Tor Seidler was a 1997 National
Book Awards Finalist for Young People's Literature for
Mean Margaret .
The
book that made the biggest impact on me was unquestionably
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I first
read it as a sophomore at Stanford-in-Italy, on a train
between Florence and Rome. The umbrella pines and medieval
hilltop towns out the window might as well not have
existed. It didn't seem like a book, this dog-eared
paperback in my hands, it seemed like life itself. Though
written in the third person, it led me into the protagonist
as no first-person narrative ever had. There were certainly
moments of authorial distance, of seeing Stephen Dedalus
in an ironic light, yet every word seemed super-saturated
with his consciousness. I wasn't Catholic, or Irish,
or the son of a spendthrift, but after my sixth and
seventh reading of Joyce's Bildungsroman I might as
well have been.
I haven't gone back to it in
years, and at this point probably wouldn't even count
it among my favorite novels. But its effect on me was
more powerful that War and Peace or Pride and Prejudice
or any other book. It basically knocked my legs out
from under me, leaving me on my knees at the altar of
the written word.
Tor
Seidler
