Spoilers ahead. You've been warned.

So, apparently, this is supposed to be funny. Which I didn't know way back when I read this, thankfully, or I'd've been scratching my head even more than I already was at the time. Imagine my surprise though when, years later, I heard this described as a hilarious book.

"Sempre soube que a procura da perfeição é um hábito letal."

No Estranho Mundo de Garp há de tudo um pouco: escritores, feministas loucas, mães solteiras, transexuais, enfermeiras, ursos ciclistas,...
Um mundo surreal de gente excêntrica e alucinante que ama, odeia, trai,...; mutila, mata, morre,...
Episódios delirantes, divertidos e dramáticos, narrados com tal arte que, muitas vezes, chorei do que devia rir e ri do que devia chorar.

Uma saga familiar que, segundo John Irving, trata do medo dos pais de perder os filhos mas que, em meu entender, vai mais além: trata da necessidade do ser humano de criar e manter uma família, seja ela de sangue ou somente de amor.

Aunque la parte del cuento se puede hacer algo pesada, me encanta este libro y no me canso nunca de recomendarlo.

Every time I read a serious literary novel, I ask myself: what is the author trying to say? Of course, he/ she is telling a story, but it must have a point. Otherwise how does the reader stay hooked, without getting lost in a rambling narrative that goes nowhere?

In The World According to Garp, there appears to be no central theme or premise. The story jumps from happening to happening, some fantastical, some hilarious, and some extremely disturbing. But we keep on reading, because from page one onwards (where Garp's mother Jenny Fields stabs a promiscuous soldier in a movie theatre with a scalpel), we want to know what happens next. As Jillsy Sloper says later in the novel:

'But you read it,' John Wolf said. 'Why'd you read it?'

'Lawd,' Jillsy said, as if she were sorry for John Wolf- that he was so hopelessly stupid. 'I sometimes wonder if you know the first thing about all these books you're makin',' she said; she shook her head. 'I sometimes wonder why
you're the one who's makin' the books and I'm the one who's cleanin' the bathrooms. Except I'd rather clean the bathrooms than read most of them,' Jillsy said. 'Lawd, Lawd.'

'If you hated it, why'd you read it, Jillsy? John Wolf asked her.

'Same reason I read anythin' for,' Jillsy said. 'To find out what happens.'

Yes. John Irving has appropriated the technique of all the good storytellers of yore - that of telling an absorbing yarn which keeps his audience riveted. It is just the experience. The interpretation can come later.

***

And there can be any number of interpretations, if one digs deep into this tale with the eyes of a literary critic. Love, lust, pain, pleasure, feminism, gender issues, parenting... so many things mix and meld together in both politically correct and incorrect ways. The superimposition of sex with physical impairment starts when Jenny has sex with a brain-impaired sergeant to produce Garp - because she wants only a baby, and nothing to do with men. The theme of mutilation continues with Garp's ear getting bitten off by a dog, which he retaliates later by biting off the dog's ear; until about two-thirds of the way in, we are treated to a scene of such distressing gore that a less skilled writer would have lost his audience there.

(Psychiatrists say that the pain/ pleasure centres of the brain are very near one another, which is one of the reasons behind sadomasochism. The World According to Garp, in that sense, reminds me of those posters of Hindu hell which were very common during my childhood - where the stark-naked "souls" were cut, sawed and impaled in a variety of ways. Very frightening, but there was a certain element of sexual excitement to it.)

Garp's life is a juxtaposition of improbable happenings, like the stories he writes. There is an underlying sense of dread in both his fictional world and the real - the feeling of a monster lying in wait just behind the next blind corner, licking its lips in anticipation. Both Garp and Irving call it the "Under Toad" - a corruption of the word undertow, as coined by a child. Garp's younger son Walt, while warned of the undertow in a creek which can suck him under, imagines it to be a monstrous toad which lies in wait beneath the still waters. As Garp's life moves on, it becomes one continuous fight against this boogeyman.

...in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.

Five stars, all the way.

Bellissimo. L’ho adorato. Uno di quei libri che non vorresti mai finire. Il mondo poetico di Irving è unico e totalmente affascinante nella sua grottesca tragicità che cela le difficoltà umane sempre più insormontabili. “La fantasia deve superare la vita reale” fa dire a T.S. Garp, e Irving ci riesce da fuoriclasse qual’è. Fra i miei top ten.

A book full of quirky characters, most of whom were most unlikeable. There were plenty of story lines, deviations and connections. It has some good themes of lust, the relationships between men and women, the dangers of any type of fanaticism. Being a John Irving book there is unusual sexual stories, bears, wrestling, Vienna and family relationships.

What bugged me was the stories that Garp wrote making a big part of the narrative and especially the story which paralleled the book I was reading. Then there was a long section at the end which traces the life of each character in AG (After Garp). It was altogether quite annoying.

Can John Irving do wrong?

This is the third book I've read by him, and I've yet to be let down. The World According to Garp is a sensational story about the titular Garp, his famous feminist mother, and a wide array of other interesting characters. Herein Irving explores the art of writing, sexuality/sexual identity, loss, redemption, and so much more. His prose and elegant and refined; his sense of story is keen. While I am not sure this one quite reaches the heights of A Prayer for Owen Meany, it is still . . . dare I say, almost perfect. The epilogue is a little too tidy for my tastes, but I suppose it's better than being left with loose ends. I have to give this one five stars.

I loved the character of Garp, and the world he lives in. I wish I could stay there some more . . . but there are other books that demand my attention. Highly recommended to anyone who loves an enthralling literary novel.

Ne mogu da uobličim smislen komentar.
Ambivalentan odnos osećam prema ovoj knjizi. Sa jedne strane, osećam odvratnost, a sa druge, osećam nešto što bi se moglo opisati kao blaga simpatija. Opet, ta simpatija nije klasična simpatija, pre je plod (urođenog) osećaja empatije za druge i/ili drugačije..
Možda nekad dopunim komentar. Za sada je i ovo previše.

Another long overdue re-read.

I fucking love this book!

"Mind you, it's awfully well written", Wolf had said, "but it's still, somehow, soap opera; it's too much, somehow." Garp had sighed. "Life,"Garp had said, "is too much, somehow. Life is an X-rated soap opera, John," Garp had said.

The world according to Garp is very much like a soap opera, full of situations and incidents that we don't usually see in real life. The world around Garp is full of craziness and absurdity. Many a times Irving stops just short of being unrealistic. While many of his stories are far from being plausible, they are still possible without breaking any rules of the universe. Even with all sorts of zaniness, Irving manages to keep the narrative under remarkable control. And despite everything, the novel still has a great semblance to real life. The fears and the concerns of the characters, the emotions which drive them, are same as our own. Irving takes one on a journey that ranges from boundless happiness to deep sorrow, from love to hatred and all that variety of emotions which real people feel in real lives. As a bonus to everything that this novel offers, it is quite some fun to read. It is an entertaining soap opera.

In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his sense a dim rush-light, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, his fame doubtful. In short, all that is body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors.

I have a confession to make : I have great admiration and respect for the talent of John Irving, and this novel is one of the finest examples of the heights his art can reach. But I cared little for Garp and his tragicomic life rarely moved me beyond intellectual stimulation. I had a similar reaction to Owen Meany, another BIG novel from Irving, which makes me wonder a little why I feel both stories are manipulative of the reader and more than a little conceited, while my favorite remains "A Son of the Circus".

There are plenty of answers between the many pages of the present novel, and of the novels within a novel included in the text, since Garp the protagonist of the story is also a writer. Meaning a lot of pages describe how to write, what to write, the publishing world, the critics, even the readers reactions.

There are so many themes (and I had a metric ton of bookmarks that I have already discarded) that it's a hard choice where to begin. I went with the Marc Aurelius quote both because it captures perfectly the way Garp looks at the world around him, even from an early age, as a post-graduate student in Vienna, and because it caused me an inappropriate fit of the giggles, given the fact I had read about the Roman emperor/philosopher only a couple of days before in another novel:

“I think you’re going to find Marcus Aurelius particularly useful.’ ‘For what?’ I asked. Nightingale hesitated. ‘Quoting, mainly,’ he said. ‘And thus maintaining an air of erudition and authority.” (Ben Aaronovich)

I don't think mr. Irving would mind my misuse his tone setting quote. First, because he also likes to mention other authors and books in his novels (Garp states that Joseph Conrad is his childhood favorite), and secondly because throughout the novel the tragedy walks hand in hand with the comedy. Garp becomes a writer not because he wants to become rich and famous, but because he has great empathy for the suffering of others, because he wants, with all the powers in his possession, to make the world a safer place for parents and children. He wants to keep the Under Toad away or, if that is not possible, to offer some consolation and support.

Would it ever surface? Did it ever float? Or was it always down under, slimy and bloated and ever-watchful for ankles its coated tongue could snare? The vile Under Toad.

>>><<<>>><<<

Another possible starting point is to go back to the beginning, to Garp's mother, and look at the novel as a morality play about the sexual revolution in post-War America. Irving himself mentions this in the foreword – that his initial subject was the way men and women drift apart, despite loving each other in the beginning.

In this dirty-minded world, she thought, you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore – or fast on your way to becoming one or the other. If you don't fit either category, then everyone tries to make you think there is something wrong with you. [1]

I did like the militant / liberating part of the novel, especially in the context of a recent drift back in society towards intransigence and condemnation of 'otherness'. I could even say that I found Jenny Fields more likable as a character than Garp, her son. She's a pragmatist and a common sense preacher, while he is a bunch of nerves and contradictory impulses.

Jenny Fields discovered that you got more respect from shocking other people than you got from trying to live your own life with a little privacy.

After growing up in a college campus, mother and son go to Vienna, both to discover their abilities as writers. While Jenny Fields discovers the importance of opening phrases, Garp discovers decadence and alienation. Here are a couple of illustrative quotes:

That sentence [1] inspired others like it, and Jenny wove them as she might have woven a bright and binding thread of brilliant color through a sprawling tapestry of no apparent design.

and,
Years later, Garp read in a critical introduction to Grillparzer's work that Grillparzer was "sensitive, tortured, fitfully paranoid, often depressed, cranky, and choked with melancholy; in short, a complex and modern man."

'The Pension Grillparzer' is the first of stories within stories in the present novel and, according to Garp's publisher, to his wife and even to himself, the best he ever wrote. I tend to agree, mostly because it has something the rest of Irving's work lacks : briefness. It's a short story instead of a doorstopper. The other reason I love it is because it is a lot more honest than his efforts to impress either by shocking his readers or by clever turns of phrase.

"Liars and Criminals," Grandmother said. "Mystics and refugees and broken down animals."
"They were trying hard," Father said, "but they weren't coming up with the prizes."

In this condensed form is the credo of Irving's art of the novel. We are all terminal cases, but at least we get to try. The end is known before the start of the performance, but the show must go on. And a novelist is supposed to make stories better than life, to make them make sense as well as entertain. It's all a circus show with tragic clowns trying to get a laugh out of us, make us forget our troubles for a moment, before we have to go out into the night, alone. Writing a response to an angry reader, Garp the writer mentions this:

I am ashamed, however, that you think I am laughing at people, or making fun of them. I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave – and nothing but laughter to console them with.

In another place, as he grapples with writer's block, Garp rages against psychiatrists who oversimplify a man's personality. He plans to become a marriage counselor, but his wife Helen is unimpressed:

"You're a writer," she told him.
"Perfect qualifications for the job. Years spent pondering the morals of human relationships; hours spent divining what it is that people have in common. The failure of love, the complexity of compromise, the need for compassion."

That's because a writer starts by observing the world, digesting the information, even the one coming from direct, personal experience, before reorganizing it on paper. I do believe that the reason Irving's novels are a great 'imitation of life' is because he writes about the things he knows intimately – his own childhood in a New Hampshire college campus, his years of wrestling, his tribulations as a writer, his relationships with other people. The mistake most of the readers and critics make, at least according to Garp, is to use the novel to search for autobiographical elements. Nothing could be wronger.

Usually, with great patience and restraint, Garp would say that the art of fiction was the act of 'imagining' truly – was, like any art, a process of selection. Memories and personal histories – "all the recollected traumas of our unmemorable lives" – were suspicious models for fiction, Garp would say. "Fiction has to be better made than life," Garp wrote.

also,
"Christ," Garp said, "it sounds as if I wrote a 'thesis'. It's a f-cking 'novel', it's a 'story', and I made it up!"

>>><<<>>><<<

So, without looking for autobiographical elements, Garp becomes a writer, marries, has children, cheats on his wife, joins the Swinger movement ( "Oh boy," Helen murmured. "This is the last time I try to save anyone's marriage except my own." ) , becomes a feminist, then an antifeminist, experiences joy and devastating loss, publishing fame and hate-filled criticism – he is full of Life, for a while, and then he becomes immortal through Art. Who can ask for more? even if it's only a fictional character in a story?

Of course, 'The world according to Bensenhaver' is his most original, even if it is an X-rated soap opera – which it is. But it's so harsh; it's raw food – good food, but very raw. I mean, who wants it? Who needs to suffer such abuse?

As usual, it's up to the reader to digest this raw material and decide if it is abuse or food for thought. One of my favorite characters in the book is Jillsy Sloper, the unlikely proof-reader at the New York publishing house, the woman who reads because she must, not because she wants to escape or to be entertained.

If you ask me, that's just like men: rape you half to death one minute and the next minute go crazy fussin' over who you're givin' it to – of your own free will! It's not their damn business, either way, is it?

From Jillsy I naturally jump to Ellen James, a mute victim of rape, and another character I found more memorable than Garp himself. She refuses to become an icon for a radical movement, and only wants to rebuild her life as best she can.

I'm not an antifeminist! They make everything so black and white. That's why I hate them. They force you to be like them – or else you're their enemy.

>>><<<>>><<<

I didn't plan to end my review with these two clarion calls, but that's the way the dice rolled for this 'sprawling tapestry of no apparent design', this 'X-rated soap opera' , another BIG story from John Irving that I can now cross off my TBR pile. I'm not in any way disappointed for the time I spent in the company of Garp and his circus of freaks. I even think a second reading of Garp would prove as satisfying as the first, but there are so many more books beckoning. Even 'Hotel New Hampshire' at some point in the future.

Man šķiet, ka Ērvingam ir izdevies tas, ko viņš piedēvē Garpa spalvai: "Rakstnieka darbs ir iztēloties visu tik personiski, ka literārs sacerējums kļūst tikpat dzīvs kā mūsu personiskās atmiņas." Tik sasodīti patiess romāns. Un tik fantastiski traģikomiskas epizodes.
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