Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence

Sitting down to write a book about his hero D. H. Lawrence, Geoff Dyer finds himself compelled to write about anything else. He is in fact compelled to do more or less anything else instead of write. In Sicily he is too preoccupied by his hatred of seafood to follow the great writer’s footsteps; in Mexico he cannot get beyond a drug-induced erotic fantasy on a nudist beach … And yet, incredibly, this attempt to write a ‘sober academic study’ reveals the hold Lawrence and his work still exert on us today. Out of Sheer Rage is a complete one-off, a richly comic study of the combination of bad temper, procrastination and the uncanny power of obliquity.