Maybe not your cup of tea, but still a great book.
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Covering much ground, there were sections of the book I "learned" to quickly skim through...detailed descriptions of tattoos, descriptions of old Euro-church architecture, etc. Some may love these elaborations; it didn't mean much to me. Irving certainly seemed to enjoy telling us about them. But there was a point to it, I understand-- it was a part of these characters lives.
Without a doubt the book as a whole was intruiging. The story is rich with emotion and love and pain and injustice and struggle and loss and success. Just like life. And throughout every phase of Jack's life, as strange as it was at times, I really wanted everything to work out for him.
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Back to Form for Irving
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I loved this book. Irving's output is prolific and sporadically brilliant. I felt that he had lost his lustre of late, but I really rate this book with his finest work: Owen Meany, Garp and Hotel New Hampshire. It is classic Irving, tragic boy, haunted by his past and his complex love/hate relationship with his mother. The action follows Alice the mother and her quest to locate the boy's father via the tattoo parlours of the world. It's quirky, irreverent, dark and very, very sad, but with that wonderful humane touch that saves his stories from being too terrible to bear. Thankfully there is little wrestling here, Irving's obsession with which spoils many of his other works for me.
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no center
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i got this book when it first came out. i didnt want to read a review. i liked the title and the story, and that was enough. i liked it's length too, something that would hold and absorb my wandering mind. i felt ready for this book. so, after 6oo pages i gave up, bored, feeling dissapointed, and left wondering and waiting for when it would start. now, two years later i can still remember Emma. my favorite and wonderfulfully drawn character. i remember Jakes mum, another wonderful character, and a good few others too. but it is Emma i remember most. as for Jake i gave up not caring. he seemed empty to me and if this was intentional then John Irving was succesful. i thought the book could have dropped him off along the way and forgotten him - the others were far more interesting and real, i liked the father figure very much - mum and dad came off the page for me, but i can remember nothing of jakes internal landscape - his emotions - his psychology, what drove him; his pain was absent, his longing for his dad - i dont know?
so, in the end the story didnt matter, i lost interest in what happend to jake and wether or not he found his dad...
after all this critisism, i will say i thought the writing was beautifull and sustained - it was this that kept me ploughing on; it flowed and carried me through page after page. but even this ran out after 600 of them. its almost as if there is a hole right through the middle. ( maybe this is the point ? )
i have given 3 stars because of the writing.
sorry john
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Scarred for life?
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John Irving has done something unique with 'Until I Find You'; he has stamped a permanent imprint on the reader, as indelible as the tattoos that cover the body of the organist William Burns, father of the novel's protagonist Jack. From here on whenever I see someone with a tattoo, I think I shall at once be transported back to Irving's world of North Sea ports, imposing cathedrals with their mighty organs, colorful tattoo parlors, and a lenghty cast of some of his most eccentric characters. In the book's dedication Irving wishes his own young son a childhood "as different from the one described here as anyone could imagine", and it is not difficult to see how the adventures of young Jack could easily lead to the kind of neurosis he would be dealing with throughout adulthood. At a tender age Jack is schlepped around Europe by his mother for an increasingly unclear purpose. At school he is thrown in alongside sexually rapacious girls and older women intent on the corruption of his innocence. As an adult, Jack is constantly besieged by both sexes drawn to his good looks and celebrity status. It would would take a miracle to come away from this with no emotional scarring, yet with the help of a no-nonsense psychologist, Jack does seem to be able to make some progress. The reader does not actually meet the object of the book's title until the final chapter, so for over 700 pages we anticipate the reunion of Jack and his father. We want to find out for ourselves what kind of person William Burns really is, as Jack's dim remembrances and the second or third hand recollections of numerous acquaintances give us only conflicting impressions of this remarkable man. Despite the somewhat melancholy tone of the narrative and several sad events, Jack's story does not ultimately turn out to be the tragedy one might have predicted. In the end, he shows that he is made of something deeper than just the surface gloss of an appeal that has attracted so many in such superficial ways. Irving has always managed to tell his outrageous tales in an understated, matter-of-fact kind of way, and this is a good thing, for if the writing style was as manic as the material, Irving's work could easily become crazy-making and unreadable. Fortunately, Irving is a master of controlled style, and even when describing the crude and unsavory as he frequently does, his prose remains elegant and restrained. 'Until I Find You' has now joined my short list of Irving favourites, along with 'A Son of the Circus' and 'The Water-Method Man' -- neither of which, interestingly enough, has been made into a film. It wouldn't surprise me if a film attempt was made at this book, but I fear many of its subtleties would go by the wayside in a transfer to that medium. As a novel, however, it was extremely satisfying, and can be placed alongside Irving's best
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Organists, tattoo addiction and unpredicability... why not!
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Loved this book! I read all 900+ pages of it in 3 days and couldn't stop laughing for a week. I think this book is as great as his other classics. I think it helps if you traveled Europe extensively... but really I found it comic, tradgic and surprising all the way through.
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