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Joe Gould's Teeth (2016)

av Jill Lepore

MedlemmarRecensionerPopularitetGenomsnittligt betygOmnämnanden
22810117,174 (3.55)19
From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the long-lost, longest book ever written, a century-old manuscript called "The Oral History of Our Time." Joe Gould, a madman, believed he was the most brilliant historian of the twentieth century. So did some of his friends, a group of modernist writers and artists that included E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, and Ezra Pound. Gould began his life's work before the First World War, announcing that he intended to write down nearly everything anyone ever said to him. "I am trying to preserve as much detail as I can about the normal life of every day people," he explained, because "as a rule, history does not deal with such small fry." By 1942, when The New Yorker published a profile of Gould written by the reporter Joseph Mitchell, Gould's manuscript had grown to more than nine million words. But when Gould died in 1957, in a mental hospital, the manuscript was nowhere to be found. Then, in 1964, in "Joe Gould's Secret," a second profile, Mitchell claimed that "The Oral History of Our Time" had been, all along, merely a figment of Gould's imagination. Lepore, unpersuaded, decided to find out.   Joe Gould's Teeth is a Poe-like tale of detection, madness, and invention. Digging through archives all over the country, Lepore unearthed evidence that "The Oral History of Our Time" did in fact once exist. Relying on letters, scraps, and Gould's own diaries and notebooks--including volumes of his lost manuscript--Lepore argues that Joe Gould's real secret had to do with sex and the color line, with modernists' relationship to the Harlem Renaissance, and, above all, with Gould's terrifying obsession with the African American sculptor Augusta Savage. In ways that even Gould himself could not have imagined, what Gould wrote down really is a history of our time: unsettling and ferocious.… (mer)
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It's been a while since I finished a book in one sitting, but this absorbing biography of a once famous loser is shocking at times, and at other times it seems to be on the verge of going off the rails. Jill Lepore is a masterful writer whose prose is lean and purposeful, and even her brief asides about her fears and doubts as a researcher are always in support of the story. ("The past is what's written down. It is very quiet; only people who can write make any sound at all." ) The paradoxes pile up thick and fast, and the cast of characters is full of familiar names from literature class, but the most astonishing character is a woman you never heard of, but should have, if the world were a better place. ( )
1 rösta Muscogulus | Nov 4, 2021 |
I picked this up somewhat randomly at a random bookstore in Oregon during a recent visit. The cover captured my attention, and I recognized Lepore's name, as she wrote a book about Wonder Woman that I purchased as a gift a few years ago (I've always meant to read that one but have never gotten around to it). The jacket copy made it seem compelling -- here was this bizarre Modern-literature-adjacent figure I had never heard of, though I'm pretty familiar with that period in English literature. And the book started off fascinatingly enough. But the deeper I got into it, the less satisfying it was. It was fine. It was a short read that cost me very little effort to get through. It just never really had a payoff. Maybe that's by design (minor spoilers ahead), given the lack of a satisfying payoff for the snipe hunt Lepore went on when writing the book. Maybe the book is mimetic of her experience hunting for the Gould manuscript. Even if there's such cleverness at play, it was ultimately only so satisfying to me. I liked the book well enough. I didn't like it a lot. I'm glad to've learned about Gould, at any rate (though glad never to've had to meet him!). ( )
  dllh | Jan 6, 2021 |
Joe Gould's Teeth was first published, in whole or in part, in the New Yorker, and that seems very fitting. The book feels a bit like the magazine -as embodied in Jill Lepore- is trying to make right on its two famous Joseph Mitchell profiles of Gould from 194x and 196x, "Professor Sea Gull" and "Joe Gould's Secret". Indeed, if you're going to read this book I'd strongly recommend reading those essays first or the entire fuss over the man will be kind of nonsensical.

While Gould was profiled in various magazine articles, Lepore considers these two to be seminal, and depicts them as kind of making Joe Gould's national reputation. That may well be true, but I can't say I enjoyed them as much as Lepore does. Mitchell's depictions of Gould are well written, but he comes off as an alcoholic with mental problems in both of them. In the second, where Mitchell depicts Gould as a a bit of a con artist, that seems pretty explicit in the text. In the former, where Mitchell depicts Gould as whimsical, it's a bit harder to tell if the tics that Mitchell describes only come off as obviously grotesque in the present - that they would have been seen as charming in the moment. Regardless, it’s strange to think of Gould as being perceived as any kind of romantic figure by anyone, and not some sort of bum on the make.

So given that baseline of my not being sure why Gould was considered a notable figure in the first place, I'd say that this is a pretty interesting dive by Lepore into how this madman was treated as a notable member of the Greenwich Village art community / how the con was lived, and how he hounded a talented sculptor who seems to have been less noticed in those particular circles because of her race and gender. It's an interesting little capstone and a reminder to see what's in front of your face. On the whole, though, this is a kind of small book about a small figure, and it seems primarily worth reading if you're interested in Gould already. If you have no idea who Joe Gould is, there's no reason you should bother finding out.
1 rösta Going_To_Maine | Dec 16, 2020 |
Quite the curious little story. I bought the book because I recognized the author's name as one to trust. But I knew nothing about the book.

Joe Gould was something of a hobo when he came to the attention of Joseph Mitchell. Mitchell was a writer for the New Yorker, specializing in profiles of everyday New Yorkers. I am sure that I started to read some of them when I was young. I liked the cartoons in the New Yorker and I liked to read, so I tried reading some of these rambling stories. I couldn't stick with them, in part perhaps because I was too young to appreciate the tidbits that created a sense of New York. Even later, when I acquired Up in the Old Hotel, a collection of Mitchell's essays, I found it hard going. I have read about half of that tome, including the profile of Joe Gould written in 1942.

Joe Gould was an obsessive writer. He was writing what he called An Oral History of Our Time. He was recording every conversation he had with anyone he met on the street, using a stream of notebooks. He intended this history to be the best and longest written, ever.

However, he told different stories to different people about this work, and ultimately Mitchell came to believe that the history did not exist. LePore wondered, though, and wrote this little book about her search for the truth. Did it or didn't it exist?

It's a cool, simply-written story about Gould and about her search. A historian herself, she knew how to do the research, which she discovered Mitchell did not. The story is by parts funny and tragic. Come along and get to know Joe. It's the least we can do. ( )
1 rösta slojudy | Sep 8, 2020 |
I enjoyed this foray into the great mysterious morass of Joe Gould's story and its various incarnations, though I found at times that Lepore didn't follow research leads I expected she would, leaving a lot of stones unturned. I think she gets, though, at the essential bits of Gould's very sad life (and how his clear mental illness manifested in some deeply troubling ways). ( )
1 rösta JBD1 | Oct 17, 2018 |
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The History of a nation is not in parliaments and battle-fields, but in what people say to each other on fair-days and high days, and in how they farm, and quarrel, and go on pilgrimage. - W.B. Yeats
What am I always listening for in Harlem? - Elizabeth Alexander
little joe gould has lost his teeth and doesn't know where to find them - E.E. Cummings
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To AA with love.
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For a long time, Joe Gould thought he was going blind.
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From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the long-lost, longest book ever written, a century-old manuscript called "The Oral History of Our Time." Joe Gould, a madman, believed he was the most brilliant historian of the twentieth century. So did some of his friends, a group of modernist writers and artists that included E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, and Ezra Pound. Gould began his life's work before the First World War, announcing that he intended to write down nearly everything anyone ever said to him. "I am trying to preserve as much detail as I can about the normal life of every day people," he explained, because "as a rule, history does not deal with such small fry." By 1942, when The New Yorker published a profile of Gould written by the reporter Joseph Mitchell, Gould's manuscript had grown to more than nine million words. But when Gould died in 1957, in a mental hospital, the manuscript was nowhere to be found. Then, in 1964, in "Joe Gould's Secret," a second profile, Mitchell claimed that "The Oral History of Our Time" had been, all along, merely a figment of Gould's imagination. Lepore, unpersuaded, decided to find out.   Joe Gould's Teeth is a Poe-like tale of detection, madness, and invention. Digging through archives all over the country, Lepore unearthed evidence that "The Oral History of Our Time" did in fact once exist. Relying on letters, scraps, and Gould's own diaries and notebooks--including volumes of his lost manuscript--Lepore argues that Joe Gould's real secret had to do with sex and the color line, with modernists' relationship to the Harlem Renaissance, and, above all, with Gould's terrifying obsession with the African American sculptor Augusta Savage. In ways that even Gould himself could not have imagined, what Gould wrote down really is a history of our time: unsettling and ferocious.

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