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the complete review - non-fiction

Grammars of Creation

by
George Steiner

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

A- : interesting, well-presented considerations of beginnings and their end

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  On the whole fairly enthusiastic and impressed, though lots of snickering about Steiner's showy erudition and style. And a wide variety of opinions (lots of confusion ?) concerning what the book is actually about.

  From the Reviews:

• "(H)is mode is apocalyptic, as it has been ever since the beginning of his career, and his intention is total. One sign of this is his perpetual wish to expand the already gigantic range of his references, even if it takes him inadvertently over the border of his competence. (...) But the greater price of his desire to unite all the knowledge within his reach -- to turn every mathy into polymathy -- is an inordinate juggling with generality in his prose." - Francis Spufford, Evening Standard
  
  
• "Zumindest gefährdet sind heute Gedächtnis und Erinnerung, Einsamkeit, Stille und Privatheit, der wirkende Zufall und jetzt auch -- das ist George Steiners Thema -- die Idee der Schöpfung und der Kreativität. Sie wird ersetzt durch bloßes Erfinden und Entdecken, wobei die Vorstellung der Kosmogonie ebenso unter Druck gerät wie ihr Analogon, die schöpferische Phantasie des Künstlers." - Wolfgang Frühwald, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "(A) study that is philosophical in conception, yet deeply humane too. (...) An astonishing wealth of ideas has been compressed within the compass of this book. However, significant omissions and blind spots remain. (...) Overall, however, this is a mesmerising book that demands and amply repays the closest attention. (...) Grammars of Creation is a sustained outpouring of strenuous thinking, but it is expressed in prose that is unfailingly apt, luminous and evocative. From its earliest propositions." - Roy Porter, The Guardian
  
  
• "Steiner has always been an exciting and provocative writer, but he is also a master of English prose. (...) In passages such as these, criticism spills over into the heady realm of art." - John Banville, The Irish Times
  
  
• "In many cases, it is more stimulating and rewarding simply to follow him down one or another of these fascinating byways than to stand back and consider the thrust of the book's main argument." - Merle Rubin, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "Grammars of Creation has no argument as such. It is a series of intellectual arabesques around the theme of creation. (...) The most successful parts of Grammars of Creation examine the struggle of individual poets and novelists -- Paul Celan, in particular -- against the constraints of language. It is in these passages that Steiner's talent for tactful and imaginative close reading comes alive. Less appealing is the aesthetic theory that underlies the particular interpretations." - Edward Skidelsky, New Statesman
  
  
• "Grammars of Creation is full of disquieting questions." - Roger Kimball, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "(I)n Grammars of Creation, he has come out as the remarkable grammarian that he is, to write a kind of summa of his work (.....) He is, as ever, grandly erudite and thrilled by crisis. (...) It's impossible not to argue with Steiner, partly because with every turn of phrase he wants to impress something upon us. But he can make us feel that reading is a kind of privilege, which is itself strange now." - Adam Phillips, The Observer
  
  
• "One reads Steiner not for his pessimism, though, but for the many sharp insights and speculations that fill all of his books. There is no shortage of them, across a needlessly intimidating range of allusions, in Grammars of Creation." - Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle
  
  
• "Steiner's travel sketches of the Web are as brilliantly suggestive and tantalising as everything else in this dazzling tour de force but, ultimately, as unsatisfying. (...) It is hard not to smile at the murine output of so mountainous a parturition." - Hugh Lawson-Tancred, The Spectator
  
  
• "Indeed, reading the first three and a half chapters often feels like being lost in a pathless thicket. There are occasional glimpses of something vivid (.....) But there is no sense of where we are going. (...) The book seems to have ground to a halt when suddenly, in the middle of the penultimate chapter, the prose style changes abruptly and becomes crystal-clear; because finally Steiner has something new and powerful to say." - Humphrey Carpenter, The Sunday Times
  
  
• "This book about beginnings is, in fact, a threnody upon endings; it records the passing of the Enlightenment and the extinction of human hopes. (...) Steiner is a passionate writer who turns vast theoretical concepts into prose poetry as if he were engaged in the ancient pursuit of uniting truth with beauty. He moves swiftly from argument to argument in a conceptual glissade, throwing out references and allusions like the gold of a spendthrift. (...) This is not an easy book, not by any means, but it always a suggestive one." - Peter Ackroyd, The Times
  
  
• "Now, in Grammars of Creation (...) he outstrips all previous enterprises in scope and suggestion. The work is Steiner Agonistes, a full out grappling with history, theology, and the import of the long-prophesied triumph of the technological. (...) Grammars of Creation is a searching and dispiriting book, exhilarating in its local instances, but somewhat exhausting in the steady bullying of its references." - Sven Birkerts, The Washington Post
  
  
• "Jenseits der Philologie wird der begnadete Leser Steiner recht unpräzis. Sein humanistischer Soupçon wider jede naturwissenschaftliche Kultur geht so weit, dass er das wichtigste moderne Dokument einer poetisch kohärenten Grammatik der Schöpfung nicht einmal zur Kenntnis nimmt: Edgar Allen Poes "Prosagedicht" Heureka (1848)." - Otto Kallscheuer, Die Zeit

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       "We have no more beginnings", George Steiner begins his book. It is an observation and a lament, and it is the focus of Grammars of Creation. Steiner looks to beginnings and he reflects on how and why we have lost them in this age where "the reflexes, the turns of perception, are those of afternoon, of twilight". So should readers expect yet another outpouring of millennial Angst or the ravings of man who perhaps is beginning to face his own mortality ? Not quite -- it is George Steiner, after all. Grammars of Creation is a broad examination of beginnings and ends, of past and possible future, and especially of art, the consummate human achievement.
       Steiner acknowledges that "there have been previous senses of ending and fascination with sundown in Western culture", but he believes we have reached a much more far-reaching one now: "a core-tiredness." He sees a fundamental, pervasive shift, comparing it to previous states (when there were still beginnings) and considering some of the manifestations and possible consequences.
       The almost unthinkable horrors of the 20th century leave a terrible legacy. Steiner suggests that:

The twentieth century has put in doubt the theological, the philosophical, and the political-material insurance for hope. It queries the rationale and credibility of future tenses.

Language is immeasurably saturated. Words, grammatical forms, phrases, rhetorical conventions are saturated, nearly to the level of the phoneme, by usage, by precedent, by cultural-social connotation.

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Links:

• Yale University Press publicity page
• Faber publicity page
• Gallimard publicity page
• Excerpt
• The Gifford Lectures

• Deutschlandfunk (German)
• First Things
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (German)
• The Guardian (1)
• The Guardian (2)
• Letras Libres (Spanish)
• New Statesman
• The New York Times Book Review
• Port
• Publishers Weekly
• The Observer
• San Francisco Chronicle
• The Spectator

• George Steiner at the British Council
• Q & A in The Paris Review

• Errata
• Lessons of the Masters
• A Long Saturday
• My Unwritten Books
• No Passion Spent

• See Index of Literary Essays

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About the Author:

       George Steiner, born in 1929, is one of the foremost intellectuals of our time. A professor at Cambridge and Geneva, he is the author of numerous books.

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© 2001-2017 the complete review

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