This topic is currently marked as "dormant"—the last message is more than 90 days old. You can revive it by posting a reply.
1MissWatson
This is the first novel that Percy published, at the age of forty-five and with a career as a pathologist behing him. I’m having a hard time understanding this book, it’s one of those where I think I do not really “get” it. It doesn’t help that I had to re-read a lot of sentences to make sense of them, there seemed to be a lot of typos and weird punctuations.
A young man on the edge of his thirtieth birthday describes his life in New Orleans. The time is the mid-fifties, and most of the book takes place during the last days of Carnival. As he goes about his work, his leisure time, his visits with his family, we learn about his and his relatives’ past; he is the only child of a doctor who married a nurse, volunteered for the Second World War and died. His father’s family brought him up, mostly his aunt, who has a stepdaughter she worries about, she seems to be mentally unstable. These are well-to-do people who go to university and care about the arts, taking part in society, making careers. He works as a stockbroker for the firm of one of his uncles, but his aunt expects him to do something more useful for society. His mother comes from a different social stratum, to which she returned with her second marriage, and now has a large brood of children much younger than himself. He seems at home in both families, and yet curiously detached, as if he did not really belong. The book ends with his marrying his cousin and taking up the study of medicine, as his aunt wants him to.
It reads like a taking stock of his situation, his surroundings, his place in the world. He often refers to movies to explain or describe a situation or a course of action, to compare motivations for doing or not doing things, which were eerily familiar. But at the end I still found myself a little baffled as to the purpose of it all.
ETC
A young man on the edge of his thirtieth birthday describes his life in New Orleans. The time is the mid-fifties, and most of the book takes place during the last days of Carnival. As he goes about his work, his leisure time, his visits with his family, we learn about his and his relatives’ past; he is the only child of a doctor who married a nurse, volunteered for the Second World War and died. His father’s family brought him up, mostly his aunt, who has a stepdaughter she worries about, she seems to be mentally unstable. These are well-to-do people who go to university and care about the arts, taking part in society, making careers. He works as a stockbroker for the firm of one of his uncles, but his aunt expects him to do something more useful for society. His mother comes from a different social stratum, to which she returned with her second marriage, and now has a large brood of children much younger than himself. He seems at home in both families, and yet curiously detached, as if he did not really belong. The book ends with his marrying his cousin and taking up the study of medicine, as his aunt wants him to.
It reads like a taking stock of his situation, his surroundings, his place in the world. He often refers to movies to explain or describe a situation or a course of action, to compare motivations for doing or not doing things, which were eerily familiar. But at the end I still found myself a little baffled as to the purpose of it all.
ETC
Join to post
