Ένα μεγάλο, κλασσικό, αμερικάνικο μυθιστόρημα στα όρια του ποιητικού λόγου. Απολαυστικό μέχρι την τελευταία σελίδα. Αρκεί να έχεις υπομονή και να αφήσεις τον Τζακ να σε ταξιδέψει στο Νότο του μεσοπολέμου. Φανταστικό, ίσως το καλύτερο βιβλίο που διάβασα φέτος!

A rambling, nonsensical, semi-biographical piece of literary garbage.

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.

Για χρόνια αναρωτιόμουν γιατί το συγκεκριμένο μυθιστόρημα δεν είχε μεταφραστεί ποτέ στα ελληνικά, όντας ένα από τα σπουδαιότερα και κλασικότερα μυθιστορήματα της Αμερικάνικης λογοτεχνίας (βραβευμένο μάλιστα με Πούλιτζερ), και έχοντας μεταφερθεί δυο φορές στους κινηματογράφους. Τελικά, οι υπέροχες εκδόσεις Πόλις το έφεραν στην Ελλάδα τον Οκτώβριο του 2020, εγώ φυσικά το αγόρασα την πρώτη κιόλας μέρα κυκλοφορίας του, να όμως που έπρεπε να περάσουν τόσοι μήνες από τότε, ώστε να το διαβάσω τελικά. Μάλλον έψαχνα την κατάλληλη στιγμή, όπως έκανα και με το υπέροχο "Το πλοίο των τρελών" της Κάθριν Ανν Πόρτερ που διάβασα πριν λίγες μέρες, όπως γενικά κάνω πολλές φορές με διάφορα βιβλία που περίμενα πώς και πώς να κυκλοφορήσουν στα ελληνικά και να τα αγοράσω και μετά με περίμεναν αυτά πώς και πώς για να τα διαβάσω. Λοιπόν, σας έπρηξα στο πολύ μπλα μπλα, αλλά να, σκέφτομαι τι μπορώ να γράψω για τούτο δω το αριστούργημα, γι' αυτό το απόλυτο δεκάρι (από τα πιο εύκολα δεκάρια που έχω βάλει σε βιβλίο), ώστε να σας δώσω να καταλάβετε πόσο πολύ με ενθουσίασε. Θα μου πείτε, το απόλυτο δεκάρι που του βάζω μιλάει από μόνο του, αλλά κάτι πρέπει να γράψω για το βιβλίο, έτσι δεν είναι; Ας πούμε: Από την πρώτη μέχρι την τελευταία σελίδα, το βιβλίο με κράτησε δέσμιό του, με καθήλωσε, με συγκλόνισε. Είναι τόσο ενδιαφέρουσα και καθηλωτική η ιστορία, τόσο απίστευτη η ατμόσφαιρα, τόσο καταπληκτική η γραφή, που με κάνει να απορώ για το μυαλό, για την οξυδέρκεια, για την ποιότητα, για το χάρισμα που έχουν ορισμένοι συγγραφείς. Εδώ έχουμε να κάνουμε με ένα πολιτικό και φιλοσοφικό μυθιστόρημα, για έναν στοχασμό στην εξουσία, την πολιτική αλλά και τον άνθρωπο, για το Μεγάλο Αμερικάνικο Μυθιστόρημα του Νότου, με τον συγγραφέα να μοιράζει απλόχερα εικόνες και συναισθήματα, καθώς επίσης να προσφέρει και μπόλικη τροφή για σκέψη και περαιτέρω προβληματισμούς για την πολιτική, την κοινωνία, τις ανθρώπινες σχέσεις, και πάει λέγοντας. Η γραφή είναι εξαιρετική, οξυδερκής, πότε ρεαλιστική και πότε πιο λυρική, με βαθύτερα νοήματα εδώ κι εκεί, με στοχαστική και φιλοσοφική διάθεση σε διάφορα σημεία, με τρομερές περιγραφές και εξαιρετικά φυσικούς διαλόγους. Γενικά, πρόκειται για ένα εξαίσιο λογοτεχνικό έργο, που προσφέρει απλόχερα αναγνωστική απόλαυση, όντας απόλυτα ικανό να κινητοποιήσει τον εγκέφαλο του αναγνώστη, να τον βάλει να σκεφτεί διάφορα πράγματα σχετικά με την πολιτική, την ιστορία και τις ανθρώπινες σχέσεις, αφού προφανώς δεν μιλάμε για ένα απλό βιβλίο που το διαβάζεις για να περάσει η ώρα, μιλάμε για ολόκληρη εμπειρία, για ένα βιβλίο που ο αναγνώστης θα θυμάται για καιρό και που θα στεναχωριέται που τελείωσε και που θα σκέφτεται πότε θα έρθει ο καιρός για να το ξαναδιαβάσει και να το απολαύσει για άλλη μια φορά. Εγώ, για παράδειγμα, μόλις το τελείωσα και ήδη σκέφτομαι πότε θα το ξαναδιαβάσω! Υ.Γ. Η ταινία του 1949 σε σκηνοθεσία Ρόμπερτ Ρόσεν ευτυχώς ανήκει στη συλλογή μου και σίγουρα μέσα στη χρονιά θα τη δω, έστω κι αν αποκλείεται να νιώσω ό,τι ένιωσα διαβάζοντας το βιβλίο. Πάντως φαίνεται πολύ δυνατή!

Read this passage:

A woman only laughs that way a few times in her life. A woman only laughs that way when something has touched her way down in the very quick of her being and the happiness just wells out as natural as breath and the first jonquils and mountain brooks. When a woman laughs that way it always does something to you. It does not matter what kind of a face she has got either. You hear that laugh and feel that you have grasped a clean and beautiful truth. You feel that way because that laugh is a revelation. It is a great impersonal sincerity. It is a spray of dewy blossom from the great central stalk of All Being, and the woman’s name and address hasn’t got a damn thing to do with it. Therefore, that laugh cannot be faked. If a woman could learn to fake it she would make Nell Gwyn and Pompadour look like a couple of Campfire Girls wearing bifocals and ground-gripper shoes and with bands on their teeth. She could set all society by the ears. For all any man really wants is to hear a woman laugh like that.

Does the novel read that well in its entirety? Of course not. But the undulations of prose make sections like this so much more powerful. We read for entertainment. We read for escape. We read to better understand ourselves. And, sometimes, we read a book, and it changes us. People will comment heavily on the political nature of All the King's Men. It is, after all, a book about politics. But it is also a book about love, about loss, and about being a man. It is a book that made me realize how much I miss hearing that laugh. And now it's time to go and find that laugh once more.

All the King's Men written in 1946 by author Robert Penn Warren won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1947. And what a book it was. Years ago on one of my first trips to New Orleans, I was enthralled with the culture, the history and the mystique that just screamed from the the banks of the Mississippi River. And one of my most memorable moments was riding over the Huey P Long Bridge spanning Lake Ponchetrain while the bus driver regaled us all with his many stories about Huey P Long. Because you see, Huey P Long was a populist and the flamboyant governor of the state of Louisiana in the late 1920s. And this sprawling historical fiction novel is based on his life and career in Louisiana government in the fictional character of Governor Willie Stark. But it is really the story of Jack Burden, his aide and as a former newspaper correspondent, deep into historical research. Now I have to admit, that I loved the character of Jack Burden on so many levels as he attempts to come to terms with where he is in this world.

"The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether the 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. There's the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, you have to open the envelope, for the end of man is to know."

And the favorite saying of Governor Willie Stark was:

"Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didiee to the stench of the shroud. There is always something."

But Jack Burden trying to come to terms with his life heads climbs into his roadster and starts driving west to the California coast for a week as he grapples with new realizations in his life. And a memorable quote:

And you can go back in good spirits, for you will have learned two very great truths. First, that you cannot lose what you have never had. Second, that you are never guilty of a crime which you did not commit. So there is innocence and a new start in the West, after all. If you believe the dream, you dream when you go there."

Wow, this is a fantastic book! The story and the characters are first-rate, but it is the language that really got me. Sentence after sentence of verbiage that is so evocative, so perfect, you just want to savor it, to make it last, running its sweetness over your tongue and your teeth and just keeping the taste of it around as long as possible.

I knew for sure that this was going to be a rare and wonderful read when Jack Burden, the narrator, described his own nose as a hooked, askew, cartilaginous montrosity. (I also knew instantly that the casting of the recent film adaptation of this novel was really, really off, as the part of Jack was played by Jude Law [I mean, really - cartilaginous monstrosity = Jude Law???]).

Jack tells the story of Willie Stark, a country boy who becomes a politician (based on Huey P. Long, Willie Stark would seem like a caricature if we didn't sadly know better). But the story of "All the King's Men" is much more than just Willie Stark's story, much more than a tale of avarice and political corruption, it is more than a love story, more than a study of good and evil, though it is all these things. But it is also Jack's story and Jack is someone you want to spend 600+ pages with.

I could not recommend this book more highly.

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

This is a novel whose prose is astounding on every level. Robert Penn Warren was an immensely talented writer and poet, and he brings these gifts to bear in this wonderful novel. Rarely would I say that a 600+ page novel doesn't have a few words to shave here and there, but I can't say that about All The King's Men. I would not want to be the editor who thought he could whittle down this writer's great work.
ATKM is the story of Jack Burden (metaphor of a name) and his long (too long) growth process. Jack has what we would call "issues", and like most of us he has the ability to overcome them, but first he must grow up. This novel is the story of that process.
ATKM has been called a novel about politics, but I think that politics serves a secondary function in this text. It is through his involvement in the underbelly of the political world that the narrator (Jack) learns how to live in the real one.
Even though there are a multitude of characters in this text, each one is finely wrought and Warren never seems to delve into caricature. With the huge cast of characters in the novel this is no small feat. One of the greatest glories in this text is that there is not a single character who is likable or without flaws. And yet, as I read I found that I really did not hate any of them. In fact, I felt I knew many of them. That is because they are so lovingly and accurately crafted by the author. Jack states towards the novel's close about one of the text's more dastardly characters, Tiny Duffy, "and for the first time I saw him as human." That really is one of the main themes of the text. How all of us, in all of our ugliness and beauty , are still divinely human. When we see the good and ill in others and don`t pass judgment, we can then recognize and accept it in ourselves. Jack Burden is the unique narrator in that his almost passive views of others allows the reader to engage with them without prejudice.
The colloquialisms and speech of the deep south in the early half of the twentieth century are delivered here with the accuracy and the warmth of someone who knew intimately the world which he was writing about. Rarely have I read a novel with such a keen sense and development of time and place.
ATKM also has many subplots and diversions that are complete narratives in themselves, and are satisfying to that end. Yet they all also tie into the larger themes of the novel as a whole.
Read this novel closely, be prepared to reread certain parts, and then sit back and lustfully digest one of the greatest of American novels. You will learn something about yourself along the way.

Very conflicted between 4 and 5 stars. Terrific story, memorable characters, smooth writing. Poetic, dark, meaningful. Reminds me (oddly enough) of D.H. Lawrence and Hermann Hesse.

This novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 and is the work for which Warren is most known. He also received the Pulitzer for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. I read this one at the beginning of this month. This is an absolutely fine novel with some gorgeous, thoughtful, and insightful writing. It's got morality and ethics and how it ties into politics and how flawed we are as human beings even as we're trying to reach some depth in our characters.

Warren probes the characters of Willie Stark, the politician, and Jack, the narrator, who works for Willie. I don't always like Jack, but for the most part, Warren enables me to understand him. Jack comes across as a fish in Willie Stark's net; he doesn't have enough steam to swim against Stark's current. As for Stark, the quote "Absolute power corrupts absolutely" comes to mind.

Penn's style of writing is what held me to this novel. He can bend a simile to do his bidding and polish it with stardust. I was riveted.

The moonlight lay on the slightly ruffling water like a swath of brilliant white, cold fire. You expected to see that white fire start eating out over the whole ocean the way fire in a sage field spreads. But it lay there glittering and flickering in a broad nervous swath reaching out yonder to the bright horizon blur.

I felt like I was setting down to a feast with prose like this. Gorgeous and vivid imagery burst into my mind with color, painting a picture that often brought with it an emotional effect.

His straightforward prose was just as effective.

Just as I climbed in beside Sugar-Boy, in the place the Boss always took, I heard the burst of music from the apartment house. The window was open and the music was very loud. Adam was beating the hell out of that expensive piano, and filling the night air with racket like Niagara Falls.

The above sentence followed a tension filled scene that made me feel like I'd just tumbled out of the OK Corral.

Throw in a little philosophy:

For Life is Motion toward Knowledge. If God is Complete Knowledge, then He is Complete Non-Motion, which is Non-Life, which is Death. Therefore, if there is such a God of Fullness of Being, we would worship Death, the Father. That was what I said to the old man, who had looked at me across the papers and fouled dishes, and his red-streaked eyes had blinked above the metal-rimmed spectacles, which had hung down on the end of his nose.

And you've got a mighty fine novel.

The original New York Times review of All the King’s Men in 1946 praised it overall, but called it as “uneven as a corduroy road.” I couldn’t agree more.

Going into this novel, I expected at least a majority of its 650 pages to be dedicated to the titular King, Willie Stark. The back of the book included a blurb from Joyce Carol Oates claiming that Stark belongs in the pantheon of American characters. After the first 100 pages or so, which read like the absolute best of House of Cards, with rapid fire dialog, hilarious barbs, and political jockeying, I was expecting a gripping and deep examination of Stark and his rise and, I assumed, fall in American politics.

What I found instead was hundreds of pages of back story and character development for the narrator and I think main character of the book, Jack Burden. Burden is Stark’s right hand man and a well drawn, interesting character, but outside of some arguably tenuous thematic connections to Stark, not terribly relevant to the story. The novel includes a nearly 100 page detour into the history of Burden’s 19th century relatives and even more pages on Burden’s life before Stark and his relationship with the love of his life, Anne Stanton.

The book is never boring, but it feels incredibly disjointed and even unfinished at times when certain descriptive phrases repeat themselves in close succession and other sentences feel entirely out of place in the novel. Warren was a beloved poet, so perhaps this was all intentional, but I’ve never read anything like it and it felt unpolished.

The final 100 pages are full of great twists and surprises that bring it to a very satisfying conclusion. It also features an incredible brain surgery scene that is impossible to put down. I would recommend in spite of the unevenness, but it’s far from a favorite of mine.