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Summary: disturbing, frustrating, haunting, and at last beautiful
Review: (for comfort)I ran to my Mac and pulled up the customers' reviews on this strange, plaintive, and penetrating work. It was then that it hit me like a boulder... it's a prayer! I finally got it when I read the reactions! From the horror of the singularly most graphic image I've seen in modern literature, the buried clay-soldiers "gasping" for air, "swimming" out of the ancient red clay wall-tombs, to the hasidic prayers acknowledging and giving empathy to our common feelings of helplessness and hope, Dillard's For The Time Being is a long, thoughtul, confused, beseeching and penetrating prayer. Marvelous.
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Summary: Dillard's Newest is Everything "Pilgrim" Couldn't Be
Review: "For the Time Being" is a wise book, a tale told by the mature yet remaining-jubilant Annie Dillard. Ever since I heard she described herself to a reporter recently as a "soccer mom," I wondered where she would take her words next... Mere death and numbers override this work, which takes on the unpretentious tone of a radio DJ, laughing through religion, God, and places. Dillard is unassuming, brief, and aimed at honesty- her mode of self discovery is enlightening to anyone; "do you think I don't know cigarettes are lethal?" Dillard emerges from the woods and into the world in her newest, and we discover her remarkable maintance of her youth; no longer at Tinker Creek, she applies her gained strength through the world she encounters. A beautiful book.
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Summary: Read It for the Poetry, Not the Philosophy
Review: Although in her work as a whole she touches on many questions and issues commonly associated with theology and philosophy, Annie Dillard primarily is a poet, not a theologian or philosopher. In that light, FOR THE TIME BEING works best as a montage of beautiful language and images which dance around and point towards many of the great theological and philosophical questions. Because Dillard clearly hopes readers of her text will themselves be spurred to confront certain Big Questions ("What Does Life Mean?" is one), her prose here can be frustratingly tantalizing: readers want her to tip her hand already! Here, for me, the poetry more than usual lapsed into hardened dogma and doctrine, which is what annoyed me most. That and the obscure references! (Gary Clevidence, for example, is Dillard's second husband, not merely an anthropologist; Justin Kaplan, similarly, is a close friend; etc.)
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Summary: DO NOT attempt to understand this book in one reading!
Review: If I may again add two cents: I suppose it is a sign of our times that we need everything immediately. Witness the arts of the '90s- all whistle but no steam, flashy videos but no meaning. If you bring that kind of understanding to this book, you will be very frustrated, as many reviewers seem to be. No, the beauty and depth of this book can only grow on you with time spent. This is a book to spend a year with, not just an afternoon. A book to read and savor and reflect upon. Slowly. Take your time. For The Time Being can be taken literally as that- take the time with this book and you will be richly rewarded, and you will understand. There really are no wasted words, no haphazard sentences. Only a series of wonders waiting to be opened.
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Summary: ERROR
Review: I regret my former "review", and have actually lost a little sleep over it. I certainly am not in a position to criticize such an extraordinary work by calling the great house of Knopf to task. Annie Dillard's book is a five star book, absolutely. A click of the mouse and my miserable ruminations were launched. Please delete "With Apologies To All Concerned."
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Summary: With apologies to all concerned
Review: I've read that when Einstein was at Princeton, a graduate student had to follow him around to be sure he tended to details in the real world. The student picked up things Einstein dropped, made sure he paid and/or got his change from the cashier in the cafeteria, etc.Knopf needs to hire someone to tend to Annie Dillard. She is surely a genius, one of the Illuminati of our Age, but she is badly in need of an editor who will see that she tends to the details. FOR THE TIME BEING is an homage to Teillard, yes, full of many swell observations, facts, and well-turned phrases. But I am sure there is much in the book that makes Annie Dillard wince when she looks it over, if she ever does. There are disjointed, useless passages everywhere: did a sleepy editor stick in notes a child made in the margin? Who did the proofreading? Was "The Author's Note" really necessary? It seems more like a book proposal thrown in haphazardly. Makin' Whoopee? Was an editor intimidated by Dillard's greatness, and lose sight of the fact that the author is also the busy mother of a teenager who just might need some help pulling in the reins? I smoke sometimes, and I know it's fatal. But I don't want Annie Dillard to identify so much with Teillard that she thinks she can smoke too. I don't want her to squander even a few moments of potential time. Because I am glad to be on earth at the same time she is here writing, and I am waiting until she sloughs off her debts and servitude to the other great thinkers who have inhabited this sphere, and emanates more of her own pure wisdom and humor, garnered through these years.
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Summary: Definitely Pulitzer Prize material.
Review: We find in this work the same author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek older and wiser. The depth of thought and emotion here goes beyond what she's already published, a natural extension of a pure writer's life.
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Summary: The Mother of All Disappointments
Review: As a longtime fan of Dillard's (especially Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) I had high expectations for this book. Unfortunately, it doesn't come anywhere near the eloquence of Pilgrim. Reading like a sketchbook rather than a developed work, it's essentially a collection of quotes. Now, some of these quotes are quite interesting and made me want to go to the source. But, maddeningly, nothing is footnoted. Worse, at least one source (the last line of Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Filling Station") is misquoted. How can an author who supposedly loves language (and loves it enough to use "quondam" when a simpler word would do) get the last line of one of Bishop's best-known poems wrong? And if this--so easily checked by the author herself or an editor--is wrong, what about all the other non-referenced quotes? I could see some of these brief passages on clouds, birth, numberlessness working as a meditative montage on film, but in written form they fail, fail utterly, primarily because the author herself adds so very little.
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Summary: elegant. challenging. intriguing.
Review: It seems that some people are disappointed that Ms. Dillard only asked questions, and provided no answers. I'd reply that if you read this book looking for answers, stop now. Instead, read this book for the questions it asks. For the exasperation it reveals in these questions. For an elegantly poetic phrasing of the questions that plague us. I recently dealt with the death of a friend's parent, someone I didn't know but an event that shook me harder that I realized. I found Ms. Dillard words a balm on my confusion. Yes, she seems to say, this stuff is nutty. This stuff doesn't make sense. Thank you, Ms. Dillard. Excellent work.
Rating:
Summary: It asks questions I don't have the courage to ask.
Review: The amazing capacity of Annie Dillard to bind together the seen and the unseen.. Wonderful sections, such as the one on Solutrean knives ("the size and thickness of a fillet of sole") and the most beautiful description of an encounter with the holy I've ever read. (And what happens to those who feel it.) Also very funny. Highly recommended.
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