Download Your Copy My Fathers Tears: And Other Stories Compiled And Edited By John Updike Produced In EPub
read this for a book group, It's not a book I would've chosen on my own, I thought it got off to a good start with the first story but subsequent stories seemed to be too much of the same settings and themes over and over.
Onlyboy children, raised during/after the Depression, by parents and grandparents, infidelity in thes, sometimes divorce, distance from their children, It was kind of boring although the guy is great at descriptive writing, You can picture everything but after a while you just don't care to, I have not read Updike before but this collection seems a rather transparent recollection of his own short stories, Here is a reminiscence of travel, of how ambivalent families and places can make one feels, of loves come and go, of id and ego in battles, of how memories can be grand and insignificant all the same.
Here and there, as it is unavoidable of a recollection, you sniff a what if, And how comforting for the soul that the mind can offer such an alternative, Invecchiando, migliora
L'Updike dei primo romanzi, divertiti e sarcastici è maturato in questa ultima raccolta e propone due o tre racconti molto belli.
Epurati. Come se, invecchiando, Updike si fosse accorto che non aveva dato l'essenziale, Qui, in alcune pagine, va al cuore della sua vita, Pochi elementi, alcune figure sempre le stesse: il padre, la madre, un matrimonio che muore, un bambino che lo percepisce si stagliano, limpide, in racconti liberati dagli ornamenti superflui.
Published injust a few months after John Updike's death at age, this collection ofshort stories is a magnificent look at the world past and present.
The keen observationsfrom the quotidian details of life during the Great Depression to doomed love affairsare what make these stories of faith, infidelity, and the small choices we make in everyday life so resonant and powerful.
Some of my favorites:
"The Walk with Elizanne": The high school class ofis holding itsth reunion in, and David Kern encounters his first girlfriendbut doesn't immediately recognize her.
Then all the thoughts! All the memories!
"Varieties of Religious Experience": This is the story of/told through the viewpoints of a New York City survivor, someone trapped high in the World Trade Center, two of the hijackers, and passengers on one of the doomed flights, but they are all wrapped up in one man's loss of faith because God let it happen.
"Delicate Wives": The story of a couple
who had an illicit affair, break it off, and then reunite years later.
"Kinderszenen": Life during the Great Depression as told through the viewpoint of a little boy, an only child living with his parents and grandparents in an old house that may have a ghost or two.
Beautifully written with distinct characters, but sometimes overlapping settings, this masterful collection is one to be savored, It is storytelling at its finest,
This is by far the weakest of the Updike books I have read, The themes are familiar: memories of youth, aging lust, infidelity, late second marriages, guilt over the collapse of the first long marriage that begat children, death and insignificance.
Updike seemed to be eternally atoning for the breakup of his first marriage as he neared the end of his days, as evinced in this posthumously published collection.
Except for the/piece “Varieties of Religious Experience,” which is narrated from the points of view of the victim, the perpetrator, and the bystander left with the legacy, none of the stories are powerful enough to engage.
A footnote on the/piece: Updike did a more thorough examination of this theme in his novel Terrorist, which I enjoyed, The stories set in Spain and India, and outside the familiar USEast Coast milieu, fail to excite as they are focused on the internal quest of the narrator and are not integrated with the exotic locales.
The opening story set in Morocco and written back in, makes such an effort at integration, but ends up reading more like a travelogue.
The normally fluid writing of Updike seems to have developed a different rhythm, and I had to reread some of the longer sentences to fall back into the flow.
It appeared to me on concluding this book, that this collection of stories had been assembled to reflect the last days of the great author, what he was preoccupied with at the time, what he regretted not having accomplished, and what he had witnessed during his career.
Its a pity that the normally punchy prose had given way to a languid musing, with a reluctance to excite the senses lest that be too much for the fragile health of the aging author.
It was as if the tired “Rabbit” Angstrom had finally returned home to his hutch, to rest, after bopping vigorously around the neighborhood for a very long time.
“Drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned, ” Thats how John Updike describes one of his elderly protagonists in this, his final collection of short stories, He might have been writing about himself, In My Fathers Tears, the author revisits his signature characters, places, and themesAmericans in suburbs, cities, and small towns grappling with faith and infidelityin a gallery of portraits of his aging generation, men and women for whom making peace with the past is now paramount.
The Seattle Times called My Fathers Tears “a haunting collection” that “echoes the melancholy of Chekhov, the romanticism of Wordsworth and the mournful spirit of Yeats.
” Most of these I must have read in The New Yorker originally, but the only one I recalled is "The Guardians," which still stands out as pretty much the bestabsolutely mindblowing.
"The Apparition," which takes place among American tourists in India, is also superb, and the last line is like a punch in the stomach.
Both, like most of these stories, deal with the connection between sex and death in the male brain/mind/Weltanschauung, which is also as I take it the underlying theme of all Updike's work.
My only complaint about this volumeaside from the fact that it is his last book, which is not Updike's fault, of courseconcerns "Varieties of Religious Experience," his story about/, which bounces back and forth among the spiritual points of view of various people on that day, including one of the terrorists, fortifying himself with drinks in a strip club a grandfather witnessing it from his daughter's apartment building rooftop which was where Updike himself watched it a WTC office worker trapped in one of the floors above the impact point of the first tower and an elderly woman aboard the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.
In my opinion, when he wrote this the events themselves were too raw, and he didn't get the tone right at all.
I suppose one day I'll read hisnovel Terrorist, but not anytime soon I don't think, Still highly recommended. Eventually Updike will get the recognition he deserves, asthcentury American fiction's finest prose stylist, and one whose writings, even in their mundanest moments, always slam straight into the heart of the most important metaphysical questions.
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