Reviews for Umwandlungen

The average rating for Umwandlungen based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-11-04 00:00:00 John Appersom Pleasingly bizarre idea for a book, as Baker uses Barthelme's death as an excuse to spiral into an essay on his obsession with John Updike (a writer, as Baker points out, that I would NEVER have connected with Baker), who was still alive. The gimmick, and one I quite like, is that Baker deals with the influence of his memories of Updike's lines, and only after the fact does he go back through and find out what the actual phrases are. Often, he is wrong. Often, his are better. The leaky nature of influence is fascinating - there's a sequence in Rilke's "The Notebooks of M.L.B." that I've always been terrified to look up because it's been so influential on my writing - and Baker is, as ever, hilarious. There's a long sequence about coins that's excellent, and the meeting with the man himself toward the end of the essay/book is wonderful. Take this characteristic paragraph. Updike has just ascended a ladder to change storm windows while on camera for a PBS broadcast when "in the midst of this tricky physical act, he tosses down to us some startlingly lucid little felicity, something about 'these small yearly duties which blah blah blah,' and I was stunned to recognize that in Updike we were dealing with a man so naturally verbal that he could write his fucking memoirs ON A LADDER!" There is lots of stuff that good. But two issues: (1) I myself am of two minds on Updike (quite liking the Maples stories; enjoying Rabbit 3 but not so much 1,2, or 4) and so care more about Baker than Updike, which led to occasional boredom (2) the book has an odd obsession with Baker's overcoming homophobia that feels really dated and had me on one occasion flinging the book aside. It is very minor to the plot, but it's irritating.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-12-20 00:00:00 James Bowman What a wonderfully eccentric idea for a book: Nicholson Baker riffing about his obsessive admiration for John Updike. Naturally, I had to read this, because a) I love John Updike's writing (when he's good), and b) I rarely get to discuss him with anyone in real life since no one I know has actually read him. Plus, as an astute Goodreads friend once aptly said to me of Mr. Updike: "he's curdling as we speak". I.e., he's gone out of fashion, and will probably continue to go that way. This is an inevitability for most writers, but it feels like a lot of babies are being flung out with the bathwater these days, and this is one baby I hold dear. Anyway, the idea of Baker's tribute (which was written in 1991 when the big guy was still with us) delights me to no end. I relate particularly when Baker describes his own imagined future devastation on the day he would learn of Updike's death - because it is exactly how I would have felt, had I discovered Updike while he was still alive. The loss brought on by his death would have pierced me as keenly as the death of, say, John Lennon, or later, David Bowie. The artists who simply aren't supposed to die. They're supposed to keep making their art, it's part of what makes the world go around. I suddenly got a glimpse of how disassembled and undirected and simply bereft I would feel if I were to learn suddenly through the Associated Press of Updike's death. All I wanted, all I counted on, was Updike's immortality: his open-ended stream of books, reviews, even poems, and especially responses to pert queries from Mademoiselle and The New York Times Book Review. It amused me to read Baker fantasizing about a friendship with Updike, his dreams of receiving an invitation to play golf with the guy. How they would bond over their shared affliction of psoriasis (though Baker truly overshares about where on his body is affected...). How certain phrases of Updike's have stayed with him through the years (though he often has the wording completely wrong), how they could potentially influence each other's work, for better or worse. Baker also dares to turn the coin and criticizes Updike for using a thesaurus, and for being "mean", both in his fiction and his reviews of other authors. My eyebrows raised, though, when Baker, in full disclosure, admits to having only read a limited number of Updike's novels. I have easily read many more J.U. books than he; what's he doing writing a fan-book about the man? It soon became clear that Updike is a convenient jumping off place for Baker to talk about himself and his own neuroses as a writer. Sometimes it was funny, but more often than not the long sentences and longer paragraphs weren't particularly interesting to me. See, I'm not a superfan of Nicholson Baker's. I don't CARE where he gets his psoriasis, or how he feels about... much at all. I picked this book up because of the "U" in it. So whenever we got too far away from "U", my interest waned. Perhaps if this had been a 1,500 word essay for The Atlantic, as originally intended, I would have enjoyed this thoroughly. But a novel? I give Baker big points for the idea of showing adulation for an influential writer while said writer is still alive - but in the end I needed a little more "U" and a lot less "I". And on that note, I will end on a quote from "U" himself, when being questioned regarding his poetry, some of which was found to be in poor taste, and one of the reasons why I can't help but love him: I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.