John O'Hara
Paperback | Pages: 251 pages Rating: 3.82 | 13633 Users | 769 Reviews
Present Books During Appointment in Samarra
| Original Title: | Appointment in Samarra |
| ISBN: | 0375719202 (ISBN13: 9780375719202) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Characters: | Julian English, Froggy Ogden, Harry Reilly, Caroline English |
Description To Books Appointment in Samarra
O’Hara did for fictional Gibbsville, Pennsylvania what Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi: surveyed its social life and drew its psychic outlines, but he did it in utterly worldly terms, without Faulkner’s taste for mythic inference or the basso profundo of his prose. Julian English is a man who squanders what fate gave him. He lives on the right side of the tracks, with a country club membership, and a wife who loves him. His decline and fall, over the course of just 72 hours around Christmas, is a matter of too much spending, too much liquor, and a couple of reckless gestures. That his calamity is petty and preventable only makes it more powerful. In Faulkner, the tragedies all seem to be taking place on Olympus, even when they’re happening among the low-lifes. In O’Hara, they could be happening to you.Describe Of Books Appointment in Samarra
| Title | : | Appointment in Samarra |
| Author | : | John O'Hara |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Anniversary Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 251 pages |
| Published | : | July 8th 2003 by Vintage (first published January 28th 1934) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Classics. Novels. Literature |
Rating Of Books Appointment in Samarra
Ratings: 3.82 From 13633 Users | 769 ReviewsCriticize Of Books Appointment in Samarra
The narrator, I'm told, is Death. That reminds me of The Book Thief in that way.
I had never read anything by O'Hara before, and he probably would have stayed off my radar forever if I hadn't read Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways, in which Valerie Hemingway states that O'Hara was an author recommended to her by Papa himself(but not this title). I figured that if a writer is good enough for Papa Hemingway, who am I to pass him by?So I figured I would start at the beginning and I was certainly not disappointed. I found a book with a noirish (if that's a
O'Hara's timeless novel begins with W Somerset Maugham forboding epigraph Death Speaks. Death speaks: There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the market-place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from
John O'Hara may not have had the most felicitous style of his generation, but he had plenty to say. APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA rounds out my list of five English-language novels (in my case, all 20th-Century American novels). This is the underappreciated one; I can't honestly say that of BABBITT, THE GREAT GATSBY, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD or even LOLITA. The last day in the life of Julian English, just as the Great Depression is beginning to be felt. Realistic, gutsy, surprising, heartbreaking.
The stifling atmosphere of small town life is so vividly displayed here that alone made the book difficult for me. I'm not old enough to know what middle class mores were in fact like in the 1930's but many so-called canon Great Books depict the same types of people, occupations and distresses. The Wasp set of values in vogue in the past, under which the characters in the book must live, struck me as the American version of Victorian values in the earlier era. Julian English's name is a clue to
My my. There's something about the pleasantville genre that never quite sat square with me- the difference between the public persona and the ineffable "self" that makes a mess of so much decorum. Well, no shit. Writing after 1968 affords us that judgement.But here's John O'Hara, writing over the winter, publishing in '34. His apparently bibulous inclinations makes him one of the best writers about character and drink, at least on a technical level. But this portrait of a small town built on a
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