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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..."… (mere)
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. ( )
Lectura entretenguda, estil original. La traducció del primer relat, d'Antoni Pigrau, seria molt bona si no fos per l'ús exageradíssim d'adjectius possessius innecessaris. La traducció del segon relat, de Manuel de Pedrolo, és millor. ( )
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
The actors by their presence always convince me, to my horror, that most of what I've written about them until now is false. It is false because I write about them with steadfast love (even now, while I write it down, this, too, becomes false) but varying ability, and this varying ability does not hit off the real actors loudly and correctly but loses itself dully in this love that will never be satisfied with the ability and therefore thinks it is protecting the actors by preventing this ability from exercising itself.
It is (to describe it figuratively) as if an author were to make a slip of the pen, and as if this clerical error became conscious of being such. Perhaps this was no error but in a far higher sense was an essential part of the whole exposition. It is, then, as if this clerical error were to revolt against the author, out of hatred for Iron, were to forbid him to correct it, and were to say, 'No, I will not be erased, I will stand as a witness against thee, that thou art a very poor writer.'
Tilegnelse
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
If there is an amateur reader still left in the world - or anybody who just reads and runs - I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.
Første ord
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
One night some twenty years ago, during a siege of mumps in our enormous family, my youngest sister, Franny, was moved, crib and all, into the ostensibly germ-free room I shared with my eldest brother, Seymour.
At times, frankly, I find it pretty slim pickings, but at the age of forty I look on my old fair-weather friend the general reader as my last deeply contemporary confidant, and I was rather strenuously requested, long before I was out of my teens, by at once the most exciting and the least fundamentally bumptious public craftsman I've ever personally known, to try to keep a steady and sober regard for the amenities of such a relationship, be it ever so peculiar or terrible; in my case, he saw it coming on from the first.
Citater
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man.
Sidste ord
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
This LT work is only for Salinger's 1963 publication of two novellas together, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. LT has separate works for each novella individually, "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" (1955) and "Seymour: An Introduction" (1959). Please do not combine either individual novella with this work. Thank you.
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..."
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Looking ahead to Salinger
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