Ինձ դժվար է գնահատել այս գործը, որովհետև ուղիղ 2 տարի խմբագրել եմ ու ծանոթագրել։ Այդ իմաստով, վեպն այնքան եմ կարդացել, որ զգացողություններս բթացել են։ Բայց մի բան կարող եմ վստահ ասել. սա 20-րդ դարի ամերիկյան լավագույն վեպերից է։ Ըստ իմ ընկեր Ռուբեն Մուրադյանի՝ լավագույնը։

I go through a lot of anxiety when I decide to quit a book in the middle of it. I really did give this one a chance. I really like the leader of my book club, who chose this book, however, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I never read such a bunch of babble before in my life. If all the babble was pulled out of this book, it would probably be 100 pages. As opposed to it’s 437. This quote is an example… “If there weren’t any other people there wouldn’t be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people. That is a very comforting thought when you are in the car in the rain at night alone, for then you aren’t you, and not being you or anything, you can really lie back and get some rest.” Huh? Half the time I couldn’t tell where I was in this book. Is he talking about the present? The past? The future? Did this happen already? No idea. I just wish he would tell the story. The story of a mafia type politician. The Governor of a Southern state in the 1930’s. The narrator was something like the press secretary of “the boss”. But the author takes the reader off on so many tangents, I couldn’t keep anything straight, let alone have a clue about the actual plot. I was always asking the question, what does this have to do with the storyline? Will I find out later? The answer to that question is no because I’m closing the book on page 157.

ATKM’s "dead on" characterizations of political behavior are as relevant today as they were when it won a Pulitzer in 1947. Often described as the story of Willie Stark, a thinly disguised fictional stand-in for fabled Louisiana Governor Huey Long, it is really much more that of Jack Burden, Stark’s aide and friend, from whose first person POV the story is told.

Alternately attracted and repulsed by the tangy smells of commitment and corruption, Jack engages our sympathy and intellect as he personalizes the complex, unintended, and sometimes tragic consequences of his leader’s political decisions. How frustratingly difficult it is to achieve even admirable goals in the real world of a voter-driven governmental system. Sound familiar?

Complementing the intriguing story line is Warren’s magnificent writing which reflects the skills and emotions of the poet he indeed was.

An example ... “You meet someone at the seashore on a vacation and have a wonderful time together ... you talk with a stranger whose mind seems to whet and sharpen your own ... afterward you are sure that when you meet again, the gay companion will give you the old gaiety, the brilliant stranger will stir your mind from its torpor, the sympathetic friend will solace you with the old communion of spirit. But something happens, or almost always happens, to the gaiety, the brilliance, the communion. You remember the individual words from the old language you spoke together, but you have forgotten the grammar. You remember the steps of the dance, but the music isn’t playing anymore. So there you are.”

In this political season of 2012, ATKM provides an extended opportunity for reasoned reflection on what is and is not possible, in government and in our own lives.

I finished this book on a plane. I was on a plane coming home from somewhere that I didn't belong and as we coasted onto the tarmac I felt a little like Jack Burden. He was never really comfortable in the shoes that he wore but was constantly striving to find the truth in things. He was looking for the truth while consistently doing the right even when it was hardest. Not to say that I am this all knowing altruistic seeker of truth in all things, quite the opposite, but coming from somewhere I didn't fit and into where I did I felt a connection with this narrator. I came to know and love Jack for his weaknesses and his strengths. Penn Warren created the single most honest, true and beautiful characters complete with faults and stupidity; I loved him. Unlike Burden, my own trip west was not to distance myself from what I couldn't bear but rather face my own "great twitch" head on and I felt the cleansing that his flight out west must have felt like.

There is good and evil and I am aware some people think there is no good and evil but Penn Warren's contrast between Stark and Adam Stanton is a beautiful example of such. It seemed like so many of the characters had their own opposite. Each character had it's own alter ego, good/evil twin within another character as well as a little original sin thrown in there for shits and giggles.

The female characters were a little to easily categorized though. All the archetypes were present. The devoted wife, the seductress, the angel, the smart ass. They were well developed but just in need of a little more reality.

Brilliant, poetic, fatalistic, riveting and to top of my favorites.

King of Pain

Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren had been teaching at LSU for about a year prior to the 1935 assassination of U.S. Sen. Huey P. Long (La.), nicknamed "Kingfish," the populist and crooked 42-yr-old senator and former Louisiana governor, on whom his novel is loosely based. The title comes from Long's motto, "Every Man a King," and a "Humpty Dumpty" verse.

The story follows the political rise and fall of the fictional Willie Stark, who came from modest roots as a small town lawyer and made it into office as a populist before the Depression, to be elected twice as governor of a Southern state. Warren left references to location intentionally vague, even throwing in red herrings about coming in from the "beach" at a close-by vacation home (Louisiana has lakes, but no beaches; it's oceanfront: the wetlands leading into the Gulf of Mexico).

Jack Burden, the novel's narrator, was a former newspaper columnist and history student before becoming Governor Stark's right hand man. He is exceedingly dispassionate as a bystander and participant in the ongoing tragedy, and remains so despite watching the tragedy unfold and suffering two epic betrayals. Maybe Penn Warren was going for the shock or sense of bewilderment a reader may feel about the narrator seemingly not being affected by occurrences that would likely devastate any normal person.

This is not simply a political novel as I thought; I was surprised to learn that Warren said he didn't intend it to be one.

The book is much more about:

all actions having consequences, intended or not;

accepting responsibility for one's actions;

issues of identity, such as how a boy can be affected even as a man in his 30s upon learning the true identity of his father; and,

maybe most substantially, the variety and grades of betrayal and the impact of each on the betrayed and the betrayer.

As I think about it, I'm certain All the King's Men covers all 7 deadly sins, particularly the Big Five: Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy and Wrath.

A quote from the novel I found most poignant as I was reading it, but not quite as much so today:

“...the air so still it aches like ... your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.”

I must admit I tuned out a couple of times when the author/narrator trailed off into 2 to 3 page abstruse ramblings on the meaning of life in relation to space and time. I don't like lectures.

All in all, I enjoyed the book immensely for its political nature, its place and time and its exploration of these various themes.

3,5

Dεν μιλά για το τώρα, ούτε για το τότε. Μιλά για το πάντα. Mια εικόνα μόνο.... η ροή του χρόνου

Este libro nos va envolviendo en una prosa depurada y certera que nos ofrece una historia épica sobre un hombre sureño, blanco, pobre pero que tiene dentro de sí un fuego que lo obliga a querer ser más y querer moverse de donde está.

La historia no se cuenta de manera lineal, se va moviendo entre puntos referenciales del camino de Willie Stark, y la maestría en la narración se la debemos a Jack el narrador, un personaje entre sombras con un punto de vista decadente de la vida, pero muy inteligente a la hora de juzgar personas y comportamientos, esta personalidad irreverente y al mismo tiempo sensible es congruente con las grandes descripciones que nos regala y nos deja pensando.

“Cuando nacemos, nuestros padres pierden algo propio y se destrozan en su intento por recuperar lo perdido, que somos nosotros. Saben que no lo conseguirán del todo, pero obtienen una parte nuestra tan grande como les es posible.”

Conforme avanzamos, la gran odisea de Willie Stark va dando paso a una historia paralela que también tiene su peso e importancia, y Jack emerge como un segundo protagonista digno de contender por la atención del lector.

Por un lado vemos un retrato de la política, aunque algo ingenua no deja de tener validez, nos muestra que no importa que tan íntegro y honesto sea un hombre, para alcanzar el poder, la fama o el dinero siempre tendrá que rodearse de gente cuestionable y realizar actos innobles para conseguir sus metas, lo que los distingue de los simple rufianes que abundan en el medio, es que deben ser honestos con las batallas que prefieren luchar y poder dejar un espacio sin mancha, pero también podemos observar que ese espacio también es perseguido y buscado, es como si ese pedazo impoluto y blanco desafiará y denigrará a los hombres que no lo tienen y de algún modo buscan eliminarlo. Willie es una mezcla compleja, con muchos defectos y virtudes, pero aunque comete actos cuestionables también es capaz de buscar realizar actos sinceros y nobles, buscar el bien común pero sin olvidar el medio en el que se mueve y las herramientas que se usan, es una radiografía exacta del poder y sus entrañas.

Cuando uno piensa que en ese tenor seguirá la novela, uno se sorprende con un drama digno de cualquier tragedia griega, Jack el asistente de Willie introduce esta variable mediante su historia de vida, su infancia manchada por el divorcio de sus padres, su madre una belleza llegada al sur que por coincidencia se queda, y se vuelve una mujer de muchos amores y poca estabilidad, Jack se vuelve un reaccionario y desprecia su origen acomodado, tratando de ir por su cuenta, pero las raíces son fuertes y lo hacen enfrentarse a su pasado que incluye a sus amigos de la infancia, que introducen al amor y la amistad en este juego que Jack llama vida y donde no logra acomodarse, adicional tiene un padre ausente que ejerce de religioso harapiento un poco loco que lo enfrenta con sus creencias o la falta de ellas.

Llega un momento que todo implosiona y nos deja pensando en los mecanismos que nos rigen a los seres humanos y nos hacen ser quien somos.

Hay una mezcla de entretenimiento y reflexión que es perfecta, y hace que la historia tenga una manufactura impecable, la manera en que el escritor describe ciertos sentimientos o sensaciones es tan única que asombra y nos indica su gran dominio del idioma, es una novela larga pero no se siente, tiene partes lánguidas pero se compensan con las partes vibrantes que abundan.

“Si el hombre supiese cómo vivir jamás moriría.”

“For this is the country where the age of the internal combustion engine has come into its own. Where every boy is Barney Oldfield, and the girls wear organdy and batiste and eyelet embroidery and no panties on account of the climate and have smooth little faces to break your heart and when the wind of the car's speed lifts up their hair at the temples you see the sweet little beads of perspiration nestling there, and they sit low in the seat with their little spines crooked and their bent knees high toward the dashboard and not too close together for the cool, if you call it that, from the hood ventilator. Where the smell of gasoline and burning brake bands and redeye is sweeter than myrrh. Where the eight-cylinder jobs come roaring around the curves in the red hills and scatter the gravel like spray, and when they ever get down in the flat country and hit the new slab, God have mercy on the mariner…”
-tRobert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

Look, I understand that you may not want to read a political novel right now, especially not one about a populist demagogue who harnesses the rage of the people to gain power, while engaging in no small amount of corruption.

But here’s a little secret about Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Despite its reputation, it really isn’t about politics at all. It’s about a man searching for himself by sifting back through history – his own and his family’s – and discovering a bit about the skeletons that live in the past, yet still haunt the present.

However you classify it, you should know this: All the King’s Men is a damn good read.

It is, in fact, one of my favorite books. Funnily enough, that makes it hard to talk about.

It’s easy to explain the things about a book you did not like. Poorly-drawn characters, lazy plotting, and clueless pacing are simple to highlight. It’s much harder to express appreciation or even love, because so much of that is tangled up in an emotional response that can be intensely personal.

I first read All the King’s Men at a turning point in my life. I had just passed the bar exam, I was engaged to be married, and I was weeks away from my first real job. It was in that heady environment that Penn Warren’s classic first came into my hands. To be honest, at that moment in time, I’d probably give a five-star rating to an Arby’s menu. Thus, it’s a bit hard for me to separate the objective from the subjective in formulating a review. In fact, instead of scratching out my thoughts, it’d be far easier to simply strip naked and run around the block screaming Robert Penn Warren’s many virtues at the top of my lungs. Since local law enforcement has asked me to stop doing that, I’ll try to put it into complete sentences.

All the King’s Men is a novel about local politics, back room deals, and bombastic speeches; it is about greed and corruption, secrets and lies, vendettas and murder; it is about the dreams of youth, the realities of age, and love.

At the center of this gloriously overstuffed novel is Willie Stark, who Penn Warren based on Louisiana’s Huey “the Kingfish” Long. When All the King’s Men opens, Stark is a small-time politico in an unnamed southern state who is tapped by the local Democratic bosses to run for governor. Unbeknownst to Willie, he has been asked to run in order to split the so-called “rube vote.” When Willie finds out he's been duped, he gets angry, and sets out to campaign as a vengeful populist with nothing to lose.

Over time, and with a plot contrivance or two, Willie climbs the ladder to real power, able to do good things like building roads and schools and hospitals. A real man of the people. Unfortunately, for Willie, his definition of “man” is not altogether sparkling, as expressed in his famous motto:

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the diddy to the stench of the shroud.

While the larger-than-life Willie gets top billing, he is not actually the central personage of Penn Warren’s opus. Indeed, All the King’s Men is about Willie Stark in the same way that Moby Dick was about Ahab. Stark, like Ahab, is the center of gravity, but not necessarily the focus. The story flows through them but is not necessarily about them. Instead, the main character here is really Jack Burden, the first-person narrator of All the King’s Men. It is Jack with whom we spend most of our time. It is through Jack, a natural cynic, that we gain our perceptions of Willie as an increasingly ambitious, unstoppable force:

“So you work for me because you love me,” the Boss said.

“I don't know why I work for you, but it's not because I love you. And not for money.”

“No,” he said, standing there in the dark, “you don't know why you work for me. But I know...”

“Why?” I asked.

“Boy,” he said, “you work for me because I'm the way I am and you're the way you are. It is an arrangement founded on the nature of things.”

Jack, like Melville’s Ishmael, has a lot to say. Unlike Ishmael, Jack is actually interesting most of the time. He is a former history student who begins the novel as a journalist and later joins Willie’s campaign. If I’m being honest, he’s a bit of a navel-gazing narcissist, with a penchant for long, digressionary detours that force you to pay close attention. For all the side-paths and narrative excursions, which see Jack putting together the mysteries of his youth, I was never less than fully engaged.

The reason – and the determining factor in whether you love or hate this novel (there seems to be no in-between – is Penn Warren’s distinctive style. He was a poet by trade – the nation’s first poet laureate, actually – and his writing takes on certain cadences, like poetry, that had an effect on me that I felt but cannot accurately describe. One element that jumps out are his long, detail-packed sentences, filled with rhythm and repetition, sentences that start one way, seem to veer off, then loop back to their origin. It can be exhausting and exhilarating at the same time. I don’t like overwritten books, but though this came close at times, it always stayed on the right side of the line.

All the King’s Men is a novel that is more than a bit skeptical of the realities of American politics. Every bit of good in Willie is balanced by a bit of bad. The constant horse trading, in which ideals have less currency that expediencies, holds true today. Yet for all that, there is also more than a strain of unabashed sentimentalism in All the King’s Men. For all its uncertainty about politicians, it is more sure about humans in general. There is, for example, a beautiful passage where Jack is ruminating about falling in love:

[F]or when you get in love you are made all over again. The person who loves you has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass. So there are two you's, the one you yourself create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther these two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn't be any difference between the two you's or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect alignment.

It is a surprising bit of writing to find in a book that has been sold – since the time it was first published – as a bracingly cleareyed look at the dark side of democracy.

To be sure, Penn Warren does not neglect that angle, and All the King’s Men is both a very particular Roman à clef about Huey Long, and also a general indictment of the political process as a whole, where gaining power requires convincing a bunch of people that you are what they want you to be.

All the King’s Men, however, has achieved its timelessness because it is far more than a fictionalized version of a New Deal-era public servant who lost his way. It is a novel filled with ornate prose and memorable passages and excellent dialogue, and which is populated by characters that are hard to forget. Though it is sometimes as slow as a summer afternoon in the deep south, it creates a world that you are in no real hurry to leave.

I remember that when I first read All the King’s Men as a senior in college (too many years ago), I thought it was a very good political story, but I don’t think I had a full appreciation of how good or complex the book is. Now, having re-read it at a much later point in my life, I think it’s one of the best novels I’ve ever read.

It is, first of all, beautifully written, with language that often approaches poetry—not surprising given that Robert Penn Warren won major literary awards for poetry as well as fiction, and shortly before the publication of this book was the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1944–1945). Second, the story told in the novel, which is centered around two very different characters, Jack Burden and Willie Stark, whose lives intertwine, is compelling and complex, with a non-linear timeline that at first seems confusing but ultimately works to enhance the reader’s understanding of the connections between the characters and events. Third, through the narrator, Jack Burden, Warren explores many existential questions about truth, history, responsibility, guilt, good and evil, and more.

The novel is often characterized as a fictional political biography of the Huey Long-inspired character Willie Stark. But while Stark’s political career is one focus of the book, I think Jack Burden is the main character. As the narrator, I guess he has the inside edge on capturing the reader’s attention. But I found his journey in the course of the book to be fascinating, even though in many respects he is not all that likable.

As a young man, Jack has no purpose and no direction; he is drifting through life with no real idea of what he wants to do. All he really knows is that he wants to distance himself from his past—from the father who abandoned him when he was six years old, from the mother who he thinks never really loved him, and from the genteel surroundings of the community in Burden’s Landing (named for his family) in which he grew up. In college, Jack is drawn to idealist philosophy: “If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn’t real anyway.” This philosophy is, of course, convenient for a young man without direction.

After attending and hating law school, Jack studies history in graduate school but leaves before completing his dissertation. He then becomes a newspaper reporter and soon meets nascent backwoods politician Willie Stark. Jack admires Willie as a man of action, energy, and drive, and ultimately becomes his right-hand man and sometime fixer. Jack’s idealist philosophy serves him well in this role, but he feels conflicted by certain tasks that Willie asks him to perform, especially when he is asked to dig up dirt that has the potential to injure people he cares about.

But as a trained historian and a journalist, Jack is also drawn to knowledge and truth. So even though one part of him doesn’t want to dig up the dirt and he suspects he won’t like it if he’s successful, he can’t resist. “I knew that I had to know the truth. For the truth is a terrible thing. You dabble your foot in it and it is nothing. But you walk a little farther and you feel it pull you like an undertow or a whirlpool. First there is the slow pull so steady and gradual you scarcely notice it, then the acceleration, then the dizzy whirl and plunge to blackness. For there is a blackness of truth, too.”

Ultimately, learning the truth unlocks some secrets of Jack’s past and allows him to come to terms with the things he had been running away from. Jack is able to change his perspective about several important people in his past and begin to build a future. Other characters are not so fortunate. Willie Stark becomes a victim of his ambition, and Jack’s boyhood friend Adam Stanton, who also learns the truth, can’t handle it. As Jack tells Adam’s sister (and Jack’s future wife), Anne, Adam “‘is a romantic, and he has a picture of the world in his head, and when the world doesn’t conform in any respect to the picture, he wants to throw the world away. Even if that means throwing out the baby with the bath. Which,’ I added, ‘it always does mean.’”

Early in the book, in a fine bit of foreshadowing, Warren has Jack ruminate about the relationship between knowledge and death: “The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can’t know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn’t got and which if he had it, would save him.” That’s a question that, according to Judeo-Christian tradition, had its origins in the Garden of Eden. And it’s one of the big questions that Jack has to wrestle with as he considers what the consequences of his actions will be for himself and for those around him, and how much personal responsibility he will bear for those consequences.

All the King’s Men is a book that warrants multiple readings. I have only scratched the surface of it here. For one thing, I haven’t done justice at all to the Willie Stark character. But suffice it to say, this book easily gets a five-star rating from me, and I highly recommend it.

48 stars out of 10. This just became a new favorite book. It’s been called the greatest American political novel ever written, and who am I to disagree?

But to say it’s political is to describe only one small aspect of it. Sure, one of the main characters happens to be a politician. But this is really a study of broken human nature, of our quest for truth, of how we cope in the midst of dysfunction, and how our imperfections affect the lives of others. And it’s written in the beautiful, colloquial, visceral way with words that only Robert Penn Warren has.

In so far as politics is the art of relationships, sure, this book is very political. But that’s barely scratching the surface.

A Pulitzer Prize winning novel based on a real life politician Huey Long, or so it goes. This novel does focus on the dark side of some people who go to great lengths to achieve and keep power over the ones they are suppose to help. Public service and it follows that still the lessons learned are soon forgotten. I thought it was a well written novel but not one that is going to stay with me.