Bech Is Back (edition 1982)

by John Updike

Series: Bech (book 2)

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Member:	sibyx
Title:	Bech Is Back
Authors:	John Updike
Info:	Alfred A. Knopf (1982), Hardcover
Collections:	Your library, All fiction
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Tags:	fiction american

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Bech is Back by John Updike

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Portrait d'un célèbre romancier juif américain menacé par l'âge, la morosité et la stérilité. Une chronique qu'on peut supposer nourrie d'autobiographie et qui, au second degré (comme le souligne Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, dans ##Le Devoir## du 10 novembre 1984, p. 26) constitue 'une critique cinglante de l'institution littéraire américaine, dans tous les rouages de sa chaîne'.

PierreYvesMERCIER | Feb 19, 2012 |

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Series (with order)

Bech (book 2)

Canonical title

Bech is Back

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Alternative titles

Original publication date

1982-10-22

People/Characters

Henry Bech

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Awards and honors

New York Times Best Books of the Year (1982)

New York Times bestseller (Fiction, 1982)

Epigraph

BECQUE (Henry) . . . Après des débuts poétiques assez obscurs . . . à travers des inexpériences et des brutalités voulues, un talent original et vigoureux. Toutefois, l'auteur ne reparut que beaucoup plus tard avec [oeuvres nombreuses], où la critique signala [N.B. 'signals' in the first and second printings of the first edition] les mêmes défauts et la même puissance. . . . M. Becque a été décoré de la Légion d'honneur en 1887. --LA GRANDE ENCYCLOPÉDIE.

Dedication

First words

Though Henry Bech, the author, in his middle years had all but ceased to write, his books continued, as if ironically, to live, to cast shuddering shadows toward the center of his life, where that thing called his reputation cowered. ("Three Illuminations in the Life of an American Author")

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Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0394528069, Hardcover)

In this follow-up to Bech: A Book, Henry Bech, the priapic, peripatetic, and unproductive Jewish American novelist, returns with seven more chapters from his mock-heroic life. He turns fifty in a confusing blend of civic and erotic circumstances while publicizing himself in Australia and Canada. He marries a shiksa and travels with her to Israel, where she falls in love with the land, and to Scotland, where he does. And—sweating buckets! thinking big! minting miracles!—he writes an ingeniously tawdry bestseller. Bech’s aesthetic and moral embarrassments reveal acid truths about both his trade and our times.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

(retrieved from Amazon Wed, 06 Feb 2013 20:12:22 -0500)

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