- Paperback: 192 pages
- Publisher: Granta Books; New edition edition (12 Jan 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1862070970
- ISBN-13: 978-1862070974
- Product Dimensions: 18.8 x 12.8 x 1.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 954,240 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Nicholson Baker has written a book about John Updike. That's not true: he has written a book about John Updike and Nicholson Baker; he has written a book, that is, about "U" and "I". Nicholson Baker is the author of "Vox", "The Mezzanine", "The Fermata", "Room Temperature" and "Thoughts".
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
On August 6, 1989, a Sunday, I lay back as usual with my feet up in a reclining aluminum deck chair padded with blood-dotted pillows in my father-in-law's study in Berkeley (we were house-sitting) and arranged my keyboard, resting on an abridged dictionary, on my lap. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
On August 6, 1989, a Sunday, I lay back as usual with my feet up in a reclining aluminum deck chair padded with blood-dotted pillows in my father-in-law's study in Berkeley (we were house-sitting) and arranged my keyboard, resting on an abridged dictionary, on my lap. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Nicholson Baker has written a book about John Updike, or rather he has written a book about Nicholson Baker writing about John Updike. If anyone is familiar with Baker's novels (specifically 'Mezzanine', 'Room Temperature' and 'Box of Matches') they will know what to expect - a minute dissection of his reasons for liking, and writing about, the author, John Updike. Baker reminiscences about how he discovered Updike and quotes from his work - ostensibly from memory, commenting on how most of the quotes he attributes to Updike are wrong - which are later corrected using '[]' in the text itself.
'U & I' essentially comes across as an internal conversation between Nicholson Baker and Nicholson Baker - where the subject happens to be John Updike. If you enjoy introspective novels and an insight into the working practices of a living author, or are already a fan of Baker, then this book will be of interest.
'U & I' essentially comes across as an internal conversation between Nicholson Baker and Nicholson Baker - where the subject happens to be John Updike. If you enjoy introspective novels and an insight into the working practices of a living author, or are already a fan of Baker, then this book will be of interest.
Format:Paperback
THIS sex-fuelled classic is said to be the book a young and voluptuous Monica Lewinsky gave to Bill Clinton which had the filthy president whipping out his cigar for her entertainment.
Getting a well-deserved re-release, it's about a couple who enjoy erotic chats over the phone, and gets steadily filthier, in a tasteful way.
The Internet has changed the way people do these things but like sex itself, it doesn't matter so long as it's done properly.
Baker does it as well as it can be done, producing a horny masterpiece.
And if there's a better mutual-masturbation scene in literature, I've yet to read it!
Getting a well-deserved re-release, it's about a couple who enjoy erotic chats over the phone, and gets steadily filthier, in a tasteful way.
The Internet has changed the way people do these things but like sex itself, it doesn't matter so long as it's done properly.
Baker does it as well as it can be done, producing a horny masterpiece.
And if there's a better mutual-masturbation scene in literature, I've yet to read it!
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
10 reviews
23 of 26 people found the following review helpful
I'm so glad I wasn't there
28 Oct 2000
Format:Paperback
Nicholson Baker's semi-demented account of his Updike fascination begins from perhaps the slimmest premise a writer ever attempted to build a book upon. He admits that he hasn't even read most, or even half of Updike's work all the way through, and yet he can't help measuring his achievement against Updike's. Which, when you look at the imposing bulk of Updike's work against the handful of slender volumes that is Baker's, seems fair enough, at least if you think quantity is a virtue.
Yet Baker writes so well, not just about the nuances of his quasi-Oedipal relation to Updike, but about Stuff Generally, that we keep reading. When he says that a particularly sarky remark of Samuel Johnson's "merited a shout and a thigh slap", the economy of that phrases reassures us about his own talent; likewise his description of a hamburger as "substantial, tiered, sweet and meaty" makes you want to go out and chow down straight away. This is not only about Updike - although it's very good on Updike - but chiefly about Baker, and his own determination to wring poetry out of the everyday.
Perhaps Baker's real direction, if the manic momentum of "U and I" is anything to go by, is more towards the torrential worry of a Thomas Bernhard than the Olympian repose of an Updike. I only began to read Updike years after I'd read this book, and I find him a bit of a let-down. But Baker has gone on to do some entertaining things with sex, some excellent essays and a kid's book. He has demons far more volatile than Updike's; I think he should let them roam a little more freely.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Anxiety of Influence
22 Sep 2001
Format:Paperback
Baker has a gift for writing very funny pieces about subjects that are usually dry and serious. Nominally about John Updike, U and I is mostly concerned with how young writers are influenced by the "tradition" of past writers. He's anxious, for instance, about "The Anxiety of Influence." Has Harold Bloom covered the same ground already? Baker doesn't know, because he hasn't read Bloom, and now refuses to do so, for fear that the book will "take me over, remove the urgency I feel about what I'm recording here." His vague ideas of Bloom's argument have come second hand. "Book reviews, not books, being the principal engines of change in the history of thought." That doesn't stop him wildly speculating about what Bloom would say, and then sheepishly confessing to some of the books that have directly influenced his own work in progress, such as Exly's A Fan's Notes and Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot.
John Updike, in an interview that appeared in Salon, praised the book himself. "It has done me a favor, that book, because it's a book like few others. It's an act of homage, isn't it? He's a good writer, and he brings to that book all of his curious precision, that strange Bakeresque precision."
26 of 30 people found the following review helpful
The influence of anxiety.
31 Oct 1996
Format:Paperback
Imagine a late-night chat session around a few beers, in
which a good friend who happens to be a writer starts to
tell you about his obsession with John Updike; but the
story is a little too weird to take seriously (your friend
starts off telling you that he has only read a small
percentage of Updike's work) and a little too funny to be
true (your friend's mother gleefully introduces him to
Updike at a book signing); so you, entertained, listen to the whole
story in a state of somewhat suspended disbelief. The story
turns out to be brutally honest, of course, because the
friend turns out to be Nicholson Baker, before his name
became synonymous with anxious, detailed fiction. The
inflated relationship to Updike, sustained hilariously in
his mind like a zeppelin, turns out to be based on a couple
of fan-meets-idol encounters, since the story is about Baker
as a young, unestablished writer; but this doesn't mean that
Baker and Updike aren't (or weren't) linked together by some
fundamental literary bond. This book is Baker's attempt to
examine the roots of that bond, and the results are
delectable, side-splitting, and painfully embarrassing.
Drink a few beers while reading.
which a good friend who happens to be a writer starts to
tell you about his obsession with John Updike; but the
story is a little too weird to take seriously (your friend
starts off telling you that he has only read a small
percentage of Updike's work) and a little too funny to be
true (your friend's mother gleefully introduces him to
Updike at a book signing); so you, entertained, listen to the whole
story in a state of somewhat suspended disbelief. The story
turns out to be brutally honest, of course, because the
friend turns out to be Nicholson Baker, before his name
became synonymous with anxious, detailed fiction. The
inflated relationship to Updike, sustained hilariously in
his mind like a zeppelin, turns out to be based on a couple
of fan-meets-idol encounters, since the story is about Baker
as a young, unestablished writer; but this doesn't mean that
Baker and Updike aren't (or weren't) linked together by some
fundamental literary bond. This book is Baker's attempt to
examine the roots of that bond, and the results are
delectable, side-splitting, and painfully embarrassing.
Drink a few beers while reading.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
