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Loading... Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction (original 1963; edition 1991)by J. D. Salinger
Work InformationRaise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction by J. D. Salinger (1963)
20th Century Literature (451) 1950s (163) Books Read in 2007 (140) » 9 more Loading...
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First story great. Second story: wtf! ( ) Two stories. The first (Roofbeams) struck me as a masterclass in narrative and characterization. An extended interaction between a small set of people, it's almost impossibly vivid; it reminds me of Raymond Carver, without the minimalism. What actually happens is not so important (although a mystery is solved by the end). It's the kind of story I want to read again just to study the technique. Needless to say, I also enjoyed it immensely as a scene. The second (Seymour), by contrast, seemed pointless and self-indulgent. Nothing important is revealed, and the narrator's (apparently) amphetamine-fueled, self-conscious logorrhea is irritating and then exhausting. It's all too typical for the writer/narrator to interrupt a sentence with an extended parenthetical aside about what led him to write the sentence and how he feels about the sentence and why he's going to write the sentence despite his misgivings about how it might be interpreted. This gets old in a hurry. I found it a struggle to get through. If it weren't too pat an assumption based on too little data, I'd say Salinger had run out of gas ("Seymour" was his last published story before "Hapworth 16, 1924," which by most accounts was even worse). If the Salinger heirs ever get over their own neuroses and publish the last several decades of their father's work, we might get to test that out. But I'm not holding my breath. Belongs to SeriesGlass Family (3) Belongs to Publisher SeriesLiterair paspoort (45) Nuovi coralli [Einaudi] (382)
The last book-length work of fiction by J. D. Salinger published in his lifetime collects two novellas about "one of the liveliest, funniest, most fully realized families in all fiction" (New York Times). These two novellas, set seventeen years apart, are both concerned with Seymour Glass--the eldest son of J. D. Salinger's fictional Glass family--as recalled by his closest brother, Buddy. "He was a great many things to a great many people while he lived, and virtually all things to his brothers and sisters in our somewhat outsized family. Surely he was all real things to us: our blue-striped unicorn, our double-lensed burning glass, our consultant genius, our portable conscience, our supercargo, and our one full poet..." No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. Hachette Book Group3 editions of this book were published by Hachette Book Group. Editions: 0316769517, 0316766941, 0316769576 Penguin AustraliaAn edition of this book was published by Penguin Australia. |