"Richards’s sharpness is surprising coming from a guy whose mind, everyone had to assume, was by now a salvage heap."
— Chiasson, Dan
Author
Date
March 10, 2011
Metaphor
"Richards’s sharpness is surprising coming from a guy whose mind, everyone had to assume, was by now a salvage heap."
Metaphor in Context
Memoir, as a genre that still prizes authenticity over artifice, puts a special pressure on literary style: anything too lyrical or shimmering invalidates the memoirist’s moral claim. The best tone for the job is still Henry Adams’s self-savagery, which allows the reader to restore mentally whatever sympathy for Adams Adams withholds from himself. Richards’s sharpness is surprising coming from a guy whose mind, everyone had to assume, was by now a salvage heap. On stage, he is a prince of apparent mindlessness, deploying a small repertoire of lip curls, grimaces, and crooked smiles. You expect that his memoir would be written in the language-equivalent of those facial expressions, but Richards is and always has been a writer, one of the greatest songwriters in rock history.
(p. 30)
(p. 30)
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Dan Chiasson, "High on the Stones" New York Review of Books March 10, 2011. p. 30. <Link to nybooks.com>
Date of Entry
03/07/2011
