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Bezig met laden... For Rabbit, with Love and Squalor: An American Readdoor Anne Roiphe
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 Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek.  TimBazzett | Sep 10, 2013 |  geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
What does it mean to love a character in a book? Many of us do. Many of us always have. These loves are not the subject of late-night phone conversations with friends or entries in our secret diaries. Yet, as Anne Roiphe reveals in her stunning new book, the characters we know only in fiction live forever in our hearts and our minds. We are what we read. In "For Rabbit, with Love and Squalor, " Roiphe takes us on a glorious tour of the relationships she has had with the great male characters of American fiction: Holden Caulfield, Robert Jordan, Dick Diver, Rabbit, Nathan Zuckerman, Frank Bascombe, and Max and Mickey. In her literary love life Roiphe is a serial monogamist. When she is involved with one character, she is exclusively his until another comes along. She is an audience, an imaginary lover, and a critic, too -- but a critic only in the way a relative carps or chides at the escapades of a dear one. Though a woman, she identifies with her male heroes; as a woman, she feels love, awe, worry, and tenderness toward them at the same time. Never have the great male creations of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Salinger, Roth and Upd Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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 Google Books — Bezig met laden...GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde: (4)
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1185 PARK AVENUE,
ART AND MADNESS, and
EPILOGUE - all of them excellent.
This book, FOR RABBIT, WITH LOVE AND SQUALOR, is a different sort of book altogether, and I enjoyed it immensely. It is a very personalized sort of literary criticism, I suppose, as Roiphe writes of her special and long relationships with several established fictional characters from contemporary American Literature, namely: Salinger's Holden Caulfield, Hemingway's Robert Jordan, Fitzgerald's Dick Diver, Updike's Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, Roth's Nathan Zuckerman, Richard Ford's Frank Bascomb, and Maurice Sendak's Max and Mickey.
Like Roiphe I am a booklover of epic proportions and know all these classic characters. The only one I don't know is Dick Diver, and I probably never will, since even THE GREAT GATSBY never really engaged me, so I doubt if, at this late stage of my life, I really want to read TENDER IS THE NIGHT.
Her title is, of course, an amalgam of Updike and Salinger, and I did feel that perhaps she felt the closest to those two characters: Harry Angstrom and Holden Caulfield. (Salinger's precocious and weird Glass family I was never quite so crazy about, and I suspect neither was Roiphe.) She feels an inordinate affection and protectiveness toward the big clueless Rabbit, despite what she sees as a subtly veiled anti-Semitism here and there in the tetralogy, a subject that arises in the Roth chapter too. Well, me too, Anne, about loving Harry, I mean. I loved all of the Rabbit books and remember being quite devastated when Updike killed him off in RABBIT AT REST. I always hoped he might write a more complete 'prequel' about Harry's high school and army days. No such luck, since Updike himself is now gone - another devastating blow back in 2009.
Too much I could say here, so I'll just say Holden has been important to me since I was fourteen. I recently read CATCHER again, and it holds up, even now, fifty-five years later. Rabbit? Well, I miss him and his "user" attitude towards women and other people. He really was a lot like a rabbit, living "inside his skin," instinctively, his only defense, to run, "ah, run."
Except for the Fitzgerald, I loved this lovely sometimes funny, often warm meditation on all these guys, and the way Roiphe actually inserted herself into their lives to react, comment, gently criticize, and even give comfort. It was fun, and often very moving too. Thanks for reviving the memories of all these great books and characters, Anne.
If you're a lover of serious literature, and know all these fictional guys, you'll like this book. I recommend it highly. (