U and I: A True Story -

Nicholson Baker

Vintage

1992

192 páginas

6h 24m

ISBN-10: 0679735755

Nicholson Baker is most famous for Vox, the phone-sex novel Monica Lewinsky gave President Clinton, but the vastly superior U and I contains Baker's own dirty little secret: an obsession with John Updike. Not since Salieri in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus has one man's genius so publicly tormented another. Baker's ambition is a naked thing shivering with sensitivity, like a snail bereft of its shell. Yet his book about himself thinking about Updike is as hilariously self-knowing as it is excruciatingly sincere. And Baker is not mad (not quite). He does have a few things in common with his idol: fiction precociously published in The New Yorker, psoriasis, insomnia, a keen eye for everyday minutiae, and a mischievously felicitous prose style. He is, however, funnier. Hunting for Updike at The Atlantic's 125th anniversary party, he gets brutally snubbed by Miss Manners--U and I is a fine comedy of literary manners--and cheers up when Tim O'Brien chats with him. But when O'Brien mentions that he golfs with Updike, Baker is hurt:

It didn't matter that I hadn't written a book that had won a National Book Award, hadn't written a book of any kind, and didn't know how to golf: still, I felt strongly that Updike should have asked me and not Tim O'Brien.

He justifies this reaction with a remarkably intricate series of associations between his life and Updike's, starting with the major impact a golf joke in an Updike essay once had on him. When Baker reads in the paper that his local cops offer to X-ray kids' candy for razors, he plausibly imagines the droll "Talk of the Town" piece Updike might have spun from the item, glumly noting that Updike's piece would have been better. He even teasingly confesses that U and I constitutes "a little trick-or-treating of my own on Updike's big white front porch." By the time he actually meets his hero (at Rochester's Xerox Auditorium!) in 1981, Baker has transformed him into a character in a Baker story. Quite a trick--and a treat.

In his elegy for Yeats, Auden wrote that a great poet's words are modified in the guts of the living, but Baker proves what really happens: at best we misremember and mangle, shamelessly remaking the master in our own image. --Tim Appelo

Resenhas (1)

5 (Perfeito)

Li sobre este livro em Reality Hunger um tempão atrás e finalmente peguei pra ler, é um dos meus preferidos este ano com certeza.
E se eu te disser que eu li ele quase todo em voz alta? Adoraria ter ouvido um audiobook, ao invés de ter lido, porque do jeito que o Nicholson escreve parece muito que ele está falando com você. Os colchetes são engraçadíssimos, ele desenvolve todo um argumento em cima de algo que ele pensa que o Updike ou outra pessoa escreveu e PÁ: aquela frase nem existe ou ele lembrou errado hahah
Se você começar a ler, chegar na parte do golfe e pensar "poxa, que cara convencido!", espera até o capítulo 6 ou 7 que ele se redime (ou não). Estou muito ansiosa para ler outras coisas do autor, mas estou com um receiozinho de ler algo do Updike, com medo de não gostar. Um dia...!