癲狂院 Vixen Owl Cigar..。o○

Charming Widow...


More Real than Real...
John Irving has a tendency to overcharacterize his novels, which sometimes turns them into little more than amusing character sketches, rather than a coherent work rich with memorable characters.
This is thankfully not the case with "A Widow for One Year ."
From beginning to end, true to form, Irving has imagined a series of interwoven scenes and situations which provoke alternately laughter, disbelief, bemusement, shock, and tears ; unlike his earlier "A Prayer for Owen Meany" and "The World According to Garp," these vignettes come together to express the story of an aching need to adapt to and understand one's place in society against incredible twists of fate.

A few notes on the reading: Once again, a riveting novel by my absolute favorite author.. The characters were more real than those in any of Irving's other novels; I can tell because they do and think the kinds of things I would do and think.. The events of the novel are not so extraordinary, nothing you might not see on the evening news on a bad day......

What makes this novel gr8 is that the characters seemed so real, I thought about them even when I was not reading.
I remembered things from the book as if they were stories a friend had told me, or events I had witnessed myself.
Things don't always happen the way you think they're supposed to - you get disappointed in the characters and in the story - reading this book feels just like a day in the life.

The novel watches the development of Ruth Cole from precocious, adorable "replacement child ," born after the death of her two older brothers, to a grown woman, a gifted writer, learning to be comfortable with her history and her fate.
Ruth's journey is riveting and touching, but more than just sentimental.
Her story engages the reader to the point where the reader's way of thinking about the world has changed as a result of being exposed to Ruth's worldview.
For anyone who John Irving and would like to see his evolution into a better novelist; for anyone who loves to write and read about writers; and for anyone who is sensitive to what it is like to spend one's whole life fighting against a history they had no hand in.

【John Irving】A Widow for One Year
It's Still In Him - and How...
Like many of the loyal John Irving readers, I have been waiting for a novel to match (or even come close to ) the joy and sophistication of a "Prayer for Owen Meany".
Needless to say "A Widow for One Year" does not eclipse Irving's previous masterpiece -- but it comes close.

Without revealing any of Irving's characteristic twists and turns, I will say that the story focuses on a female protagonist, Ruth Cole (a writer and novice squash player ) along with her father (the famous children's book author Ted Cole ).
Ted's strange sexual habits, Ruth's mother's exploits with her husbands young writing assistant, and Ruth's journeys to the Red Light district in Amsterdam to research a novel create a typical Irving patchwork weave of stories, lives, and humor.
We follow the characters through much of their lives, and each page leaves you thinking it can't get any better.
Rest assured it does.

The story unfolds masterfully, and the writing is as good as any I have seen in any of Irving's novels.
You'll be laughing out loud by page two and awe-struck by page four when you learn the significance of the picture hook on the book's cover.
Irving's exploration into a female main character is also a pleasant surprise and is carried out quite successfully.
I felt there was an interesting self-reflexivity in Widow for One Year ; the main character, Ruth, is a novelist who in many ways reminds me of what I know of Irving.
I would never stretch so far as to posit that this novel is any sort of autobiography, but interesting issues of authorship and autobiography are addressed in regard to Ruth's work which I find in some way reflexive of Irving's body of work.
Also interesting to me was the relationship between each author and his or her work.
Ruth, her father Ted, her missing mother Marion, and a family "friend ," Eddie, are all writers.
Each uses interacts with his or her writing in ways which correspond to that character's interaction with other characters (if that makes any sense ).

One last note: the pace of the narrative is directly proportional to the tension of the event that narrative is describing.. What Ruth witnesses (I won't give it away) is rather disturbing, and the scene is more slowly paced, which increases the tension of the scene.....

The ending of the novel is one of Irving's most satisfying yet (minus Owen Meany of course ) and shows the sophistication and development that Irving has undergone through the years.
Although it's title implies a brief span of time, Im confident that Irving fans and novices alike will savor the characters and stories of this book for a long time to come.

Everything is finally wrapped up in the end and I leave thinking that these characters have not developed as adults despite the long time span of the novel.
I continue to try to understand them and their motivations.
Irving has done an excellent job of providing us with a cast to analyze.
In addition he has presented a strong, well-developed female character which is uncommon of male writers. (He does give her very large breasts that she talks about often, but he does develop the character none the less .)


It's Definitely in that Caliber, & Clearly Worth Your Time.