Joyce Carol Oates - I'll Take You There

Dust Jacket Blurb

"In those days in the early Sixties we were not women yet but girls. This was, without irony, perceived as our advantage." So begins I'll Take You There, an astonishingly intimate and unsparing self-portrait of a nameless young student who, though gifted with a penetrating intelligence, is drastically inclined to obsession.

Funny, mordant, and compulsive, "Anellia" (as she sometimes calls herself) falls passionately in love with a brilliant yet elusive black philosophy student. But she is tested most severely by a figure out of her past she'd long believed dead.

Pitiless in exposing the follies of the time (the bizarre "sisterhood" of sororities, the self-lacerating extremes of the intellectual life), I'll Take You There is a dramatic revelation of the risks—and curious rewards—of the obsessive personality as well as a testament to the stubborn strength of a certain type of contemporary female intellectual.

Excerpt

beetle The way out. To show the fly the way out of the bottle was the life's hope of Ludwig Wittgenstein but the truth is that human beings don't want a way out of the bottle; we are captivated, enthralled by the interior of the bottle; its glassy sides caress and console us; its glassy sides are the perimeters of our experience and our aspiration; the bottle is our skin, our soul; we’re accustomed to the visual distortions of the glass; we would not wish to see clearly, without the barrier of the glass; we could not breathe a fresher air; we could not survive outside the bottle.

Or tell ourselves, in the glassy-echoing language of the bottle, that this is so.

Awards

New York Times Notable Books of the Year

Notes

Working Title: "The Negro Lover"

Other Editions

book cover

Reviews

Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2002, p. 985
Booklist, August 2002, p. 1886
Publishers Weekly, August 26, 2002, p. 39
Library Journal, September 15, 2002, p. 93
Boston Herald Book Review, October 1, 2002, p. 40
The Bookseller, October 4, 2002, p. 35
Columbus Dispatch, October 13, 2002, Features p 07G
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Cue p. 08E
Entertainment Weekly, October 18, 2002, pp. 120-121
Buffalo News, October 20, 2002, Book Reviews p. G7
New York Times Book Review, October 20, 2002, p. 7
Rocky Mountain News, October 25, 2002, Entertainment p. 26D
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 27, 2002, p. F10
Montreal Gazette, November 2, 2002, p. H1
Daily News (New York), November 3, 2002, Showtime, p. 20
Providence Journal-Bulletin, November 3, 2002, p. K08
Washington Post, November 3, 2002, p. T13
Atlanta Journal and Constitution, November 10, 2002, @Issue, p. 2
United Press International, November 15, 2002
The Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY), December 8, 2002, p. H1
Herald Sun (Melbourne), December 28, 2002, p. W30
The Observer, January 5, 2003, Review, p. 13
The Independent (London), January 6, 2003, Features, p. 10
The Times (London), January 8, 2003, Times2, p. 18
Daily Mail (London), January 10, 2003, p. 56
Daily Telegraph (London), January 11, 2003, p. 5
The Guardian (London), January 11, 2003, p. 27
The Herald (Glasgow), January 11, 2003, p. 12
The Scotsman, January 11, 2003, p. 7
Independent on Sunday (London), January 12, 2003, Features, p. 14
Sunday Telegraph (London), January 12, 2003, p. 13
Sunday Times (London), January 12, 2003, Culture, p. 46
Chattanooga Times, January 19, 2003, p. F6
Time Out, January 22, 2003, p. 61
Financial Times (London), January 25, 2003, Books, p. 4
The Spectator, January 25, 2003, pp. 47-48
Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 26, 2003, p. 3
New Statesman, January 27, 2003
Birmingham Post, February 8, 2003, p. 49

I'll Take You There

by Joyce Carol Oates