I adore this novel. I am still riding the immediate post-read high, but the consistent return to the question of being or going "underground" is treatI adore this novel. I am still riding the immediate post-read high, but the consistent return to the question of being or going "underground" is treated with a simultaneous delicacy and directness that is haunting. Questions regarding what it means, specifically, to be American, counter-cultural, radical, resistant, alternative, activist, artistic, intelligent echoes throughout this book without ever feeling prescriptive, and she does so by using and perusing the *stuff* that signifies and sustains those cultural categories, the echoes and ephemera between the seventies and nineties, the cacophony and the consequence. The diversity of the novel's characters, the different kinds of activists and idealists, support "Eat the Document" as both archive and discourse. ...more
"Can the imagined gaze of future generations shame us, in Kafka's sense of the word, into remembering?" (251) Into choosing compassion over convenienc"Can the imagined gaze of future generations shame us, in Kafka's sense of the word, into remembering?" (251) Into choosing compassion over convenience, because that choice is possible (in this way, at least) for us?
Like all of JSF's work, this book is something that I desperately wish I could telepathically transmit to everyone that I love--that I could force (if only that force would not also constitute a violence) everyone to read. This book has influenced me wildly during the reading process, and as expected, will surely continue to influence me throughout the rest of my life. Par for the course for JSF, I am inspired especially to live deliberately, cultivate different (better?) stories, and learn to forget and (perhaps more importantly) to remember /differently/. However, with this work of nonfiction, the subsequent action holds a different kind of weight--one that is engaged specifically with /this/ world, with this moment presently occupied....more
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