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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. kldahl | Jun 20, 2009 |   I absolutely hated this book. I only got about 100 pages in before I couldn't force myself to read any more. I literally wanted to gouge my eyes out. *shudder* I thought it was far too preachy, I didn't like Irving's writing style—bouncing around in time, mentioning an event that hadn't happened yet saying "we'll get to that later"—ugh. Some people have told me that I didn't make it far enough into the book, that it gets funny and great, but I just couldn't do it. He's not for me. (  )goddessladyj | Jun 10, 2009 | This book had such a high rating I was very anxious to read it. My disappointment was great! I found the first 90% tedious and preachy. I found very little I considered "Christ-like" about Owen, which was the basic premise of the book (I guess). Nor did I find it funny, as some have indicated. (maybe a faint smile, never a laugh) I did struggle through to the end and was somewhat interested in how it all turned out, but the last 10% of the book hardly made up for the boring tedium of the first 500+ pages. (  )bibliophileofalls | Jun 7, 2009 | Complex story with a cast of characters you will fall in love with. Funny, absurd, tragic, educational, Irving has it all and brings it all together for an amazing book. (  )CatieN | Jun 6, 2009 | This is probably the best book by John Irving. A kind of American version of "The Tin Drum" by Guenter Grass (whose hero Oskar Matzerath is as small as Owen, has an equally strange voice and bears the same initials), this story revolves around a vision that Owen has of his own tombstone with a date of death engraved on it. Topics like faith, responsibility of one's own deeds and the Vietnam war are masterfully intertwined as the narrative leaps backwards and forwards in time to its inevitable conclusion. (  )DieterBoehm | May 20, 2009 | 2  0.049 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
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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Knowing nothing of the book before I picked it up, I will admit to a bit of disappointment at the prominence of religion in the novel. I appreciated, however, the discussion of the varying natures of faith. I also found the political commentary, passages which could easily have been pulled from a current publication, to be remarkably relevant. In sum, an enjoyable read, but no fervent raves here. (