5 posts tagged “aging”

I never had to read this book in high school or college. In fact, I didn't have to read anything by Hemingway in my academic career. I might be the only one...

I picked this one up because pretty much everyone who reads it says they hate it and if I haven't read an author I like to start out with the one people seem to anecdotally hate the most.

Although I have no interest in fishing, I did enjoy this book. I came away learning some things about fishing as well as a few tidbits of wisdom.

And the book was either not as over-the-top macho as I was expecting, or I've become impervious and need to find more girlfriends.

I can't remember the last time I was so gripped by a novel. I loved the way this story was told. There are basically three sections and each section is one day in the storyline. The first part is told from various points-of-view. Sometimes we go forward in the day and sometimes we reverse a bit. The second and third sections are told from the viewpoint of a single, but different, character.

There is so much you could talk about with this book. I am not sure what the main theme is. Crime? Love? Time? One might think from the title that it would be atonement itself?

As a statement about life starting out at one point and ending up somewhere else completely unimagined, it's a wonderful analogy.  We never really know what another person might be thinking or his/her true motives. Even friends. Even family. And there is a certain amount of danger in that. And loneliness.

Slate's audio book club did a review of Philip's Roth's Everyman. One of the commentators said that John Updike had tackled "the same issue" in Villages and had done a better job. The issue was a man who narrates his life as a series of sexual conquests.

I really enjoyed Everyman. It was my first experience with Roth and I found the story rather poignant and haunting. Villages was my first experience with Updike as well. Whereas I was able to sympathize with Roth's protagonist, there was nothing to like about Updike's main character who learns nothing by the end and neither has the reader.

I picked this one up because it was short. Roth is one of those author's that I have on my mental to read list. This was perhaps not the best one to start with, but I did enjoy it enough to want to read some of his other works in the near future.

The book has some themes that I always find fascinating. Can people truly be monogamous? Is it really more satisfying to live an artist's life? Generally, does love keep you safe or help you make mistakes? Is progress connecting us or driving us apart?

At least in this book the answers are mostly negative. The unnamed, main character is dead at the book's opening and then we see his life mainly through his many hospital stays and his relationships with women.

The main character makes many mistakes, alienates those in his life, and doubts himself inwardly. It is interesting to note that his father and brother chose a 9 to 5 lifestyle and were happy all round and physically healthy.

On the flip side, the main character wants to be an artist his whole life. When he retires from advertising he finds that there is little long term pleasure in painting. And he soon feels he has no more inspiration for it. The artist's life is so often romanticized that it was nice to see the "boring" people end up with some happiness, at least this time.

This book would go on my list of top ten books that I did not enjoy.

Perhaps I just did not get this one, but it seemed pretentious at best.

A book with basically one character who sits in place and complains for 156 pages is pretty much torture.

The author wrote the whole book as one long paragraph which only added to the sigh factor.

Sure there were four or five good lines in the book, but there was a lot of suffering otherwise.

Geez, now I'm starting to sound like the man in the book...