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Title: LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL by Thomas Wolfe ISBN: 0-684-80443-3 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 01 October, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.1 (42 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Not a Good Read
Comment: I realize a number of reviewers think this is a great book. Not me. Compared to real literature, it is boringly repetitive with endless trite descriptions of EVERTHING. I read that Wolfe was enormously proud of his ability to write pages a day. Well, if one used every possible adjective to describe EVERYTHING I could certainly do the same. Writing quantity is easy; writing QUALITY is another matter entirely. Dickens, Thackery, Austen, Bronte, Capote are all far better writers and address much the same subject. If you insist on wasting time reading it, at least borrow it from the library...don't through your money away buying it.
Rating: 5
Summary: The ultimate American coming of age story
Comment: What sets this book apart from most 'coming of age' stories is the stunning combination of poetic language and monumental vision with which Wolfe imbues this tale of Eugene Gant's blossoming into manhood. No other American writer of novels has managed to utilize a voice so lush and exacting at the same time. The reader is literally seduced into the world that Wolfe creates and provided with an experience as rich as any in modern fiction.
Thomas Wolfe was a large man, and he thought and acted in a large way. His editor, Maxwell Perkins, had to severly cut down the size of the gigantic text that he was given, and it is still a big book in all respects - in sheer size, breadth of vision, and thematic scope.
This is one of those books I have to return to every few years just to see if it is still as good as I remember. While it is very much an adolescent book - in the sense that it storms the emotions with a 'Romantic' intensity - and I am much more critical than the young man who first read it - I find that I am still awed at Wolfe's talent and command.
This is one of those 'must read' books for all who would be conversant with modern American fiction. It's type has been out of fashion for some time, but it can't be ignored as a substantial contribution that is uniquely its own thing.
Rating: 4
Summary: Impressionistic approach of acaste society
Comment: The story of a family in the American Switzerland at the frontier of the South, close to the Mississippi. They start when the city is just a small village and they grow - over two generations - along with the city, Altamont. The book gives us a very good vision of social hierarchization, a « caste » system, with seven castes. First the Episcolians who have the highest social eminence. Then the Presbyterians who are less fashionable but solidly decent. Third the Methodists who are the middle group between vulgarity and decorum. Fourth the Baptists who are the most populous and common. Then we have three castes of outcast people. The « negroes » or Blacks who are nothing but « dogs walking on two legs ». Then the Jews who are a perpetually chased and hunted group. Finally the Pigtail Alley white-headed, white-haired and white-faced people. Those seem to be rejected even more than the previous two groups. This caste system is based on two scales of « values ». First religious affiliation among white Americans. Then a « racial » rejection based on the color of the skin (blacks), the non-christian religion (jews), the color of the hair and skin (white, in fact what could be « poor whites » who are not even decent enough to live up to their race). The members of the second generation are followed very carefully. And that is where the book has a real problem. We constantly jump from a descriptive vignette to a psychological portrait, always at a determined moment, so that we cannot in any way have a fair idea of the plot, the events, the way they are stringed together, nor of the real psychology of any character, because, along the pages, we have quite many psychological vignettes of one character, and not two of these vignettes are comparable or equivalent. The writing is perfectly impressionistic and we get lost in its meandering among successive touches. This is a shortcoming because we do not really enter a « novel », but rather a slide-show where each slide would be a vignette, but with no unifying commentary. The end is pathetic because it shows how the children are fighting to put their hands on their shares of the father who is going to die's estate. Eugene, the last born, stands over the mélée because he is going away and does not want to come back. He is going to Harvard to finish his university studies. And there appears the long-dead Ben, his brother, who makes him realize that anyone has to sever the chain to the family in order to be, to be oneself, to be free and oneself in one's own world and on one's own feet.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
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Title: You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe ISBN: 0060930055 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 September, 1998 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Of Time and the River : A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth by Thomas Wolfe ISBN: 0684867850 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 08 September, 1999 List Price(USD): $50.00 |
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Title: The Web and the Rock (Voices of the South) by Thomas Wolfe ISBN: 0807123897 Publisher: Louisiana State University Press Pub. Date: May, 1999 List Price(USD): $18.02 |
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Title: The Complete Short Stories Of Thomas Wolfe by Thomas Wolfe ISBN: 0020408919 Publisher: Unknown Pub. Date: 01 May, 1989 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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Title: The Hills Beyond by Thomas Wolfe ISBN: 0807125679 Publisher: Louisiana State University Press Pub. Date: June, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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