I have an ongoing love affair with John Irving, and it all started with this book.

When I first read it, I was perhaps a bit too young. However, it has had an incredibly large impact on me. In a sense, it may not be grand or epic. The story is rather ridiculous, morbid, and almost fantastical due to its excessive insanity. Now, as an adult, I want to look at it with a condescending and detached perspective, believing that life has a much higher purpose than getting involved in the soap opera-like plot presented here. But what I learned, again at a too young age, is that the dirty, dark, and crazy melodrama is actually the best part of any existence. The juicy details are what make us alive and interested.

This book is an absolute must-read. It progresses rather quickly, taking us on a wild ride through the lives and sexual escapades of the characters, leaving us hardly any time to catch our breath. We keep reading, eager to know if something even more ridiculous will happen soon, yet we find ourselves surprisingly attached to the characters. Even when Irving becomes a bit overly obsessive with description, it only serves to paint a deeper and more vivid image in our minds. It is also unbelievably moving. There is a particular section that I now tend to skip, simply because if I read it, I will start sobbing uncontrollably. But at the same time, I also find myself laughing out loud at other parts, often through my tears.

Interestingly, I learned the meaning of the term "douche bag" from this book. That led to an awkward conversation with my health teacher...

I had read this book in my younger years and I was curious if my opinion had changed.

This book, with its sometimes black, dirty, exaggerated yet always warm humor and its anarchy, was something new for me (up until then, my favorite authors were Fontane, Böll, Tolstoi, Christie).

And even today, I had so much fun with its strange ideas, although I sometimes felt it was a bit long-winded and rolled my eyes at the next "story within a story". In hindsight, I wouldn't know what he could have left out, as the feeling was so complete for me at the end.

It was exciting for me to see how strongly he thematizes the mechanisms of social discourse. The fanaticism and the uncompromising nature. Feminists who harm themselves in solidarity with the victims. Men who want to put women in their place. And in between, people who insist on their individuality.

It seemed very topical to me.

It's sad that we humans still discuss today how streamlined the individual must be and yet in society tend to label everyone who falls out of the ordinary box but still likes to be put in another one with great new labels.

Perhaps it is not given to us to let our fellow human beings be just as they are without a label, as long as they don't harm anyone. And maybe we also want to be able to classify ourselves somewhere.

And yet Irving writes about people and life with great warmth and respect.

It's exciting that he seems to polarize. I know many readers who can't do anything with his novels or who are even angry with him.

I liked him again very much.

It is not easy to write about this book because, although I did not particularly like it, I recognize that the characters are charming (Jenny Fields, Roberta Muldoon, and the Ellen-Jamesians) and the reading was pleasant. Having said that, the story itself appears grotesque, naive, and sometimes it seems more like a creative exercise than a novel. It is a deliberate choice, in fact, within the novel, it is said that a novel written by the protagonist, Garp, is none other than the novel that is being read. There is a point in the story where Garp, the writer-protagonist, says that a novel is worth something when it is true. Well, for me, "The World According to Garp" is not. It is all fake because it is taken to the extreme. The grotesque works when it allows for a estrangement and a reconnection with reality at the end, as if one were holding one's breath and then, afterwards, appreciating the oxygen.

Here there is no oxygen, it is apnea from beginning to end. One remains underwater throughout the book and there is no land in sight to reach. For goodness sake, it is an interesting seabed populated by many beautiful colorful little fish, each one different from the other, each one bizarre... and the thing interests you, but when you see that they hide in shells or small phony vessels, you understand that there is no land because you have dived into the aquarium of a amusement park and that you will find the oxygen by finishing the novel.

By the way, I hated the character of Garp from beginning to end.

This is a rather astonishing story about a man who appears to firmly believe that being an absolute scoundrel is a perfectly acceptable modus operandi for leading his life. However, whenever someone even mildly reflects his idiotic conduct back at him, he throws a rather spectacular tantrum. It's quite remarkable how he never seems to grow as an individual, despite being constantly surrounded by semi-decent human beings. Truly, by a wide margin, he is the least interesting character within the book, and this is despite the fact that the entire narrative is centered around him. He is, in the literary sense, the equivalent of the extremely irritating sound of styrofoam being rubbed together. One can only hope that this was a deliberate choice by the author, but deep down, there is a strong suspicion that it wasn't. In fact, even the girl who persists in wearing diapers well into her teens is far more likeable than T.S. Garp.

One star is awarded solely for Roberta Muldoon.

Garp’a Göre Dünya is one of the cult classics of modern American literature. It has also been adapted to the big screen with the same name. I started reading the book without knowing its plot and without watching the movie. I'm sorry that such a masterpiece escaped my radar, but I also think it's a book that will have a greater impact on you if you're not too familiar with the details.

It is an extremely feminist work that is quite harsh, does not mince words, and whose purpose is to shake common beliefs, question distorted value judgments, and draw attention to social - especially sexual - inequalities. The author's revolt against sexual inequality, intolerance, and violence is felt from the very first page.

The book begins with the story of Jenny Fields, the daughter of a wealthy family in the United States who chooses to live an independent life as a nurse in the early 1940s. Fields, who thinks and wants to live outside the norms of her time and even our time, is a woman who wants to have a child but does not want to get married or have a permanent relationship with a man, and one day she finds a solution to this. It was very enjoyable to read about her rather unusual character. However, later, the focus of the plot shifts to Jenny's son Garp, and in fact, the book tells Garp's life from his birth to his death.

After a rather unusual and powerful beginning, especially as Garp grows up, the story seems to progress a bit like a Hollywood movie, but as you move forward, you can see where the author is trying to go. Irving brings up many social issues such as gender roles, inequality, sexual violence, and parenting along the axis of Garp's growing up, getting married, and having children. In the story, we move from the period when a woman was sent to college because of her "suitable marriage" opportunity to approximately half a century later, but with Irving's unique dark humor, we see that the conditions for female murders and abortions have not really changed.

In a small part of the book, the author also includes the short stories that Garp, who wants to be a writer, writes; with these, in fact, probably based on his own adventures, we witness the story of a writer pouring his own experiences into a fictional work. The book also reflects the inner reckoning of a person as if his experiences are seeping into a fictional work in order to both support himself and create a successful fictional work by taking advantage of his experiences. This was also quite impressive.

If you are a meticulous reader in terms of your table of contents, Garp’a Göre Dünya may bother you, but I definitely recommend it to readers who are interested in gender roles, sexual inequality, who love feminist literature, or who think, like me, that a good work needs to be shaken up a bit.

Wow, when it comes to originality, Irving truly outdoes himself.

He fills this book with the most extraordinarily oddball characters. However, each and every one of them is so remarkably knowable. They seem, if not exactly normal, then at least like people whom one has encountered in real life. I am truly in awe of Irving's incredible ability to make characters that are both unbelievable and yet believable at the very same time.

Similarly, this book is replete with tragedy, and yet it is simultaneously uplifting.

I was extremely lucky to have read the book before seeing the movie. Mostly because my parents had such a great love for reading that I could read just about anything. But movies were a different story. Nothing higher than a "G!" It's not that seeing the movie would have made the book any less great. It's just that each page of the book was like a new revelation.

More than 10 years later, I was sitting mutely in a meeting where everyone was engaged in a lively discussion, talking over each other. (I am normally one to jump right in, but at that moment, I was fending off a migraine.) My boss, a really funny guy and a great friend, with whom I had never discussed this or any other book, leaned over to me and asked, "What are you, an Ellen Jamesian?" I don't know why, but that simple question speaks volumes about the brilliance and transcendence of this book. Also, I laughed so hard that the migraine, which had been bothering me, instantly got worse and then, miraculously, vanished!

“The World According to Garp” is a remarkable novel, filled with energy and art. It is simultaneously entertaining, spine-chilling, heart-wrenching, and immensely rewarding. The novel takes the form of an extensive commentary on the life of the novelist T.S. Garp, the author of “The World According to Bensenhaver,” and an exploration of the relationship between Garp's art and his life, both of which carry a heavy burden of catastrophe. Bensenhaver is, in fact, a kind of parody of Garp, and Garp himself seems in part a parody of John Irving, a complex relationship that is clearly not an exact correspondence.

Garp is the son of a self-sufficient nurse who, in her own words, wanted a job and wanted to live alone. Known in the hospital as the Virgin Mary Jenny, in 1943, she finds a war victim who is condemned and virtually brainless and decides that he will be the one to impregnate her.

In the exuberant, extravagant, disturbing, and deeply moving world of this novel, few events are clearly unequivocal. Although many women cut out their tongues to honor a raped and mutilated girl; an ex-Philadelphia Eagles player, now transgender, becomes Garp's best friend and companion; Garp's mother, now a nurse in a New England prep school that does not admit girls, becomes, when her autobiography is published, a feminist heroine. But Garp, who cooks and cleans in his own home, is considered, because of his novels, a villainous exploiter by the most fervent admirers of his mother.

In the world of Garp, we laugh at the horrible and cry at the ridiculous; after all, they are often the same thing. “The World According to Garp” is essentially a novel about imperfect, often disconcerting, but enduring relationships between husband and wife, father and son, mother and son, friends and lovers, men and women; between memory and imagination, life and art: all the fragile networks that men and women erect against the dangers of the world (although in some ways women seem “better equipped than men to bear fear and brutality, and to contain the anxiety of feeling how vulnerable we are to the people we love,” as Garp writes in his fictional novel, but which also applies to Irving's novel).

It should be noted the strange themes with which John Irving seems to be obsessed. Mutilation, malformation, sex in the most savage possible way, wrestling, bears, writers, anxiety... all of this could result in a crazy novel, but Irving is very skilled in the way he writes. He integrates these variables as a normal, almost healthy part of life. “The World According to Garp” is actually about a writer who struggles to balance his dreams and his responsibilities, which is a boring premise, but John Irving makes it a journey populated by charming and colorful misfits that bring life to such a dry and abstract work.

This novel is like a convincing metanarrative puzzle, because it is obvious that Irving's approach to Garp's life is biographical. It is the biography of a fictional character and yet the biography of Garp is written by a writer called Donald Whitcomb. There are also immersions in Garp's own writing and they draw parallels with his own life. And parallels can also be drawn to Irving's own life. He also was born of a single mother and struggled and wrote a lot about Vienna, among other things. The way Irving slides between the narrative layers of his novels keeps things fresh and unpredictable.

The flaws in this network, some of them seemingly as important as the fact that the knob on the gearshift of a car was not replaced, add to the horrible and devastating calamity at the center of the novel, an accident for which Garp is even more responsible than his wife, an accident that destroys one child, mutilates another, and leaves scars on the bodies and memories of all those involved, including an unfortunate student who is incapacitated forever while receiving a farewell blowjob. Garp's obsession with protecting his family from harm has almost led him to ruin, no less moving for its irony, horror, or absurdity. “If Garp could have been granted one great and naïve wish,” Irving writes, “it would have been that he could make the world safe. For children and adults. The world seems to Garp unnecessarily dangerous for both.”

The family catastrophe haunts him. In the world of Garp, memory takes hold of the imagination but the imagination transmutes and transcends memory. The result is essentially useless but true. The truth, of course, has its own value, and a book, as the cleaning woman in Garp's editor's office observes, “feels true when it feels true. A book is true when you can say, 'Yes! That's how people behave all the time.”

And we know that “The World According to Garp” is true. It is also brilliant. On the most basic level, we keep reading to find out what will happen next and when finally everything happens, we don't want it to stop. So surely we will read it a second time and find it as full of the hilarity of survival as of pain, like a soap opera for adults that goes from the ridiculous to the sublime.

Full review without spoilers on my YouTube channel ➡ Maponto Lee

I would assert that "Lolita" and "Love in the Time of Cholera" are two of the most exquisitely written books I have ever perused. However, if I were compelled to select my absolute all-time favorite book, I would likely opt for "The World According to Garp". Irving leads us along the trajectory of T.S. Garp's life, commencing from his conception and culminating in his death, and I was completely captivated at every juncture. This book is replete with humanity, abounding in both lighthearted and dark humor, and brimming with profound insights into the human condition. Irving has继承了Charles Dickens' mantle and imparted his own distinct flavor to the art of storytelling and character creation, leaving an indelible mark on the reader's psyche.

I would also like to add that while the movie adaptation based on this book may not be a veritable masterpiece (albeit a valiant attempt to condense a lengthy and complex narrative), Robin Williams delivered an admirable performance that revealed his remarkable range and depth as an actor, far beyond what most people might have initially realized. Additionally, John Lithgow's performance was simply glorious. But this is not a movie review. So, let me conclude by stating that if you are an aficionado of masterful storytelling and characters that are larger than life yet still eminently realistic, then do pick up this book. I am envious of all those who have the opportunity to do what I can no longer - to read this wonderful book for the very first time.

Oh My ---

I truly think that I need to read this again........

Maybe I was in a state of confusion the first time I read it................. (wait: I didn't do drugs --even during the 60's while living in Berkeley.....I was a straight arrow)! Maybe that was my problem........

Help.............I must read this book again!

I have my reasons --I'm leaving it at that!

Perhaps there were some nuances and details that I missed during my initial reading. It could be that my mind was preoccupied with other things or that I didn't approach the book with the right mindset.

By reading it again, I hope to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of its contents. Maybe I'll discover new perspectives or connections that I didn't see before.

Plus, there's something about this book that keeps pulling me back. It has a certain allure that makes me want to explore it further.

So, despite my initial confusion, I'm determined to give this book another chance and see what new insights it has to offer.

Irving ile etkileyici bir tanışma.

His pen is sharper than I expected; this is actually quite astonishing because the book is entirely like a joke. It is very easy to get used to his satirical style, making the reader feel as if they are watching a Hollywood movie in the first few times. This is a good thing, but it is a matter of debate depending on who and what.

The storytelling is excellent, perhaps not at the level of plainness, but it has a sharp language that never lets go of its words, which makes reading all the characters we know, starting with Garp, enjoyable, interesting, and beautiful.

It is a long book, but perhaps the only obstacle that may not tire the reader is this: we are reading a story intertwined with issues such as sexuality, gender roles, and inequality that are not well received by a segment of society in Garp's world because Garp is a man who loves excesses. He exaggerates everything, believes in magnifying everything; what he writes is also exaggerated. Ehe.

I'm truly sorry. THIS happens to be my favorite John Irving novel. It's astonishing to realize just how difficult it is to make a choice among his works. John Irving is an exceptionally great writer. His stories are not only captivating but also deeply thought-provoking. They have the power to draw you in and keep you engaged from the very first page until the last. Each of his novels seems to offer a unique world, filled with complex characters and intricate plotlines. Whether it's the coming-of-age tales or the more profound explorations of human nature, Irving's writing always manages to leave a lasting impression. It's no wonder that THIS particular novel holds such a special place in my heart.

Can John Irving do wrong?

This is the third book I've read by him, and I've yet to be let down. The World According to Garp is an incredibly sensational story. It's about the eponymous Garp, his famous feminist mother, and a whole host of other fascinating characters.

Herein, Irving delves deep into various aspects such as the art of writing, sexuality and sexual identity, loss, redemption, and so much more. His prose is not only elegant but also refined, and his sense of story is extremely keen.

While I'm not entirely certain that this one quite attains the lofty heights of A Prayer for Owen Meany, it is still, dare I say, almost perfect. The epilogue, in my opinion, is a little too neatly tied up for my personal tastes. However, I suppose it's better than being left with unresolved loose ends.

I have no choice but to give this one a resounding five stars. I absolutely adored the character of Garp and the world he inhabits. I truly wish I could remain there for a while longer. But alas, there are other books that are vying for my attention.

This book is highly recommended to anyone who has a passion for an enthralling literary novel.