Or with fear and degradation, Jack Burns would one day conclude, because this same older girl suddenly looked away. However, there was still enough warmth in the early-fall air to hold their scent, which Jack reluctantly inhaled and confused with perfume. With most of the girls at St. Not even by the time he left grade four. Some fallen leaves were all that remained in motion on the quiet street corner.
She knew the North Sea cities where he was most likely to be hiding from them; together they would hunt him down and confront him with his abandoned responsibilities. Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. Great book, Until I Find You pdf is enough to raise the goose bumps alone. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:. It's not that his shadow doesn't hang over Jack, however. Lots of people -- especially women and girls -- remember William, and expect the boy to follow in his father's footsteps.
As one girl explains to the young schoolboy "You're going to be like your dad -- we're all counting on it. What he does know -- dad hurt his mom by leaving her, dad likes to jump from woman to woman, organ to organ, and place to place, and dad is getting most of his body covered with tattoos -- probably doesn't make him seem someone to emulate.
But Jack doesn't worry about it too much nor actually does Irving: beyond the woman-bedding aspect, Jack as mini-William with all that entails isn't really fully explored -- and life, especially at his elementary school, where he's one of the few boys, offers mysteries enough.
From day one at St. Hilda's Jack comes under the protective if not always comfortingly so influence of Emma Oastler, a sixth grade girl when he starts kindergarten.
Pretty-boy Jack will always attract the ladies -- especially the older ones -- but Emma becomes a rare close and lifelong friend, and while she introduces him to many of the ways of the world and keeps a disturbingly watchful eye -- and hand -- on his penis as he matures , their intimacy is of a different sort. Sex, however, is a big deal, and Jack is introduced to intercourse at a very tender age -- taken advantage of by an older woman before he's really hit puberty. Emma can't exactly set that right, but she does effectively end the abuse.
The formative experience nevertheless leaves Jack with a hankering for the old ladies -- a few years older than him, at least though he sleeps around with girls his own age too : "The older woman thing Emma, his obvious companion, unfortunately comes with baggage of her own, preventing them from consummating their relationship.
From a young age Jack acts -- generally playing female roles in the school plays he's so pretty that he can get away with it.
He grows up to become an actor, too, and continues to play quite a few female and transvestite roles even when he's all grown he's even a Bond girl in one movie, "the one who was killed by a poisonous dart from a cigarette lighter when deduced Jack was a guy" , but it seems more happenstance i. At some point Emma insists: "Jack Burns is a writer, not an actor; he just doesn't know it yet", but there's scant evidence for that, then or later.
Jack stays a successful actor -- with an Oscar-winning screenwriting-detour courtesy of Emma -- but acting doesn't really seem central to his life either. Funny old thing: memory. View all 3 comments. Jul 16, Josh Cutting rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: musicans, tattoo freaks, or any son of split parents. First of all, this book has totally sold me on John Irving.
I read "A Prayer for Owen Meany", and had the hardest time getting into it. I really liked about the last hundred pages, but getting there was a chore, to be quite honest.
But this book, this book had me from the first line to the last. And it is directly because of all of the personal parallels. You have the musician I'm a musician, a pianist actually you have the tattoo addiction 4 of my own at last count, the last one being a true test of iron will, but it is freakin SWEET!
The single boy and his single mother, father estrangement, the feeling of a rudderless life, everything. And at the end, when Jack has discovered certain key people of his life if you've read, you know what I mean, if not, go read!
I was a puddle! This was the polar opposite of my experience with "Suttree". That novel was a cold masterpiece that at the end had me feeling academic but cold. This one chimed every emotional cord or chord in me. Oct 10, Chrissie rated it really liked it. Sep 29, Kristin Myrtle rated it it was amazing Shelves: i-own-it , reviewed , favorites. I have read many many many John Irving books and this one is unequivocally my favorite.
It's also the John Irving book that seems to incite the most vitriol. And I don't know why. It's a simple story about a man, a man searching for his father, and searching for himself. It's a road novel, back and forth and back and forth over Europe and America the mother and son characters move.
It's also about the history of tattoos and you get to learn all the nifty language and parlance and colloquialisms I have read many many many John Irving books and this one is unequivocally my favorite. It's also about the history of tattoos and you get to learn all the nifty language and parlance and colloquialisms of a fasciating sub-culture.
But most of all it is about how our memories decieve us, they lie to us. And how our parents lie to us and decieve us. And how when we're young, when you're innocent and green and wide-eyed and naive you aren't aware of the wierdness that surrounds you.
That surrounds your parents. You think it's normal. This huge sprawling novel reminds me of one line from Alan Moore's Lost Girls. Nov 09, Nathan rated it really liked it Recommends it for: Irving veterans. I have read 10 of John Irving's books: his first 9, and this one. Clearly, he does something that I keep going back for. Maybe it's no coincidence that I also read all of Dickens' novels in chronological order, back in my twenties.
The two are very different -- Dickens is much funnier, for instance -- but they have much in common. It doesn't surprise me to read others' mention of the links between them: Of the scope, the sheer heft factor of their books, many complain. I like it. It's hard not t I have read 10 of John Irving's books: his first 9, and this one. It's hard not to like a character, Jack Burns for one, when, after pages, you feel you've known him his whole life.
I think incomplete knowledge and hasty summation of others is at the root of human conflict. I am a sucker for writers who are both essentially compassionate and unequivocally outraged by human cruelty, especially if they don't just wring their hands, but leap from their armchairs, sprint after the offenders, smash out their tail-lights and put them on notice, a la T.
Irving also is a tonic to me because I feel understood when an author writes frankly about sexuality. I don't have to share a character's particular predilections to enjoy the reading, and I feel respected when things aren't whitewashed 'for my protection. For these reasons, Irving is right up my street.
Both Irving and Dickens zero in on the invisible-because-conventionally-unregarded strings that most of us are still dancing at the ends of, with the other ends tethered to our childhoods. Most of us throw our hands up about our pasts, stamp 'history' on the whole bundle, and close the door upon it.
If we're like sailing ships, our history is the wind, beyond our control, still pushing at us; it takes skill and tenacity to steer the present, consciously, against this wind, and most of us don't have the grit for it. Both Irving and Dickens have troubled to regard childhood, to steep themselves in it, and their writing about childhood rings with this truth as a result: childhood is magical, yes, but more Pan's-Labyrinth-magical than Pinocchio-Blue-Fairy magical; it's magical because ordinary human actions can be transformed, distorted, elevated to myth, when perceived by a child.
A single instance of loss, of gratitude, of injustice, all parts of the passing parade of human experience as understood by adults, can become -- or as mysteriously not become -- lifelong, permanent, and defining for a child. As a former child, present parent, and future feature of my childrens' memories, it helps me to remember this, and reading these authors gets me there.
As for 'Until I Find You,' in particular? Well, it's not Irving's tightest work, and Irving's tightest work is none too tight. I have to conclude that he's serving a purpose other than spare, lean writing. It has a different effect on the reader than saying, "So Jack and his mom went to a succession of major Scandinavian cities, met assorted tattooers, and stayed in various hotels," to have to go through the somewhat circular experience, the full theme-and-variations, with Jack.
In many respects, reading the book is more like living life than like experiencing a finely-crafted, precision-engineered storytelling. McQuat almost gets to serve as a needed counter-weight, but dies too early; Claudia's daughter comes and goes with Jack seeming to sleepwalk through both the experience and the ramifications; the bat exhibit and The Wurtz; I could make a long list of the dangling threads that just keep dangling.
Irving has no regard whatever for Chekhov's gun look up 'Chekhov's gun' in Wikipedia , and I guess I don't either. Mar 19, Tim rated it did not like it. John Irving's longest novel also takes the longest to become interesting — if it ever does; I bailed before getting close to page , all ambition sapped from me by this strangely uninvolving work that, by my limited reckoning, never would have been published if submitted by an unknown.
While containing familiar Irving elements don't they all? It's as thoug "It's better than a sore penis," Jack said. It's as though the work were ghosted by an Irving replacement; like series Westerns or action-detective novels that are "A known author name here novel by fill-in writer here. Usually, his novels perk up at some point, and suddenly you realize you're "in" the tale, and it's smooth sailing from there.
Not here. In the early part of the tale, 4-year-old Jack Burns is taken by his mother hither and yon in search of his tattoo-obsessed, church organ-playing father, whom Jack had never met. Oslo, Helsinki, Stockholm; Alice, a tattoo artist, visits whorehouse after whorehouse talking to prostitutes, visits church after church and listens to their organs; talks to tattoo artist after tattoo artist, most with "Tattoo" in their names.
Almost nothing of interest happens in the book's first part. Oh, there's a vintage Irving moment in which a housekeeper and young Jack put their bodies against each other, hold their breath and let their hearts beat together. This isn't funny a month old doing it might be; or a 7-year-old ; it's just dumb. The only other real relief from traipsing around Europe pointlessly is a scene in which Jack is saved from the ice by a tiny soldier, who of course later has sex with Jack's mother not everything is tiny.
Preceding the novel itself is a blurb from William Maxwell's "So Long, See You Tomorrow" a much better novel; this mention actually is what made me decide to give the book a read about memory, that it's "a form of storytelling that goes on continuously in the mind and often changes with the telling. Irving never develops this during the reading I did before tossing the book aside; but the way he handles it, if that's what he's doing, is not even interesting.
Perhaps, later, much good happens and Irving rights this listing ship. I'll never know. But if a writer expects people to read an page book, he simply MUST find a way to keep them interested in the first quarter of the novel. I hate bailing on books, particularly those from authors I've loved in the past, but I will if a writer does this to me. If Irving were trying something completely different, I'd be more forgiving.
He's not. It's like Rod Stewart going from a rocker who could do no wrong on his own and with the Faces from to completely losing it and later doing crappy show tunes — except Irving is throwing in the same elements he always does, but without making them the slightest bit interesting. Unlike Rod, he's not abandoning what he does best; he's simply doing what he always does very badly and at excruciating length. I've spent more words on Irving's book than it deserves.
Nov 16, Amanda Patterson rated it it was ok. John Irving is an inspirational author and I use many of his books as examples on how to write a good book. A Widow for One Year is in my Top 10 books of all time. Until I Find You is far from brilliant. It's tedious, self-indulgent and boring. As much as I like to see authors making money and winning Oscars The Cider House Rules , I'm not in favour of the power they weild afterwards.
No first-time author would be indulged in this way. Typical John Irving characters. I was hoping for more typic John Irving is an inspirational author and I use many of his books as examples on how to write a good book. I was hoping for more typical John Irving writing as well. It's not there. This book falls flat on its page face. In today's instant gratification society, pages is seen as a commitment. If I'm going to invest that kind of time in a book, I really expect to be dazzled and entertained.
The story is told only from the child who becomes an actor, Jack's viewpoint, and I suspect this may be part of the problem. It's difficult to sustain interest in 1 character for pages. Feb 03, Carlos Velez rated it it was amazing. Jack Burns! I can't hear the name without the exclamation point in my head. He leads an interesting life. John Irving weaves his childhood, teen years, and adult life into a strange and fascinating tale.
Much of what John Irving writes about revolves around sex, especially for Jack Burns. Taboo sex is a major factor in the lives of the main characters, for instance, a middle aged woman and a tee Jack Burns! Taboo sex is a major factor in the lives of the main characters, for instance, a middle aged woman and a teenage boy. He follows the life of the main character or characters from their formative years well into their adult life, and he shows the change and growth the character goes through, especially in relation to the strange experiences they went through as children.
Families are dysfunctional in a very refreshingly unique sort of way. And there is a love of stories. In both novels, there is at least one creative character who writes books, or movies. He tells these stories within his own story as well. In A Widow For One Year, there are four writers, and he gives details about the plots to each of their books. One of the authors, Ted Cole, writes children's books, and he actually tells the full stories of three of them.
In Until I Find You, the main characters best friend writes screenplays, and the main character is an actor in movies, and he goes into detail about the plots of these films as well. In both books, Irving also goes off into tangents. It is especially in prevalent in Until I Find You, where he seems unable to finish a sentence without being reminded of some event in the characters future or past, or some interesting tidbit about the place where the current scene is taking place.
He goes into detail on these tangents to the point where you forget what story he was originally telling, and then he brings you right back into it without whiplash to your brain and sinks you right back into his fascinating story. I don't know how he does this without making me want to put the book down I've rather grown to like this ability he has.
It's bad story telling, put to a very good use. I wouldn't trust anyone else to be able to pull it off, but he does so splendidly. Read John Irving, unless you're morally uptight, and be enriched.
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