When you finish reading a book of a stature such as "A Visit from the Goon Squad" by Jennifer Egan, you sit down, breathe and keep breathing, till the breath paces itself out and you aren't gasping anymore. The effect of books has to be this way. It has to have the maddening reaction in a reader - the gasping, the constant thinking about the characters and more so how would their lives turn out after the book is finished. Would they have a life at all once the reader has ended the reading? Would he or she go back and revive them? If a book can evoke these thoughts, then it is of the most superb quality writing that existed.
"A Visit from the Goon Squad" is all about lives being lived and the ones that were lived in the past. The book according to me is all about memories, failed lives, failed loves and how somewhere in all of this, there is this bleak thought of giving hope a chance and seeing where life goes thereon. There is nothing sugar coated in the book. Egan gives the reader, "life" the way it is - harsh, uncompromising, difficult and sometimes worth living just for all of that. Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the young, troubled woman he employs. The book is essentially about their lives, their pasts and how it all merges into one big fascinating book.
Egan
12:24 PM, Apr 20, 2013
New York: A story by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan for the New Yorker is being serialised in 10 installments on Twitter, according to the magazine. The New Yorker said the first installment of the story, a spy thriller called "Black Box, went out on Thursday night. "The story is written in terse dispatches of 140 characters or less, which will be tweeted, through The New Yorker Fiction Department's Twitter...
11:06 AM, May 28, 2012
New York: Salman Rushdie, Neil Gaiman and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists Jennifer Egan and Michael Cunningham are among more than 100 authors who in an online petition are declaring their support for Occupy Wall Street. The petition on http://occupywriters.com/ reads: "We, the undersigned writers and all who will join us, support Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement around the world." Others supporting the protests include "Lemony Snicket" author Daniel Handler,...
05:35 PM, Oct 17, 2011
