About this item
Highlights
- A dazzling journey into the eccentric, troubled, and luminous minds that shaped literature.In this bold, personal, and deeply researched blend of memoir, essay, literary analysis, psychological reflection, and intellectual sleuth story, Montero draws on psychology, neuroscience, creative literature, and the testimonies and biographies of authors and artists to weave a fascinating narrative on the connection between creativity and mental instability.With intelligence, generosity, and narrative élan, Montero brings to life figures such as Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, and Doris Lessing, painting a fresco of the ways in which the brain works, its quirks and dark corners.
- Author(s): Rosa Montero
- 256 Pages
- Biography + Autobiography, Literary Figures
Description
Book Synopsis
A dazzling journey into the eccentric, troubled, and luminous minds that shaped literature.
In this bold, personal, and deeply researched blend of memoir, essay, literary analysis, psychological reflection, and intellectual sleuth story, Montero draws on psychology, neuroscience, creative literature, and the testimonies and biographies of authors and artists to weave a fascinating narrative on the connection between creativity and mental instability.
With intelligence, generosity, and narrative élan, Montero brings to life figures such as Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, and Doris Lessing, painting a fresco of the ways in which the brain works, its quirks and dark corners. She breaks down the forces that influence creativity and miraculously reassembles them before the reader's eyes over three hundred gripping pages.
Like a masterfully plotted detective story, each clue leads readers one step closer to new definitions of both the creative act and of what is and is not "normal." Blending intimate memoir with wide-ranging cultural history, The Danger to Be Sane is a moving and inspirational homage to minds and lives that are outside of the mean.
'Twas a Divine Insanity--
The Danger to be Sane
From Emily Dickinson, Poem 593
Review Quotes
"An incandescent, wise, brilliant book."--Héctor Abad- Faciolince, El Espectador
"One of those books that you want to give away, to lend, to encourage everyone to read. Because writing rescues us, and so does reading."--Claudia Piñeiro, Infobae
"A book that absorbs and grips the reader."--Juan José Millás, El País
"A perfect synthesis and the culmination of the best of Rosa Montero's work [...] one of the literary milestones of 2022."--Manuel Rodríguez Rivero, Babelia, El País
"A book to get people to read books again."--Juan Cruz, El Periódico de España
"A perfect read."--Nadal Suau, El Cultural
"Those of us who have felt strange, awkward, painfully sensitive, extravagant, the riders of an unbridled imagination, enthusiasts with sudden descents into the gloomiest discouragement, will find a mirror and an explanation in this book."--Irene Vallejo
"An enthralling essay where reality and fiction take each other by the hand in perfect conjunction, as if it were a narrative dance."--Inés Martín Rodrigo, ABC
"A documented review of the disorders, psychoses and irrationality that a major part of the population suffers from, and that all those authors that Montero has studied for decades have endured. A full-frontal exploration of her own mental health."--Berna González Harbour, El País Semanal
