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Stoner by John Williams
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Stoner (original 1965; edition 2014)

by John Williams, Rose-Marie Nielsen

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingConversations / Mentions
6,6863511,400 (4.27)1 / 356
Classic Literature. Fiction. HTML:

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a "proper" family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude. John Williams's luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.

.… (more)
Member:leroys
Title:Stoner
Authors:John Williams
Other authors:Rose-Marie Nielsen
Info:Stockholm : Natur & kultur, 2014
Collections:Your library
Rating:****
Tags:None

Work Information

Stoner by John Williams (1965)

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    Petroglyph: Both "Stoner" and "The professor's house" deal with a small-town university professor vaguely comfortable with his family life, who fits uneasily in a new life that sorta kinda happened to him while he was focusing on his work. Both present compelling immersions in bittersweet nostalgia and the ever-present sense that life could have gone entirely different (and perhaps it should have).… (more)
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 Missouri Readers: November 2012: Stoner17 unread / 17Donna828, November 2012

» See also 356 mentions

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Showing 1-5 of 277 (next | show all)
I resisted reading Stoner for sometime because of the title although I was aware of people blogging about it and enjoying it. The title seemed to conjure thoughts about drugs, being stoned but nothing could be further from the truth. It is the story of the complete life of William Stoner, his work, marriage, his daughter, his affair and his death. It is a story about academia but also of one man who has an ordinary life and for whom we might feel some sadness.

Written in the 60s, much of this story is timeless. As the only child of farmers, Stoner has the opportunity to study agriculture and does so for two years until he has to take a class in literature. It is during that time he realises the potential of books to change the world, changes his degree and in doing so changes his own world.

He marries a woman who has mental health issues and is at times disturbing. I don't know of many people who do not have sex with their husband on their wedding night and then some time later lie on the bed naked all day waiting for their husband to come home and impregnate them. At times she is viciously mean, turning their daughter Grace against Stoner, imperious, frightened and often to be found in bed. The impact of her behaviour on their daughter lingers and although she escapes the home, she doesn't escape the trauma of a mother whose illness was left undiagnosed and untreated.

Stoner makes an enemy of a colleague who becomes the Head of Department and who does everything in his power to get rid of him. An argument over whether a student is brilliant or a sham is played out in detail and nothing is the same at work for Stoner after that. It has to be said that this academic back-stabbing and politicking is played out time and time again in books with nothing changing and with this version being extremely well-observed and recorded for posterity.

All through the ups and downs of Stoner's life, and it does feel as if there are more downs than ups, he maintains an air of acceptance about what he can not change but is passionate about being a teacher and what it means to teach. When he discovers what it means to be a teacher, there is guilt for all the students he dealt with beforehand. It is as a teacher that he comes to understand himself and literature and its place in our world.

The power of the voice in this book is incredible. It is restrained yet persistent. It never slips for one moment and never lets us out of its grasp. It is of one who is resigned to his life and to the fact that posterity is not his despite writing a book and being a good teacher. I waited and waited for Stoner's fight back, his triumph, but it never came unless it is disguised as resilience. It feels quite pessimistic but in fact is probably nearer to the truth of most people's lives ( )
1 vote allthegoodbooks | Mar 27, 2024 |
Golly, what a great book. It's an intimate, and both quite painful and joyful at times, insight into the heart and mind of William Stoner, a man from a poor farming family who becomes an English professor. Not much happens - unless you count a troubled marriage, an intense love affair with a student, and academic rivalries and friendships. But the writing is clear and clean and warm and vital - just the right balances of dialogue and description, of plot and reflection, of bitter and sweet. As the introduction rightly explains: 'If the novel can be said to have one central idea, it is surely that of love, the many forms love takes and all the forces that oppose it.' ( )
  breathslow | Jan 27, 2024 |
Wow! This is one of those quiet, sincere books that tell nothing and everything about the human condition. I will write at length about it after I've given more thought to it. ( )
  MylesKesten | Jan 23, 2024 |
A deeply thoughtful, beautifully written, very sad novel. It should be better known. ( )
  fmclellan | Jan 23, 2024 |
A heartbreaking story of a small life lived in quiet desperation , inflicted mostly by Stoner's naivety and the revenge of a small-minded university colleague. However, this literary gem raises Stoner out of the victim role and into a 'hero'.

Two wars are fought; two characters have physical deformities ... broken men in a broken world. But instead of the brokenness destroying his life, it reflects Stoner's inner goodness like a kaleidoscope.

(If it becomes a film, Jeremy Irons has to be Stoner.) ( )
  jemisonreads | Jan 22, 2024 |
Showing 1-5 of 277 (next | show all)
Part of “Stoner” ’s greatness is that it sees life whole and as it is, without delusion yet without despair. Stoner realizes at the last that he found what he sought at the university not in books but in his love and study of them, not in some obscure scholarly Grail but in its pursuit. His life has not been squandered in mediocrity and obscurity; his undistinguished career has not been mulish labor but an act of devotion. He has been a priest of literature, and given himself as fully as he could to the thing he loved. The book’s conclusion, such as it is—I don’t know whether to call it a consolation or a warning—is that there is nothing better in this life. The line, “It hardly mattered to him that the book was forgotten and served no use; and the question of its worth at any time seemed almost trivial,” is like the novel’s own epitaph. Its last image is of the book falling from lifeless fingers into silence.
added by SnootyBaronet | editNew Yorker, Tim Kreider (Oct 20, 2013)
 

» Add other authors (27 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Williams, Johnprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Krol, EdzardTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
McGahern, JohnIntroductionsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Rekiaro, IlkkaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Robben, BernhardTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Rodell, MarieContributorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Torrescasana, AlbertTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Dedication
This book is dedicated to my friends and former colleagues in the Department of English at the University of Missouri. They will recognize at once that it is a work of fiction--that no character portrayed in it is based upon any person, living or dead, and that no event has its counterpart in the reality we knew at the University of Missouri. They will also realize that I have taken certain liberties, both physical and historical, with the University of Missouri, so that in effect it, too, is a fictional place.
First words
William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen.
Quotations
He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance.
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Classic Literature. Fiction. HTML:

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a "proper" family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude. John Williams's luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.

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NYRB Classics

2 editions of this book were published by NYRB Classics.

Editions: 1590171993, 1590173937

 

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