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  • Out of Sheer Rage

  • In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence
  • By: Geoff Dyer
  • Narrated by: Tom Hollander
  • Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (45 ratings)
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Out of Sheer Rage cover art

Out of Sheer Rage

By: Geoff Dyer
Narrated by: Tom Hollander
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Summary

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

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)

What listeners say about Out of Sheer Rage

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Enjoyably droll

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

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Procrastinating distractions, stay or go

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

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I didn't want to like this book

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.

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Brilliant

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.

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Got funny looks for laughing so much in public

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

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Dreadful

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)…

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More than at first it seems

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.

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