I came across this collection a few months ago. After reading it I think it is safe to say that this is a collection best suited for those who would call themselves super fans of the author's work. And, although I do not know if I ever realized it, I might well be one of these people. I, at least, have to say that his collection of eighties books from The Hotel New Hampshire, Garp, The Cider House Rules, and everybody's favorite A Prayer for Owen Meany, is, it itself a grouping that is more than any author has a right to hope for. It is truly a run of incredible writing.

This collection is not, and is not designed to be, that. Collecting a few short stories, written reviews, and other oddities there is no flow to this. No theme. Just some odds and ends. Of course John Irving's odds and ends are gold for most writers.

The collection begins with the title essay in which the author recollects a figure from his childhood, namely a local garbage collector who, with his limit d mental faculties, was menaced and harassed by the local youth, including ashamedly now, if not then, the young John Irving. He admits he might have fictionalized a bit of the story but is adamant that a great memory of his is how his grandmother, a regal, upright woman, always treated Piggy as if he was as welcome in her presence a daughter as deserving of her respect and attention as any member of the community.

" The Imaginary Girlfriend " is a longish piece which serves as a memoir of his life. At over one hundred pages one does learn a great deal. His struggles in school academically, his love of the great books, ( which caused him to need five years to complete high school at his prep academy ) his experiences at the Iowa writer's workshop, travels abroad, but mostly about his great love of wrestling. We are not speaking Hulk Hogan. We are talking about Olympic style, athletic wrestling. Describing himself, in his beloved high school coach's words as " not hat talented but that doesn't have to be the end of it " he describes how along with writing his career in high school and college wrestling might be the only other talent of his he maximized. The relationships he describes with fellow wrestlers, coaches, are all clearly of a great importance to him. He is in the National Wrestlers Hall,of Fame, one gets the sense if means as much to him as any academic award.

Irving shares a piece he wrote in the eighties called " My Dinner at the White House " in which he was invited to a dinner at the Reagan White House and despite his candid ambivalence to the political Reagan he does attend as writes a funny piece about it.

The short stories presented show why, in his own words, thy are not amongst his best writing. The form, perhaps, does not suit him as it does other notable writers.

" Interior Space " is a witty story about a young Doctor who along with his wife move into a new home. When purchasing the home from an older German man he makes them promise not to cut down his beloved Black Walnut tree, claiming his neighbor has designs on it. Eventually the tree does become a. Issue between he and his new neighbor, the old owner shows up at his hospital, and life, as always is full of needless conflict. A side story is the Doctor treats many of the local college students when they get a social disease, he insists the boys or girls advise their potentially afflicted partners and when they don't makes the uncomfortable calls themselves.

In " The Pension Grillpazer " we read what Irving describes as the full story that the character Gary is writing ( and we see pieces of) in " The World According to Garp." If you have read the book the story is of interest, if you have not I'm not sure it will be.

" Brenbarr's Rant " is a piece that might be viewed a bit shakily in today's climate. In it we meet a cantankerous man at a dinner party going on about the prejudice he faced growing up. When he is told that as a Midwestern, affluent, white man that is a a silly comparison to those who really suffered he remarks on suffering with incredible acne, painful pimples, pustules, and boils and then makes the comparison that it is like growing up with intelligence in a sea of stupidity. Not sure about this one.

Also not strong are " Other People's Dreams " and " Weary Kingdom. " in the first story we meet a man who, after his wife leaves him, finds that he has the Dream thoughts of whatever person whose bed he is sleeping in. This proves uncomfortable when he sleeps in the bed he formally shared with his wife, then moves to his son's (who his Mother has taken ) room, and later when he visits his elderly Mother. In the latter we are introduced to Minna, a matronly woman in her fifties who acts as housemother and kitchen manager at an all girls school in Cambridge. She lives a quiet settled life that is shaken a bit when she is granted the right to hire a helper. The helper ends up being a bit more than Minna and the school can handle.

A more solid piece ends the fiction section. Called " Almost in Iowa " we follow a man who has left a dinner party in Vermont and started driving west. His wife is at that dinner party, the same wife we discover has had an affair. We learn that the man is fleeing, his life, his wife, and he has no real destination. The most interesting part of the story is that the man's car, an ancient sixties era Volvo is a non speaking character. While the car does not converse the man speaks to the car. Cajoling it about the weather, the distance, the travel, the car doing its job transporting him until he comes out of a hotel one morning in Ohio and discovers the car has been vandalized and left looking like a sad drunk coming in after sunrise. This does not improve the man's overall viewpoint of life.

The last three pieces are literary review and as such only to be of interest to series readers and those who enjoy such scholarly thought pieces. The first piece titled " The King of the Novel " is a long disposition on Irving's favorite writer, Charles Dickens. Paying special attention to Great Expectations he makes a very coherent case for the mastery of Dickens work. This is followed by a shorter piece about Dickens " A Christmas Carol."

The last piece is one in which he pays homage to the German writer Gunter Grass. I must say I have never read his work and have only really heard a great deal about " The Tin Drum " but if one is to be influenced by the passion of the reviewer one would have to pick up a Grass book after reading this piece.

I'm a huge fan of at least half of John Irving's fiction titles, so it pains me greatly to say I can't think of any compelling reason to partake of the Irving-salad Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, a mishmash of memoir, short stories and fawning lit crit that just doesn't do anything for me except wish I was reading one of his novels. His excruciatingly-detailed look back on his wrestling career (both as participant and as coach) entitled, perversely, "The Imaginary Girlfriend", is dull as dishwater (yeah, his love for the sport shines through, but reading something I care nothing about is a complete time-waster, despite Irving's best efforts). Ditto the insane inclusion in this collection of "The Pension Grillparzer", a short story that was already immortalized in his The World According to Garp. No reason to excerpt a chunk of Garp here (if you're sentimental for Garp, read the novel, don't read it here: it doesn't fit) The other short stories are meh at best, the other two "memoirs" serve more to name-drop than provide any insight into Irving's life, and his Dickens/Gunter Grass bookended slobber-fests are there to remind how lame this is compared with Great Expectations and The Tin Drum . Only the most die-hard Irving completists need bother with this one, really.

I usually love John Irving. Perhaps it's just that memoirs aren't really my thing but I almost hated this book. How much detailed descriptions of a wrestling match can one endure? And many of the other memoirs consisted of mostly name-dropping, ugh!! I'm afraid the long commentaries on Dickens also bored me to the point that I skipped most of it. The only things that redeemed he book for me were the short stories. Guess I should just limit my reading to fiction.

John Irving tells us at the start of this collection that his grandmother, who helped raise him, never read his work with much pleasure. I know how she feels. This book left me cold. The first part was interesting enough, where he talks about the job of being an author, how writing is a “strenuous marriage between careful observation and just as carefully imagining the truths you haven’t had the opportunity to see”. The last chapter, a homage to Charles Dickens, was also a good read, particularly with this being the 200th anniversary of the great man’s birth. But the short stories in between, for me, ranged from so-so to tedious to downright irritating. Piggy Sneed is “a perfect introduction” to John Irving’s work, according to the blurb on the back of my copy. I’m not so sure. It was disappointing.

Not the usual John Irving I was expecting. There are worthy memoir aspects, once you get past his passion for wrestling. Not exactly my thing but I get it. Everyone has their thing and it is of course not everyone’s thing. I really enjoyed his analysis of Dickens. It really made me rethink so many notions and reframe my feelings about his writing. If you are a true admirer of Irving forego the wrestling and see it through another goodread as always.

This started out strong, but ultimately... it was insanely boring. Well-written, but sooooooo very boring.

After the first chapter/memoir I was going for a 5. After the second chapter I was so bored with his wrestling memories that it was down to a 2... The story segment was ok with the usual in quirkiness, and then I did enjoy his reviews of various authors (Dickens, Grass, etc.) . So 3 it is. I remain on the fence about Irving since Owen Meany was one of two books I have never been able to finish.

Whelp, three stars it is. Don’t get me wrong, John Irving is an immensely talented writer, but his talent does not extend to short stories. In this collection, I’d argue that perhaps four stories in the Fiction section and two in Memoirs are highly readable and maybe even deserving of five stars. Unfortunately, there is a very long section of Memoirs that may interest three specific types of people: collegiate wrestlers, personal friends of Mr. Irving during his wrestling years, and John Irving himself. I am none of those three. The final section, Homage, should not have been included in this collection. That is all. Go read Owen Meany.

I loved this book but it took me so long to read. I think I would’ve gotten through it more quickly and had more appreciation for it if I’d already read the authors he referenced. But now at least I have some more books I want to read! I enjoyed learning more about Irving and getting some background on his novels and some of the real-life inspiration behind them.

Highlights:

Pg. 355
…critical taste tells us that to be softhearted is akin to doltishness; we’re so influenced by the junk on television chat even in reacting against it we overreact — we conclude that any attempt to move an audience to tughter or to tears is shameless, is either sitcom or soap opera or both. Edgar Johnson is correct in observing that though much has been said about Victorian re-
straint, emotionally it is we who are restrained, not they.
Large bodies of modern readers, especially those called 'sophisticated,' distrust any uncurbed vielding to emotion. Above all when the emotion is noble, heroic, or tender, they wince in skeptical suspicion or distaste. A heartfelt expression of sentiment seems to them exaggerated, hypocritical, or embarassing." And Johnson offers a reason for this. "There are explanations, of course, for our peculiar fear of sentiment as sentimental. With the enormous growth of popular fiction, vulgar imitators have cheapened the methods they learned from great writers and coarsened their delineation of emotion. Dickens's very powers marked him out as a model for such emulation."
To the modern reader, too often when a writer risks being sentimental the writer is already guilty. But as a writer it is cowardly to so fear sentimentality that one avoids it altogether. It is typical — and forgivable — among student writers to avoid being mush-minded by simply refusing to write about people, or by refusing to subject characters to emotional extremes. Dickens took sentimental risks with abandon. "His weapons were those of caricature and burlesque," Johnson writes, "of melodrama and unrestrained sentiment."

Pg. 364 In our time, it is often necessary to defend a writer's popularity; from time to time, in literary fashion, it is considered bad taste to be popular — if a writer is popular, how can he be any good? And it is frequently the role of lesser wits to demean the accomplishments of writers with more sizable audiences, and reputations, than their own. Oscar Wilde, for example, was a teenager when Dickens died; regarding Dickens's sentimentality, Wilde remarked that "it would take a heart of steel not to laugh at the death of Little Nell."

Pg. 375 Is it our timorousness, or that the sociologist's and psychologist's more complicated view of villainy has removed from our literature not only absolute villains but absolute heroes?

formerly chuck's

Meh not my fave

Kortverhalen ... nog steeds niet mijn ding ... En dan nog een bundel met verschillende genres

Enkele verhalen smaakten naar meer (vooral naar een volledig boek), andere delen van het boek (de essays over Dickens en Vonnegut) deden dat helemaal niet...

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