This wasn't my favorite Irving novel (that being The World According to Garp, with A Widow for One Year being a close second), but it was well worth the (LONG) read. You'll find all the ordinary Irving motifs (disfunctional families, eccentric parent/child relations, wrestling, etc.). Plus, in this one you also have an organist who is addicted to being tattooed--most of the tattoos being musical in nature. Seems like the more Irving I read, the more I understand, in my own limited way, the opening line of Anna Karenina, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

I have enjoyed quite a few of Irving's novels over the years, and mostly read them through in a few days of full immersion, about 300 pages per day, if not more, but this one dragged out over almost a month - mostly because I had lots of other things to do. So this might have affected the impression a little. Obviously Irving is doing everything he is so good at here as well. Weird, but likable characters, plot twists, memorable scenes. Humour and awkward erotics. We get to revisit the red light district of Amsterdam (cf A Widow for One Year) and many European cities, though not Vienna this time. And toward the end of the book even a concept starts to shine through the whole thing that makes it beautifully human as Irving's best work has always been. But something is still missing. Perhaps there is a bit too much penis-holding and too little of the concept. Perhaps the twists and turns do not move so much as they used to. Perhaps the awkward erotics become boring after a while. So, although it is not at all bad, it does not stand on my shelf next to A Prayer for Owen Meany or even The World According to Garp. If you are new to Irving, don't start with this. Then again, if you start with Owen Meany, all other books might well turn out to be disappointments.

Great book by Irving. One of my favorites by him. Great look at how people see things differently from childhood to adulthood.

I have become a big John Irving fan. This one is his longest work, but I swallowed it whole. Irving's ability to make sexual deviancy appear mainstream is heartening to us sexual deviants. This novel got beneath my skin (pun-pun...its main characters are involved one way or another with tattoing). His character development embraces the greatest empathy. His humor is always waiting behind the next corner.

Negaliu sakyt, kad nepatiko, ar patiko labiau nei nepatiko ir kaskaip taip....
Man pasirode, kad tai super asmenine istorija...gal reikejo pasidomet, bet...
Man tai buvo sunki knyga (979psl

"When he is four years old, Jack travels with his mother Alice, a tattoo artist, to several North Sea ports in search of his father, William Burns. From Copenhagen to Amsterdam, William, a brilliant church organist and profligate womanizer, is always a step ahead – has always just departed in a wave of scandal, with a new tattoo somewhere on his body from a local master or “scratcher.”

Alice and Jack abandon their quest, and Jack is educated at schools in Canada and New England – including, tellingly, a girls’ school in Toronto. His real education consists of his relationships with older women – from Emma Oastler, who initiates him into erotic life, to the girls of St. Hilda’s, with whom he first appears on stage, to the abusive Mrs. Machado, whom he first meets when sent to learn wrestling at a local gym.

Too much happens in this expansive, eventful novel to possibly summarize it all. Emma and Jack move to Los Angeles, where Emma becomes a successful novelist and Jack a promising actor. A host of eccentric minor characters memorably come and go, including Jack’s hilariously confused teacher the Wurtz; Michelle Maher, the girlfriend he will never forget; and a precocious child Jack finds in the back of an Audi in a restaurant parking lot. We learn about tattoo addiction and movie cross-dressing, “sleeping in the needles” and the cure for cauliflower ears. And John Irving renders his protagonist’s unusual rise through Hollywood with the same vividdetail and range of emotions he gives to the organ music Jack hears as a child in European churches. This is an absorbing and moving book about obsession and loss, truth and storytelling, the signs we carry on us and inside us, the traces we can’t get rid of.

Jack has always lived in the shadow of his absent father. But as he grows older – and when his mother dies – he starts to doubt the portrait of his father’s character she painted for him when he was a child. This is the cue for a second journey around Europe in search of his father, from Edinburgh to Switzerland, towards a conclusion of great emotional force."

An audiobook that I didn't finish. I found the developing sexuality of Jack (at least 6 discs long) to be much too perverted and boring to continue through. Characters felt cold and unreal.

It has been awhile since I read this (probably due for a re-read soon) but I wanted to add to my 5 star review (and yes, I gave it the full 5, not 4.5 or anything).

I love this book. I love it so much. It resonated with me in a way that not a lot of books have before - I love the characters, the story, everything.

I am a huge Irving fan - I've read all but two of his books and that's only because I haven't gotten my hands on those yet. I read every new book he released and I have loved the whole spread of his stories but this one - this one is special. I know it isn't his most popular or everyone's favorite but I really, really loved it. I am a theatre kid at heart so I loved that Jack was an actor and I really enjoyed that his mother was a tattoo artist. I know it's a weird thing but I really liked her that way and that she was in that world.

It is a lovely, sad, beautiful story to me and I would tell anyone who likes Irving or wants to explore his works to read this one.

Every one of JI's most recent works (if not all of them) should have the words "His most autobiographicalish novel yet!" printed on the front in big red letters.

Really - this guy seems to have made a career of painting and repainting his life in more and more detail into a fictional form.

Oh, of course, it's not really him in the books - it'll be something like him-as-an-actor instead of him-as-an-writer (as in this book), but although the names (but not the places) have been changed to protect the innocent (and not so innocent) - it's essentially all about JI.

It's as if he is using writing as a means to exorcise (or, because they seem to have stuck around all his life - exercise) his demons.

So, which demons have been exercised in this novel? Well, we have childhood sexual abuse at the hands of an older woman, a lifelong search for his real father with attendant misinformation from all parties concerned, an obsession with wrestling (wait 'til you get to In One Person for a twist on why this obsession may exist) and sex.

Sex permeates this novel like carbon permeates a diamond (yeah, I know). Everything seems to relate back to sex in one form or another. Here we have the sexuality of his mother and her boyfriends and girlfriends, the sexual habits of his father, the sexual predilections of his best friend (female), the sexual curiosities of his friends at school, the sexual adventures of the many prostitutes in this book, the sex antics of just about every single character and, interwoven through this, the sexual words, actions and deeds of the main character - a thinly disguised JI.

You got to hand it to the author though - he's got a dream job really. How many people can produce such a sustained internal dialogue in public and continue to make it interesting enough that people want to read his books. I mean - case in point - I've bought all his books so far and am reading them, one after the other, in the order in which they were published. I wouldn't be doing that if I wasn't enjoying the stories - I'm not that crazy!

But is the book well written? Well, mostly. There are no spelling mistakes that I can find, and the grammar is not as stilted as in some of his books - so it's a smooth enough reading experience. There are some sections that flew along, and some that had me fighting sleep - but that's probably more to do with what does and doesn't interest me than the writing style.

Is it an interesting story? Again, for books, interest is in the mind of the reader and so you'll probably have to judge that for yourself. If you're into sex, prostitutes, acting, writing, mother-father-son relationships, northern Europe and/or coming of age stories that go on for decades then this is your book. If not - well maybe it'll make for a change of pace for you. :)

Is it funny? Not for the most part - but there is this one scene that had me actually and genuinely laughing out loud - and this in my world of jaded appetites and seenitallbeforeness. Just for that one scene I nearly gave the book five stars; I just managed to catch myself.

Happy reading one and all. ;)

I imagine one's appreciation of Until I Find You will depend in large part on an ability to get through the first couple hundred pages, which mainly consist of a mother and Jack, her four-year-old son, traveling to various Scandinavian churches and tattoo parlors in search of the boy's father. The true story of Jack's father, and how the man's absence ultimately contributed to flaws in the son's character, is the main focus of the book, but holy cow does it take a long time to get there. In the meantime we're treated to an exhaustive account of Jack's childhood and schooling (consisting of, in no particular order, humiliation, wrestling, molestation, and sex with much older women), continuing through to his career as an actor and his odd relationship with an older girl (one hyphenated word sums it up: penis-holding) who in many ways is the love of his life.

What I appreciated most about the book (and "appreciate" really is the key word, as opposed to "love") is the way Irving turns the narrative on its head three-fourths of the way through, and we learn that the early slog through Denmark, Norway, and Sweden is a flawed remembrance from Jack's four-year-old self, and the actual truth of those events has been warped by both time and Jack's manipulative mother. As Jack learns the truth about his father I became more engaged with the book than I had been previously, but unfortunately it takes about 600 pages to get to that point. It's a book to be admired for its scope and ambition, but I couldn't ever muster warmer thoughts than that.

Wow, this book was epic. Two months later, I find myself seriously surprised that I made it to the end. I almost put it down a few times but since there was nothing else to read at easy reach, I kept going (plus I have a history of not being able to put down lame books).

In thinking about it a bit more, I suppose it wasn't a complete waste of my time. The story was captivating in some parts, mind candy (or numbing) in others. For this era in my life, I am glad it was there. It kept me occupied.

If ever there is a time in your life that you need to feel occupied (heaven forbid), go for it. Until then, please remember that there are many more delightfully engaging novels better worth your time.

Literary Fiction is my favorite genre and Irving one of my all-time favorite writers. And he doesn't disappoint in this meandering tale of a young unwed mother out to find the tattoo artist father of her little boy. The story is told through the eyes of the little boy as he grows to manhood. It is a haunting story in many ways leading you on a strange journey through tattoo parlors all over Europe with twist and turns in plot that are a joy to slip down the side streets of Amsterdam whores with him.

Once the little boy is grown and the story changes gears there is no loss of spectacle as his relationship with the daughter of his mother's lesbian lover grows out of their childhood when he is the only boy in an all girl's school and she his protector, sexual guide. This is a seriously hot novel in that regard. A truly magical fantasy relationship grows from hand-jobs to the sincerest of love.

This novel is packed with so many wonderfully profound twists and insights into humanity that I don't want to unfold much of it for you. Suffice to say, this is a fantastic read. The kind of book you want to curl up with on a rainy day with a hot cappuccino and absorb like a sponge. Really, the craft at it's highest illustration. In this novel, Irving treats you to what great writing is until you almost forget how wonderful the story he is unfolding to you is.

Not Irving's best. As this is my third of his, I see an emerging pattern - single, pretty and inscrutable mom, complicated son, Toronto tossed in somewhere, quest for Mystery Dad. Throw in some seriously twisted-ness and surreal moments, crazy characters and interlocking storylines and voila - you have Irving.
This novel has merit, to be sure - it is the complicated tale of a man whose identity has been formed by a past misunderstood, and his search for self ends with his resolving a lot of what went wrong. The themes are strong, the story is rich, the characters are memorable if not at all believable. That being said, the book is just too freaking long. Being one of Irving's more recent ones, it lacks the editing that all recent novels seem to lack - and the story simply does not justify it. For agonizing pages, the long awaited discoveries are drawn out in painstaking slowness to the point where I just stopped caring.
Irving's love for irony and surprise is all here, but the punch just seemed off this time. Basically, this is no Owen Meany.