Pirsig, Robert M. - Pirsig, Robert M. 1928–
Pirsig, Robert M. 1928–
Pirsig, an American, wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values," by Robert M. Pirsig …, is as willfully awkward as its title. It is densely put together. It lurches, with a deliberate shift of its grave ballast, between fiction and philosophic discourse, between a private memoir and the formulaic impersonality of an engineering or trade journal. As it stands, it is a very long book, but report has it, and fault lines indicate, that a much longer text lies behind it…. "Zen and the Art" is awkward both to live with and to write about. It lodges in the mind as few recent novels have, deepening its grip, compelling the landscape into unexpected planes of order and menace.
The narrative thread is deceptively trite. Father and son are on a motorcycle holiday, travelling from Minneapolis toward the Dakotas, then across the mountains, turning...
[The entire page is 3166 words long]
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