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Loading... My Father's Tears and Other Storiesby John Updike
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. More than half of these stories represent Updike at his best, with, amazingly, still many new things to say about ground one would have thought he had thoroughly covered. They bring home the loss to American letters that his death represents. (  ) jensenmk82 | Oct 25, 2009 |  There are some amazing stories in the collection. The first, about a family on vacation in Morocco, being one of them. More retrospective than most Updike, and maybe more melancholy. I think I would have like the entire collection more had I stopped half way through and then picked up the second half six months later. Many of the stories seemed like sketches for novels. Updike writes beautifully--amazing descriptive passages and similes throughout, not forced, just a man with a very keen eye. (  ) cdeuker | Oct 18, 2009 | Updike Will be Missed From American novelist and literary critic John Updike, this latest book of short stories, published posthumously, was a joy to read. Like all collections of short stories, some are better than others, but overall I think they reflect well on Updike and his legacy as one of America's most prolific writers. Unfortunately, I did not find the title short story "My Father's Tears" all that enthralling. But probably my favorite story in the book is "Varieties of Religious Experience". Updike recreates the events surrounding September 11, in a fictional non-fiction sort of way. I was entirely engrossed into the narrative but at the same time it was frighteningly eerie because of course we all know the outcome and the circumstances surrounding the hijackers, and those passengers on United flight 11. When reading Updike, I think what most readers will immediately notice (at least I did) was his obsession with eroticism -- to such an extent that he challenges our preconceived notions of what is socially acceptable. But fundamentally, Updike explores the complexities of Freudian logic like the oedipus complex to great effect. Certainly, Updike is not for everyone, but the many machinations of the sexual mind are truly fascinating. I am sure there will be more of Updike's previously unpublished works that will get bundled together in the future. It's just good to read Updike again and "My Father's Tears" will compliment any good Updike collection. ( )1  bruchu | Jul 27, 2009 | 
 There's plenty here for longtime fans. Olinger, the post-industrial Pennsylvania town that appears in many of his books, is again prominent, and Updike's trademark wandering sentences, which, like Wordsworth's poetry, seem to go in two directions at once, are everywhere. But My Father's Tears also has a quality, sometimes found in final books, of being filled with light and wonderment. It's not only a fitting final book, but a joyous one.
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| Book description |
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John Updike’s first collection of new short fiction since 2000 finds the author in a valedictory mood as he mingles narratives of his native Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel.
“Personal Archaeology” considers life as a sequence of half-buried layers, and “The Full Glass” distills a lifetime’s happiness into one brimming moment of an old man’s bedtime routine. High-school class reunions, in “Fiftieth” and “The Road Home,” restore their hero to youth’s commonwealth where, as the narrator of the title story confides, “the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition.” Exotic locales encountered in the journeys of adulthood include Morocco, Florida, Spain, Italy, and India. The territory of childhood, with its fundamental, formative mysteries, is explored in “The Guardians,” “The Laughter of the Gods,” and “Kinderszenen.” Love’s fumblings among the bourgeoisie yield the tart comedy of “Free,” “Delicate Wives,” “The Apparition,” and “Outage.”
In sum, American experience from the Depression to the aftermath of 9/11 finds reflection in these glittering pieces of observation, remembrance, and imagination.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:04 -0400)
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