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Loading... A Prayer for Owen Meanyby John Irving
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. This book is excellent in every regard. The story always moves at an interesting pace. I love the way Irving organized events for context and impact rather than a straight chronology. The characters are all intriguing, yet real enough that believe them and the extraordinary events that occur throughout. I especially appreciate how masterfully Irving achieves suspense and humor in a story that is as often deep in religious and social commentary. (  ) jpsnow | Nov 1, 2009 |  This is my favorite of Irving's books. I see it as an allegory, a story of religion or at least a spiritual story of a boy whose story eerily follows that of Christ -- or perhaps another religious figure. if read without that interpretation, it is also very interesting. ( ) corrmorr | Sep 25, 2009 | Every human being on this earth should read A Prayer for Owen Meany. This isn't about being or not being a John Irving fan. (I'm a being) It's about reading a novel that reaches you at your humanly core. I'll grant you that Irving writes some truly bizarre, unique, one-of-a-kind stories, and that his writing isn't everyone's cup of tea. But this book is so special, I can't sing its praises loudly enough. If you've seen the movie, Simon Birch and then made the assumption that you've all but "read" A Prayer for Owen Meany, you're wrong, wrong, wrong. I didn't hate the movie, but I'm disturbed that it was touted as being "loosely based" on the novel. But then I feel the same about Cider House Rules. The book is SO much more than the movie on virtually every level. I don't mean like when they can't include everything from the book into the movie. I mean like when they change critical aspects of the relationships, important details, the PLOT, for cryin' out loud. Anyway, do yourself a favor and put it on your list of books to read before you die. ( ) nodressrehersal | Sep 9, 2009 | Life is fair, only those who feel cheated out of life have to the most part never lived one...Owen was unstoppable in his Faith... ( ) Robbie_w | Aug 30, 2009 | If you've seen the film Simon Birch, you've experienced the family-friendly bittersweet parts of A Prayer For Owen Meany. But, as the case tends to be with books and their film adaptations, the book is far superior. Taking place in a New England town, the narrator befriends a rather small boy with a very strange voice. The boy's name is Owen Meany, and he is the son of a granite quarry owner. Owen, while just a boy, and treated as much younger than he actually is, on account of his size, is always surprising others with his wisdom beyond his age. The novel chronicles the friendship of the two boys, through thick, thin, tragedy, and comedy, in a story that makes the film feel somewhat incomplete. John Irving paints an amazing picture with his words as he gives us an amazing slice of life gives us a thing or two to think about regarding spirituality and fate. A must read for fans of heartfelt, well-planned writing. (  )1  aethercowboy | Aug 13, 2009 | 
 "Owen Meany" is as sappy as a book can get without having a title like "Coddled By The Light" or "Sauntering Towards the Light" or "Picking Posies in the Fields of the Light," but it's never nauseating or treacly or overly wholesome. It's a nice good fun read, like a quiet vacation. Irving isn't wrangling us with extremes, here -- he gives us a break. You've been beat up enough, he says. I'll do the work for you this time. The result is merciful, healthy, warm and gladdening.  The characters capable of representing such scepticism don't look good on paper, while the book puts all its efforts into promoting a belief in belief. But a belief in belief is something this book lams into elsewhere: the Americans' propensity for decisiveness in the absence of policy. On the green award of the Gravesend Academy, it may seem innocent enough; in the jungles and deserts of international trouble spots, it looks fatally naive. Mr. Irving shows considerable skill as scene after scene mounts to its moving climax. But the thinking behind it all seems juvenile, preppy, is much too pleased with itself. There is something appropriate in the fact that so much of the book takes place in and around a New England academy. The heavily emphasized ''religious'' symbols at the center of the book - the contrast to American aggressiveness offered by the clawlessness of the armadillo, the armlessness of the Indian founder of the town, even John Wheelwright's imbecile joy at being mutilated as still another symbol of his sacrifice of sex to right thinking - all this reminds this long-tried teacher of all the ''Christ symbols'' his students find in everything and anything they have to read.  John Irving’s A Prayer For Owen Meany is yet another Irving book that absolutely held my attention, and had me racing to finish it. Irving, perhaps because of his own dyslexia, takes pains to write clearly and readably. He avoids labyrinthine construction. He earns his right to describe things by keeping the action moving.
Amazon.com (ISBN 0345361792, Mass Market Paperback)Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mom with a baseball and believes--accurately--that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery O'Connor's work. Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen's orphaned best friend), the rough comedy. The scene of doltish the doltish headmaster driving a trashed VW down the school's marble staircase is a marvelous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. But it's all, as Highlights magazine used to put it, "fun with a purpose." When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't cancel the fact that he was born to be martyred. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy--from Vietnam to the Contras.The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies's Deptford trilogy, and the fatal baseball relates to the fatefully misdirected snowball in the first Deptford novel, Fifth Business. Tiny, symbolic Owen echoes the hero of Irving's teacher Günter Grass's The Tin Drum--the two characters share the same initials. A rollicking entertainment, Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history, and God. --Tim Appelo (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:11 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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