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Loading... Until I Find Youby John Irving
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  r1hard | Nov 22, 2009 |  This story centers around Jack Burns who with his mother Alice, has been on a lifetime quest to find William, Jack's father. William left Before Jack was born ... never married Alice. Knowing that he is an ink addict, after her father gave him his first tattoo, she learns the trade herself, and visits tattoo studios across the Baltic seas in search of William. She is quite skilled and sets up her studio in many ports, looking for William. The story has hidden twists, and although Jack becomes the center fiqure, finding his father after his mother dies, I became partial to Alice. She is an intirquing character and does many unexpected things. I also like her taste in music. She blasts Bob Dylan while working, and Jack himself says: "Dylan is kind of like a tattoo ... he gets under your skin and stays with you." (  ) SFM13 | Oct 11, 2009 | I love John Irving's novels, but this one was nothing less than a chore to read. I didn't find the story remotely interesting until the last third of the book. Where was the editor? (  ) MsNick | Oct 3, 2009 | By now I think I've clearly established that I'm a huge John Irving fan. I just finished his most recent, Until I Find You, and I loved it. I adored it. I didn't want it to end, which may seem odd since it's 820 pages long. Please don't let the length deter you. I loved the narrator's voice, the characters-major and minor. I loved the story, the journey, the quest; the twists and the passage of time. Every last bit of it seemed plausible to me, but I've always embraced the bizarreness of Irving's characters and settings. Two favorite passages: So much of what you think you remember is a lie, the stuff of postcards. The snow untrampled and unspoiled; the Christmas candles in the windows of the houses, where the damage to the children is unseen and unheard. If you can't forgive her, you'll never be free of her. It's for your own sake, you know- for your soul. When you forgive someone who's hurt you, it's like escaping your skin- you're that free, outside yourself, where you can see everything. ( ) nodressrehersal | Sep 9, 2009 | This is Irving's most autobiographical book. It is very moving. He travels with his mother who is a tatoo artist away from/towards his father whom he doesn't know... It is excellant. (  ) cajunbear | Nov 23, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
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Jack Burns, the hero of the tale, is four years old when it all begins. He is the illegitimate son of Daughter Alice, a tattoo artist and, guess what, daughter of a tattoo artist. She takes Jack on a pilgrimage to find his womanizing father, William, a church organist and "ink addict." By seeking out church organs and tattoo parlors, she expects to find him. She doesn't, and by now we have spent more than a hundred pages in Northern European cities doing an imitation of Groundhog Day. Same story, different day: a little prostitution for Alice, a few questions asked; alas, no daddy.
Alice and Jack return to Toronto so that Jack may enter a previously all-girls school, which will admit little boys for the first time. There begins another 200 pages of the girls and the teachers abusing Jack, over and over again. By now, he is five and is, for some unfathomable reason, eminently interesting to girls and women. His "friend" Emma keeps careful track of "the little guy," as she calls Jack's penis, looking for signs of life. The worst part of all this is that none of it is funny or sad or even clever. There are wrestling vignettes, of course, and prep school tedium, but no bears. Maybe bears would have saved it. There were funny parts in The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules as well as poignant, horrific parts in both of those and other Irving novels. This story is flat. The voice never changes; it just drones on.
Jack becomes an actor. First, he is a boy in drag because he is so pretty, then he takes transvestite parts. He and Emma, now a published novelist, live together in LA, which provides endless opportunity for name-dropping. His career eventually takes off and he gets recognition and awards, but still no daddy. Irving, it turns out, never knew his father, either. Perhaps this exercise will exorcise that demon once and for all and Irving's next book will be about something more compelling than a little boy's penis and his trashy mother's antics. If you do make it through to the book's snapper of an ending, you deserve to find out what it is on your own. Call it a reward. --Valerie Ryan
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:02 -0400)
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Trotzdem ein faszinierender und absolut lesenswerter Roman!
P.S. Das Antidepressivum wirkt übrigens nicht besser als preiswertere Vergleichspräparate und ob Jack es wirklich gebraucht hätte - ich glaube es nicht.