My personal response echoes these uncertain considerations: the first is more noticeably marginal in explaining my overall experience the second is deeper. It is later in the story simply inevitable.īut this concern with upbeat tags is in many ways peripheral because we understand such paradoxes and ironies are the substance of engaging with great literature. There are moments of minor triumph that do prompt the latter, though this is a relative response, and the utterly transient nature of any happiness or ‘joy’ is despairing, certainly at first. Terms like ‘entertaining’ and ‘joy’ do not readily equate with the emotional experience of reading Stoner. I say ‘enjoyed’ as one does, but it is an ironic observation about texts like these and Stoner, and I have used the expression automatically but also because of this singular exchange from John Williams which was made in a 1985 interview with Brian Wooley who asked himĪnd literature is written to be entertaining?Ībsolutely. There are clearly thousands and thousands of other lasting examples. I have read and enjoyed novels of greater tragedy, thinking immediately of quite different examples like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage – sticking in my mind as being powerfully affecting, though both read in my youth – and there are many more that I have read then and obviously as an adult when I could increasingly relate to the human experience reflected. … democratic in how it breaks the heart… – Colum McCannĪ brilliant, beautiful, inexorably sad, wise and elegant novel – Nick Hornby I initially struggled with the pervasive sadness and darkening tone, the latter a relentless characteristic of the narrative whilst the theme of a personal pathos was one that other writers have championed as its paradoxically ‘beautiful’ appeal, expressed as such on the back cover blurb of my Vintage Classics edition:Ī terrific novel of echoing sadness – Julien Barnes
Reading John Williams’ Stoner has been an emotional experience.
0 kommentar(er)
