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Loading... The World According to Garp (Black Swan) (original 1978; edition 1986)by John Irving
Work detailsThe World According to Garp by John Irving (1978)
The World According to Garp is a work of genius. The characters are bold, colorful, and outrageous. Every word of this voluminous yet entertaining book is important to the story. There are stories within stories that are easily woven together yet outstanding each in its own way. It frequently is laugh-out-loud funny. The relationship between Garp and his mom is wonderful because there are not too many good novels which extol a positive relationship between a son and his mother. This is a truly enjoyable read. (  ) SqueakyChu | Apr 6, 2013 |  Recently this Very Cool GR Friend (the kind of guy you want to have around you in a fight - as in ninja-fast-kapow cool!) and I were chatting. I'd like to share with you his thoughts: VCF: ....another of my favorite authors, John Irving, has built his whole career on writing about characters who have gone through highly similar experiences to his own. Almost every one of his books has a relationship between the main character (usually a young man, either late teens to early twenties at the start of the book) and an older woman. He's recently talked in interviews about how this is a way that he has tried to deal with some personal issues, including a--gasp--relationship with an older woman when he was very young! Add to this the fact that many of his characters have been wrestlers (he was a wrestler in college), have some peripheral involvement in politics without it being the focus of the novel, and encounter sudden violence when the reader isn't expecting it. He carries a LOT of themes with him, and I suspect ALL of them come from his personal life. But, for me as a reader, this has no effect on how I see the books. Perhaps it took a person with Irving's background to write [b:A Widow for One Year|4659|A Widow for One Year|John Irving|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165447937s/4659.jpg|3359767]. Regardless of what ingredients went into the pot, the meal that came out was damned tasty, in my opinion. ***** Well. That spun the cogs in the old gear box. Wait a minute. I'd read Irving too. Just when was that? When I was 15 and all hot under the collar about the person who had lent it to me and I was caught in that web which Irving weaves to so effortlessly wrap the reader. It was like being Garp at the same time as being a painful 15 year old. I'm sure I didn't understand half of what I was reading, in fact I hardly remember anything of the story. Just one tragedy involving a nurse. I had no idea about Irving as a person when I read him. But the sense of the sheer emotional tumult I experienced reading the book still remains - hence 4 stars. Although 5 would be fine, too. You've reminded me to take a look at his other books, VCF. And into the bargain, I've discovered a few other folks around here who are happy to discuss and share my thoughts on looking into Irving again. Thanks for the encouragement. I can't wait to start. (  ) Scribble.Orca | Mar 31, 2013 | "Mind you, it's awfully well written", Wolf had said, "but it's still, somehow, soap opera; it's too much, somehow." Garp had sighed. "Life,"Garp had said, "is too much, somehow. Life is an X-rated soap opera, John," Garp had said. The world according to Garp is very much like a soap opera, full of situations and incidents that we don't usually see in real life. The world around Garp is full of craziness and absurdity. Many a times Irving stops just short of being unrealistic. While many of his stories are far from being plausible, they are still possible without breaking any rules of the universe. Even with all sorts of zaniness, Irving manages to keep the narrative under remarkable control. And despite everything, the novel still has a great semblance to real life. The fears and the concerns of the characters, the emotions which drive them, are same as our own. Irving takes one on a journey that ranges from boundless happiness to deep sorrow, from love to hatred and all that variety of emotions which real people feel in real lives. As a bonus to everything that this novel offers, it is quite some fun to read. It is an entertaining soap opera. (  ) HearTheWindSing | Mar 30, 2013 | From his somewhat unusual conception through to the end of his life, we follow the life of the rather solitary, independent thinker who is T.S. Garp. From an early age he wants to be a writer, and quite soon is on his way to achieving his goal. In the meantime he marries and has a family, travels abroad, and suffers perhaps more than his fare share of drama and tragedy. As one would expect from John Irving this is a imaginative and unpredictable novel peopled with some most interesting characters. Many of Irving's familiar themes are here, New Hampshire and Vienna, bears, whores other freaks, and wrestling just to mention a few. And as with his other writings we get a complete story with no loose ends, we learn what becomes of all involved. A fascinating and captivating read, although I have enjoyed some of his other novels much more. ( ) presto | Mar 7, 2013 | John Irving is an amazing author. And what a rollercoaster ride The World According to Garp is! There are times when you can’t put the book down; there are other times when you want to throw it out the window because the sex and the violence just go too far. Persevere, though, and you realize that the sex and the violence are all part of the book’s underlying message: unchecked, out-of-control lust destroys hopes, dreams, productivity, and creativity. This page-turner has it all: marvelous characterization, intriguing plot, a Dickensian scope, awesome literary structure, contemporary issues, and a tale that starts out bildungsroman and ends up postmodern metafiction. You name it, it’s here. Even Shakespeare (read: Bacon, but that’s another topic)—the play-within-a-play master—would have been proud, because Garp contains numerous occurrences of a story within a story. Irving even pulls off a story within a story within a story at one point. This is an A+ book for sure. ( ) brian5764 | Feb 7, 2013 |
 The World According to Garp was more than single, memorable moments. It was unforgettable as a whole for a simple reason - it was epic. It was what a Great American Novel needs to be: all of life between covers. These things oughtn't to be funny. Still, the way that Mr. Irving writes about them, they are. They way he filters them through his hero's unique imagination, we not only laugh at the world according to Garp, but we also accept it and love it.
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 034536676X, Mass Market Paperback)"Garp was a natural storyteller," says the narrator of John Irving's incandescent novel, referring to the book's hero, the novelist Garp, who has much in common with Irving himself. "He could make things up one right after the other, and they seemed to fit."Irving packs wild characters and weird events into his classic--officially recognized as such in a Modern Library edition with a new introduction by the author--while amazingly maintaining the rough feel of realism in every scene and the pulse of life in every heart. Many novelists of his time might have populated a novel with a novelist protagonist whose life and books comment on each other and the novel we're reading. Transsexual football players, ball turret gunners lobotomized in battle, multiple adultery, unicycling bears, mad feminists who amputate their tongues in sympathy with the celebrated victim of a horrifying rape--Irving made them all people. Even the bear is a fitting character. In a crucial episode, Garp's wife's seduction of a young man coincidentally occurs at the moment when Garp is delighting their young sons with a reckless car trick (one of the few scenes beautifully, eerily, heartbreakingly captured in the film version as well). Many authors would have been content with the harsh comedy of the scene, but Irving respects its integrity, and he builds the rest of the book on the consequences of the event. How does he get away with his killer cocktail of slapstick and horror? Because it's simply what we all face daily, rearranged into soul-satisfying art. "Life is an X-rated soap opera," according to Garp, and who can contradict him? Rereading Garp 20 years later, one is struck by how elegantly Irving structures his bizarre and complex story. Take the two most celebrated bits in the book, the Under Toad and Garp's story "The Pension Grillparzer," which shimmers like an exquisite Kafkaesque insect in the amber of the novel. When Garp warns his son about the "undertow" at the beach, the boy imagines a monster out of Beowulf who lurks beneath the waves to suck you under: the "Under Toad." It's funny at first, but we soon find that the Under Toad is a metaphor with teeth--he connects with a prophetic dream of death in "The Pension Grillparzer," set in Vienna. Garp's son's last words are, "It's like a dream!" And as Irving--who studied at the University of Vienna--can certainly tell you, the German word for "death" sounds precisely like the English word "toad." All that death, and yet Garp is mainly exuberant. This story is, as Garp's stuttering writing teacher puts it, "rich with lu-lu-lunacy and sorrow." It enriches literature, and our lives. --Tim Appelo (retrieved from Amazon Thu, 16 Sep 2010 06:48:06 -0400) T. S. Garp, a man with high ambitions for an artistic career and with obsessive devotion to his wife and children, and Jenny Fields, his famous feminist mother, find their lives surrounded by an assortment of people including teachers, whores, and radicals… (more) (summary from another edition) |
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