The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde is an odd book. It was recommended by the woman who will always be a role model to me - Rosianna Halse Rojas. She posted her video on her book clear out and I needed more non-fiction books so I decided to read it.
a photo from Rosianna's instagram and tumblr.
The Gift is an odd mix of literary criticism mixed with psychology. Every chapter is a new idea about giving gifts ranging from your talent to women (yes, I know, we'll get onto that later). The Gift kept my attention despite the fact it was projected to take me six hours to read so in that regard, and the way I rated it, it was good but I did have several criticisms of the book.
The first chapter was all about the movement of gifts between person to person. I read this for half an hour and I still don't get the point he was trying to make. The chapter mainly included examples of Hawaiian tribes and the circulation of gifts and a bunch of Scottish myths. It was never explained how the movement of gifts could help us from day to day and I didn't like that. It should have been made relevant for the reader. There were also no real arguments for why this was important. I felt like I had just read all these examples for nothing.
There was a really weird chapter about woman as gifts and giving away women. Is this because this was written 40 years before I read it? It still felt really, really odd. It felt like it had no real place in the book.
The last two (massive) chapters of the book changed the tune so entirely I looked for the announcement that I had changed books. It went from giving gifts to poetry analysis. Yes, it was about gifts (loosely) but it felt completely irrelevant. It felt like Hyde decided to go "yes, ok I want to write about everything that interests me ever and shove it in a book." I got really bored at these parts as it felt like a historical analysis rather than a language analysis.
After years watching speeches in class I have learned something important which Lewis Hyde has never learned:
never ever ever introduce new points in the conclusion.
Seriously, what was he thinking? I was like, oh great, a summary, but he introduced new points and new myths and I just started to monitor how close I was to the end to the book. I just lost interest.
I've sounded very negative but it did have a really interesting perspective on gift giving (especially as a person who cares a lot about it). It also did keep my attention for the first 66% which is impressive for a humanities non-fiction book.
I gave this three stars.
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