My, what a loong book to finish and I am glad I have the gall to digest Irving.

Quite an interesting story, with twists and turns of games played by memory and people who distort memory. Jack Burns seemed devoid of any personality actually, till the ending part, where I think he gets a soul. Its a very Irving book. Loved it.

What John Irving does best- creates a very detailed history, starting with Jack as a young boy and taking you with him into adulthood. But the childhood portion of this book is told from the perspective of his memory, which will have you having all sorts of bits of nostalgia in relating to the way Jack remembers things and reasons he mis-remembers them. It's especially heartbreaking because as an adult he is searching for his father he never knew, and discovers that some memories he has involve his father, which he was not aware of when they were actually occurring. He has equally revelatory moments about memories involving his mother. In any case Irving's insight into how children see and interpret events and life in general is pretty amazing.
And, like his other books, you get so involved in the world he creates, that when this book ends it is depressing to leave the North Sea and Baltic Sea Ports. This book pretty much made me want to move there. Irving's stories usually take place in New England, and a portion of this book does, but it was really beautiful to read his descriptions of Northern Europe in Until I Find You. As a side note, there is also lots of tattoo art history in this book, as Jack's mother is a tattoo artist. And I have to end this with a quote from the beginning of the book by William Maxwell, which pretty much sums it up-
"What we refer to confidently as memory...is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable...In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw."

I feel bad giving John Irving two stars, it seems wrong to do that to a living legend, but while I've really loved some of his books in the past, this was not one of them.

The writing was fine, better than fine, of course. In fact, highly readable. I made it past page 200 with minimal effort, still I stopped not because the reading was a chore, but simply because I didn't give a damn. About anyone. Until that point the story revolved mainly around four-year-old Jack and his mother Alice, an attractive young tattoo artist who drags her little boy all around Europe in search of his organ-playing deadbeat father. I would have been absolutely fine with the dreamy almost fairy-tale Europe Irving paints complete with gauzy, contrived situations, my problem was that I could never quite be convinced of Alice's obsession for the father, nor was I convinced of Jack himself, as a living boy.

For reasons I don't understand, Irving was in the habit of allowing little Jack extremely astute (for a four year old) observations, then having the narrator constantly pop in and remind us that while this is an extraordinary thing for such a young lad to be thinking, we must remember that Jack had the memory of a ten year old, the cognitive abilities of a nine year old the xxxx of a xxx year old. Etc. Etc. It happened so frequently that it started to seriously annoy me. For crissakes, I thought, just make the damn kid BE an eight year old or a ten year old and then stop having to constantly remind me of how special/smart/advanced he is! Alas, I didn't get far enough in the book to see what this device was supposed to achieve. Perhaps that was one of the problems, too often, I felt I could see the pulleys and levers behind the scenes when I just wanted to enjoy the story. What does this crank do? What about this button? I kept asking, and that ruined something.

Some interesting information about the tattoo world--that evocative phrase 'sleeping in the needles' will stick with me for a long time and as always with Irving, a colorful cast of characters I enjoyed reading about--but with a book this long, if the main characters don't have me, I can't go on.

Maybe this was just not for me. :/

Hvis man ikke har læst John Irving før, er Indtil jeg Finder Dig nok et helt udmærket sted at starte. Hvis man har læst ham før, specielt Verden Ifølge Garp og Vandmetoden, vil store passager i den nok virke til det gentagende grænsende genkendeligt. Det gjorde det så afgjort for mig, og det endda årtier efter, at jeg læste de to andre.

Men den er bestemt god. Den tone John Irving fortæller i, tager sig rigtig godt ud på side op og side ned. For handlingens skyld kunne der sådan set godt have været nogle hundrede sider færre, men jeg skulle ikke kunne pege ud, hvad det skulle være for nogle, der så ikke skulle med.

Jeg kan godt lide slutningen. Jeg synes, den lander et godt sted. Rart. Okay, det er nok en feelgood-slutning. Hvis man tager de overordentligt rigelige mængder af snak om tissemænd og kopulation(er) i betragtning, er det egentlig utroligt så decideret uerotisk den her bog samtidigt er. Men det kan også noget.

«La vida ya nos obliga a tomar en demasiadas ocasiones decisiones definitivas. Deberíamos tener la sensatez de evitar tomar las que no sean estrictamente necesarias siempre que nos sea posible».

Un libro muy, muy largo al que si bien siento que si le sobran páginas; también considero que el título no puede ser más acertado "hasta que te encuentre". Una historia triste y cruel llena de dolor, abusos y malas decisiones y que aún así se hace entrañable, me gusto mucho.

I'm not finishing this book. Let me be clear. I tend to love John Irving; A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Cider House Rules, and The World According to Garp are absolutely wonderful and some of my favorite books of all time. I might even be so bold as to call them genius. But when Irving is bad, he's pretty bad, and this is one of his stinkers. The first 100 pages are pretty much exposition only. We are never really inside a character's head, and Irving seems preoccupied with demonstrating to the reader how much research he did about the history of tattoos rather than in providing character development or, you know, a story. Once I got through that, Book II offers more of a narrative, but it's a narrative that is so disturbing that far from enticing the reader to pick up the book, it actually discourages the reader from continuing on. I just read a scene where a 40-something woman rapes a 10-year-old boy. If that were the only thing that happened to this child, I'd continue reading to see how this experience (I can't describe it as "traumatic" because it's not written that way) affects him later on. But prior to this episode, the boy was also continuously molested by a teenage girl and her friends. If that weren't enough, another older woman purposely exposes herself to him. For me, this just seems to establish a pattern with Irving. Jenny Fields, Hester the Molester, A Widow for One Year, and now this. Irving writes again and again about women (usually older) who rape or seduce young boys and men, and this pattern is starting to feel a lot like misogyny. I hate not finishing books; I very rarely have done it in my life, usually hanging on to the bitter end. I can't do it this time. Reading this book feels like punishment. It's time to move on.

This is only my second John Irving novel, but I can already see he has abandonment issues. And problems with relationships. Of all kinds.

I really liked the first section, describing Jack's childhood memories of his search, with his mother, for the father that abandoned them. But I got bogged down in the middle sections; I didn't like Jack, or his mother, or the girls and women who abused him, or the women and girls he abused. There was very little that was "functional" going on in the relationships the characters had with themselves or each other. Still, the story held my interest--I wanted to see where it would end up.

The pace and intensity of the story increases when Jack's mother, Alice, gets sick and dies. Jack's view of his life and the people in it is completely turned upside-down; as a reader, I was also taken completely by surprise. Deception, however well-intentioned, is destructive. We cannot go forward unless we know what we are leaving behind. Peace cannot be made with what is not known.

Yet, as Jack realizes, the "real" truth is often elusive and hard to see. There are many angles of vision, many versions, of each event. Each player adds his or her part. At a certain point, as Jack's father's tattoo proclaims: "Reason has reached its limit. Only belief keeps rising."

Acting, writing, tattoos, music--they are all methods of both disguise and transformation. You can hide, you can deceive, but you can also illuminate.

Briefly, all I can say is that I absolutely fell in love with this book.

Vähän turhan pitkä, välillä meinasi käydä tylsäksi. Mutta monella tapaa taattua Irvingiä kuitenkin, eli oli tämä kokonaisuutena lukemisen arvoinen opus

I have very much enjoyed the other novels by John Irving I have read (Garp, Owen Meany, Widow for One Year), but I did NOT in any way enjoy "Until I Find You." All the classic Irving tropes are here (wrestling, prostitutes, New Hampshire, older women, people of small stature), but all are deployed in an absolutely forced, joyless, airless manner. The best thing I can say about this novel is that Irving's prose is typically readable. That is also the ONLY positive thing I can think to say about the book. The entire text feels like an exercise in expanding the relatively banal post-modern quote that prefaces the text, except that the quote (generally about the fallibility of memory and storytelling) is about four lines long, and the novel is 820 seemingly endless pages. And at the end of the text, I didn't feel that the quote had been the slightest bit illuminated or developed or enriched. (I don’t want to spoil anything, but the prevailing feeling I have about the novel is: that’s IT??)

The story hangs together on contrivance and uninspiring, unsurprising "twists." Previous Irving books create worlds where unbelievable acts of fate or outlandish characters become truly believable. Irving follows the old professorial dictum to "make the familiar strange and the strange familiar." Yet the world created in "Until I Find You" fails to cohere. The characters never sound real when they speak; no one’s actions ever make sense to us, nor do we (the audience) believe that they even make sense to the characters themselves. Never at any point did I truly care about a single character in this novel, and no one ever achieved anything other than the sketchiest inner life or set of motivations. Managing to keep each and every character a two-dimensional functionary within a novel so enormous is actually an accomplishment, though a dubious one, to be sure. With prose so fluid, I found myself turning page after boring, contrived, unbelievable page, waiting for something – ANYthing – to hook me, for some coincidence to startle me, for some connection to be revealed to me. But page after page (after page after page…) disappointed. There was simply no depth, no truth, no emotion.

I recently read Anna Karenina, and was shocked at the amount of activity that takes place within each and every chapter, and to each and every character. Every person in Tolstoy’s novel has a rich inner life and wonderfully nuanced viewpoints; those were 1200 pages that felt like 200. "Until I Find You" is the polar opposite: you could convince me that I have been reading that book nonstop for the last three years. It could be 800 pages or 8,000.

There’s really very little else to say about this lifeless cinderblock of a book. I enjoyed almost nothing about it, and can only reiterate my surprise and sadness at being so utterly disappointed by a book I had been so excited to read, written by a novelist I had previously enjoyed so much. What a sad waste.

Interesting story. Way too long. Not my favorite Irving.

Osm let dozadu jsem poprvé zavadil o Johna Irvinga díky všeobecně milovanému Světu podle Garpa a byla to láska na první pohled a v důsledku i jedna z mých nejoblíbenějších životních knih. Druhé setkání v podobě Svobodu medvědům ale dopadlo poměrně neslavně a na slušnou řádku let jsem proto rozporuplného autora uložil k ledu. A právě Until I Find You jsem si zvolil jako knihu, která rozhodne, jestli Irving dlouhodobě ano nebo dlouhodobě ne.

A nebudu lhát, když se mi tetované srdce otevřelo ve čtečce a v daném formátu ukázalo více než 1100 úctyhodných stran, zatrnulo mi. Ale pak se Jack Burns vydal se svou matkou do dalekých krajů, měst a tetovacích salonů a já s každým dalším takovým místem propadal stále hlouběji. To jsem ještě netušil, že se školními roky hlavního hrdiny mě jeho životní putování pohltí už definitivně a z knihy tak vykvete nový Garp. Hlavní i vedlejší postavy dýchají téměř slyšitelně, varhany, tetování, moře a kruté stesky slyšíte, cítíte i prožíváte s nimi a každá, byť sebemenší událost má následky na těch nejnečekanějších místech. Po nějaké době zase příběh, který mě nejednou rozesmál, dvakrát rozbrečel a jako celek neuvěřitelně nadchnul. Stejně jako Jack je pro někoho moc divnej, bude pro někoho moc divnej i příběh, kde se sexuálně zneužívá malej kluk, co z toho má v dospělosti následky. Ale jestli se v takových chvílích zarazíte, tak se nadechněte a pokračujte dál. Zkuste s ním před kamerou života dokráčet k něčemu šťastnějšímu. Zaslouží si to.