyer's best works, and thoughtfully and excellently read. Not to be missed.

Tremendous

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Tom Hollander has exactly the right tone to carry off this book by Geoff Dyer. The work is a fantastic read, although it takes a while to get going as Dyer goes around in circles discussing what he might or might not do. I am aware this was done on purpose but in my opinion, it is overcooked at the beginning, and his editor should have reined him in. You want to scream 'I get it, move on!' Other than that, this book is highly original, funny as a F, and worth your money.

fabulous performance of a hilarious book

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Funny, clever and thoughtful in a lovely arsey English way. And here's five more words.

Procrastinating distractions, stay or go

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This is a book about trying and failing to write a book about DH Lawrence. It’s much more enjoyable as a failure of a book about DH Lawrence than successful book about DH Lawrence would be. Probably.

Brilliant

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I didn't want to like this book because I thought it was going to be another dreadful account of D.H Lawrence's messy life, it wasn't, and I loved it.

I didn't want to like this book

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At first this seems like an entertaining enough exposition of footloose, literary prevarication, a funny meditation - although Dyer hates meditation - on what it’s like to write a book, fits and starts and block and all, all in book form.
It becomes much more than that. He has interesting things to say about freedom, work, destiny and the passions which drive us from where we start to wherever we set out to get to, or at least to elsewhere.
No knowledge of DH Lawrence required.

More than at first it seems

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Most of this book is complaining about one thing or another, but it’s somehow uplifting and true and funny. Good droll narration.

Enjoyably droll

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Loved Tom Hollanders dry reading of this book that makes me laugh like nothing else!

Got funny looks for laughing so much in public

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The author wants us to sympathise (or at last, empathise) with his plight - whether to live in Paris, Rome or San Francisco while he writes his “next book” (a book about DH Lawrence). The running joke is that he is one of life’s procrastinators. Or, more accurately he is so rich, entitled and spoilt that he can afford to be one of life’s procrastinators over things that are beyond the wildest dreams of most ordinary people. So far so normal for many Oxford graduates, which he is, though the fact that he came from good working class stock (a factory worker and a school dinner lady) made his entitled whining even more disappointing, at least for me. I hope he got a clip around the ear when he got home from counting his money (and writing trendy, unpleasant filth about his girlfriend)…

Dreadful

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