- Hardcover: 112 pages
- Publisher: House of Anansi Press; 1st Edition edition (Mar 22 2005)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0887841910
- ISBN-13: 978-0887841910
- Product Dimensions: 20.3 x 14.2 x 1.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 204 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #333,731 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
The rancorous, interminable friendship between a Great Man and his envious, self-pitying biographer drives this cleverly coiled narrative by Canadian author Heti (The Middle Stories). As Heti notes, she has based this slender, first-person work on American George Ticknor's mid-19th-century biography of historian William Hickling Prescott, but the lonely, querulous voice of her invented George is all her own. The book opens as George steps out on a rainy Boston night to answer a rare, longed for invitation to dinner at the illustrious Prescotts of Beacon Street; he and William Prescott were childhood friends. The loss of an eye during a boyhood frolic galvanized William, who resolved to always overcome adversity—and cheerfully so. He has subsequently gained fame and admiration from his historiography and sunny nature. George, by contrast, is poor, morose and covetous. What he does possess is a terrible guilt, never expressed to William, about his possible role in the mishap that changed William's life. Heti's narrative is as deliciously intimate and clue-riddled as a Poe story. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
Ticknor by Sheila Heti (House of Anansi, $19.95, 109 pages, ISBN:0887841910). Here, according to the jacket of this very attractive book, is what it may be about: "George Ticknor has been invited by his oldest friend, William Prescott, to attend a simple dinner party. He is reluctant to go. Prescott's success as a historian, husband, and charming paragon of the Boston social set, sharpens Ticknor's sense of inferiority. Full of distress he sets off into the rain-soaked streets, carrying a pie." I simply found this book unreadable.
Why an author would intentionally set out to make her subject matter impenetrable, baffles me. This novel reminds me of how I tried to read a lesser work by Henry James for a college course. I abandoned it, and happily it wasn't on the exam. Here is an example from the opening sentence of a section: "There was something that you never did that you ought to have done, which is why it has turned out the way it has."
W.P. Kinsella (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
". . .in the hipster category. . . [Ticknor] challenges conventional readings. . . but the reader will find pleasure in surrendering to the experiment, one that reminds you of early Russian novelists and their compulsive attention to states of mind." -- Letters in Canada
Why an author would intentionally set out to make her subject matter impenetrable, baffles me. This novel reminds me of how I tried to read a lesser work by Henry James for a college course. I abandoned it, and happily it wasn't on the exam. Here is an example from the opening sentence of a section: "There was something that you never did that you ought to have done, which is why it has turned out the way it has."
W.P. Kinsella (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
". . .in the hipster category. . . [Ticknor] challenges conventional readings. . . but the reader will find pleasure in surrendering to the experiment, one that reminds you of early Russian novelists and their compulsive attention to states of mind." -- Letters in Canada
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Resentment Breeds Contempt, Aug 9 2006
By Kevin Killian - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Ticknor (Hardcover)
Don't you hate people who are more successful than you are? Especially the ones who pretend they're your friends. George Ticknor, the narrator of Sheils Heti's super new novel, has a problem with his more successful chum, a boyhood pal called William Prescott who has grown into a one-man writing factory, while he, George, has remained a low level journalist and a fulltime milksop, just seething with secret resentments. The relationship between them is not unlike the one Nabokov sketched out in PALE FIRE between John Shade, the Olympian, above it all poet, and his neighbor Charles Kinbote, who comes to believe that the poem Shade spends his last days writing is "secretly" an allegory for Kinbote's own hidden past in Zembla.Heti's novel has its Zemblan aspects, a fleecy, neurosis-ridden prose style used to expose Ticknor's pretensions. That's not to say he isn't sometimes genuinely lyrical. Prescott shares his name and profession with the real-life famous US historian of the American Renaissance period, while George Ticknor was the publisher of Hawthorne, Lowell, many in the same era. Sheila Heti has scrambled pieces of their identities to provide us with an increasingly modern story of guilt and forgiveness, for in her version, something happened way back when in the boyhood of the two main characters, something dark and nasty that resulted in Prescott's losing an eye, like the accident Robert Creeley suffered as a youth, but here there's a definite BAD SEED feeling to it.
Sheila Heti's not so good when describing George's lustful feelings for a woman who probably doesn't even know he's alive. Funny lapse in a writer otherwise so gifted. I just didn't buy that he was attracted to her. It seemed like Heti was trying a) either to humanize her boy or b) to make him more sociopathic and creepy or c) a mixture of both but I doubt any man has ever felt that way about any woman outside of a book so it just felt clunky.
1 of 5 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
Unrewarding, Feb 11 2008
By William Whyte - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Ticknor (Hardcover)
The narrator walks along a Boston street thinking about his friend / rival, who he's going to dinner with. I thought the format of the monologue -- essentially the narrator interviewing himself, switching between "I" and "you" and changing his "I" story in the face of unsympathetic and well-informed questions from the "you" questioner -- had potential, but nothing about the actual content grabbed my interest. I gave up after 33 pages. At least it only cost me 1c...
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