Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H. Lawrence

Really enjoyed about 90% of this book, but then he started going on about Camus and Nietzsche and I lost interest for a week. I shovelled through the rest on Saturday and accidentally took a nap less than a page before the end. Ooops. Kind of a sour ending to an otherwise really great read. I identified with the narrator (I won't say the author) a lot, although my own experiences are much milder and more internalized, easily overcome. Reminded me of Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot but with much more self-scrutiny and less literary somersaulting (I guess?). A great and hilarious cautionary tale, in spite of the repetition and the anger.

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“The perfect life, the perfect lie, I realised after Christmas, is one which prevents you from doing that which you ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you have no wish to do. People need to feel that they have been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted; where the life they really want is precisely a compound of all those thwarting circumstances. It is a very elaborate, extremely simple procedure, arranging this web of self-deceit: contriving to convince yourself that you were prevented from doing what you wanted. Most people don't want what they want: people want to be prevented, restricted. The hamster not only loves his cage, he'd be lost without it. That's why children are so convenient: you have children because you're struggling to get by as an artists – which is actually what being an artist means – or failing to get on with your career. Then you can persuade yourself that your children prevented you from having this career that had never looked like working out. So it goes on: things are always forsaken in the name of an obligation to someone else, never as a failing, falling short of yourself.”