I'm sorry THIS is my favorite John Irving novel. See how hard it is to choose? He is a great writer.

Irving ile etkileyici bir tanışma.

Kalemi beklediğimden daha sert; bu aslında çok şaşırtıcı zira kitap bütünüyle şaka gibi. Alaycı üslubuna alışmak çok kolay, okura ilk zamanlar Hollywood filmi izliyormuş gibi hissettiriyor. Bu iyi bir şey ama kime göre neye göre tartışılır bir konu.

Hikaye anlatıcılığı enfes, patavatsızlık seviyesinde değil belki ama lafını asla esirgemeyen keskin bi’ dili var bu da başta Garp olmak üzere tanıdığımız tüm karakterleri okumayı keyifli, ilginç ve güzel kılıyor.

Uzun bir kitap ama okuru yoran cinsten değil belki tek engel şu olabilir: Toplumun bir kesimi tarafından hoş karşılanmayan cinsellik, cinsiyet rolleri ve eşitsizlik gibi konularla harmanlanmış bir hikaye okuyoruz Garp’ın dünyasında zira Garp aşırılıkları seven bir adam. Her şeyi abartır, her şeyi büyütmeye inanır; yazdıkları da abartılı. Ehe.

“You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life…”

It was not an easy book for me, I read about 30 pages in one sitting, I used to wonder what the hell I was reading here... but I found the desire to return again and again.

Exceptional storytelling: stories within stories, characters that flower and grow and wilt, locations that are characters themselves. Kindness, sex, broken and mended lives writ large.

Oh my god I hated this book. I hated it so much that if I'm ever in need of something to burn, this book will be it (which since it was a gift is pretty awful).

There was no plot at all. It's just the entire of Garp's life written down. And while his life was unusual, it was not book worthy. He was a dick who perved on babysitters. He was irresponsible, and got one son killed and the other maimed as a result.  He just wasn't very likeable. And he was a bad writer who kept trying to be one even though the one book he did write (which appears in it's entirety) was horse shit. There was just absolutely no point to this book at all.

My introduction to the fiction of John Irving is The World According To Garp. My familiarity with the author was limited to two film adaptations of his work that I've seen: The Cider House Rules which I recall well, and The World According To Garp, which has fled my memory. That meant I opened this book, published in 1976, with few expectations or comparisons. Stuffed with vignettes that alternate between the picturesque, risque, silly and tedious, I was often tickled by the writing and at times moved by the insight Irving soaked from his characters, but like a party guest who sticks a lampshade on his head, the author wore me down and I wanted him to stop.

Irving qualifies as a good storyteller and knows how to begin a chapter well, and a novel:

Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater. This was shortly after the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and people were being tolerant of soldiers, because suddenly everyone was a soldier, but Jenny Fields was quite firm in her intolerance of the behavior of men in general and soldiers in particular. In the movie theater she had to move three times, but each time the soldier moved closer to her until she was sitting against the musty wall, her view of the newsreel almost blocked by some silly colonnade, and she resolved she would not get up and move again. The soldier moved once more and sat beside her.

The narrative begins with a 22-year-old nurse named Jenny Fields, whose family is based on the New Hampshire shore at Dog's Head Harbor and maintains a small fortune from their ownership of a shoe factory. Feeling detached from her family, Jenny attends Wellesley to major in English literature, but drops out when she suspects her parents and older brothers expect her college enrollment to result in dating and marying a well-bred man. She finds a practical vocation with a very comfortable uniform and goes into nursing, carrying a scalpel in her purse for close encounters like those in the movie theater.

Applying herself to the maternity ward at Boston Mercy, Jenny Fields determines that she'd like to find a man to make her pregnant one day (in one try) and then go away. This offends both those who think she's joking and those who suspect she isn't. As Garp wrote of his mother's dilemma: "Her colleagues detected that she felt herself superior to them. Nobody's colleagues appreciate this." Transferred to a trauma unit, she cares for Technical Sergeant Garp, a ball turret gunner who catches flak that amounts to a prefrontal lobotomy. Capable of pronouncing one word ("Garp"), Jenny Fields surmises that her patient is a Goner, but small and neat and as mindless as a young child.

Thus was the world given T.S. Garp: born from a good nurse with a will of her own, and the seed of a ball turret gunner--his last shot.

Hired as a school nurse at the all-boys prep school in New Hampshire her father and brothers attended, Jenny Fields lives on campus and her son--known as "Garp"--grows up in the infirmary annex. Later named head nurse, his mother continues her education by building the most renowned private library at The Steering School and sitting in on classes, determining which would most benefit her son when he becomes a student. She overlooks athletics and when a teenaged Garp searches for a sport not involving balls, stumbles onto the wrestling program, befriending the divorced coach and his teenaged daughter, Helen Holm, who initially mistakes Jenny Fields for her estranged mother.

Garp writes a short story every month from freshman year to graduation. To impress Helen, he determines that he'll be a writer, making college pointless to him. Helen suggests he travel to Europe and when Garp discusses the idea with his mother, she decides to go with him. Selecting a postwar, post-Soviet occupation Vienna, on the advice of his English teacher and mentor Mr. Tinch, Garp discovers that Jenny Fields has some writing to do of her own. While he mostly pens puffed up letters to Helen, Jenny Fields completes her autobiography. Titled A Sexual Suspect, Jenny marches it into the office of a publisher in New York and not only sells it, but becomes a feminist icon.

Garp seduces Helen with the short story he completes in Vienna. Garp's first published work becomes, in the view of his wife Helen, the best he's ever written. Garp and Helen begin a family immediately, overwhelming Garp with anxiety and over-protectiveness of their two sons, Duncan and Walt. His lust diverts him into short-lived affairs with babysitters and later, swapping partners with a married couple whose husband Jenny meets at the English department of the state university she teaches at. These human blunders become fodder for Garp's novels, each more poorly received than the last. Throughout this, Garp struggles to make sense of it all.

In the Yellow Pages of Garp's phone directory, Marriage was listed near Lumber. After Lumber came Machine Shops, Mail Order Houses, Manholes, Maple Sugar, and Marine Equipment; then came Marriage and Family Counselors. Garp was looking for Lumber when he discovered Marriage; he had some innocent questions to ask about two-by-fours when Marriage caught his eye and raised more interesting and disturbing questions. Garp had never realized, for example, that there were more marriage counselors than lumberyards. But this surely depends on where you live, he thought. In the country, wouldn't people have more to do with lumber?

Garp had been married nearly eleven years; in that time he had found little use for lumber, still less for legal counsel. It was not for personal problems that Garp took an interest in the lost list of names in the Yellow Pages; it was because Garp spent a lot of time trying to imagine what it would be like to have a job.

I frequently laughed during The World According To Garp. Any literary character dwelling on the frustrations and eccentricities of writing, relationships and the greater world (just like Irving!) has my attention. The writing is the very definition of droll and often slapped a grin on my face. Jenny Fields is a character of terrific integrity and while I grew exhausted by how Irving uses her as a feminist icon and a political figure to Make Points, she is a memorable character. While Irving is given to rants, the novel at least has a point of view and is often entertaining to read.

Along with the good comes stuff I don't like being made to read. Irving includes Garp's Vienna short story in its entirety and excerpts from his novels within the text. John Steinbeck, or one of his characters in Sweet Thursday, called this "hooptedoodle." Like Steinbeck, I like that authors write this stuff, I just wish I didn't have to read it, preferring it be tucked away in an appendix instead of disrupting the story. Irving seems to have a very high opinion of his gifts as a satirist but when he gets stuck on ridiculing feminism, I started to skim too. It wasn't that I agreed or disagreed or didn't think he wasn't clever, I just don't want to read jokes like this from a male author in 2019.

Actually, I dislike all jokes, which is what The World According To Garp devolved into for me, a joke book. Characters are maimed, maim others, are maimed again and ultimately killed off in spectacular ways. Rather than emulate life, which often goes unfinished, every character is given this cruel send-off. Irving's fans might call this "satire" but I got to a point where I just needed it to stop. It's a clever book, a vignette-driven book that wore out its welcome for me. As a novel that's really five or six good short stories with recurring characters, I enjoyed picking the pieces off the plate that I liked and dumping the rest.

Ich hatte dieses Buch schon in meinen jungen Jahren gelesen und ich war neugierig ob sich meine Meinung geändert hat.
Dieses Buch war damals mit all seinem teils schwarzem ,dreckigem , überspannten aber immer warmen Humor und seiner Anarchie für mich( bis dato Lieblingsautoren, Fontane ,Böll, Tolstoi, Christie) etwas Neues.
Und auch heute hatte ich soo viel Freude an seinen skurrilen Einfällen, auch wenn ich zwischendurch Längen empfunden habe und auch die Augen verdreht habe bei der nächsten "Geschichte in der Geschichte" . In der Rückschau wüßte ich nicht was er hätte weglassen sollen , so rund war das Gefühl für mich am Schluß.
Spannend für mich ,wie stark er die Mechanismen gesellschaftlichen Diskurses thematisiert . Die Fanatisierung und das Unversöhnliche. Feministinnen ,die sich in Solidarität mit Opfern selber schädigen. Männer, die Frauen an ihren Platz weisen wollen. Und dazwischen Menschen, die auf ihrer Individualität bestehen .
Kam mir direkt brandaktuell vor.
Traurig, daß wir Menschen auch heute nach darüber diskutieren wie stromlinienförmig der Einzelne sein muß und doch in der Gesellschaft dazu neigen jeden ,der aus der gewöhnliche Schublade fällt aber doch gerne in eine andere , mit tollen neuen Etiketten zu stecken.
Womöglich ist es uns nicht gegeben, Mitmenschen einfach mal ohne Etikett so sein zu lassen wie sie sind. Solange sie niemanden schädigen. Und vielleicht wollen wir auch selber uns irgendwo einordnen können.
Und dabei schreibt Irving voller Wärme und Respekt über die Menschen und das Leben.
Spannend, daß er anscheinend polarisiert. Ich kenne viele Leser, die mit seinen Romanen nichts anfangen können oder die er sogar erbost.
Ich habe ihn wieder sehr gemocht.

Right from the opening chapter a lot of talk of masturbation and inappropriate erections....what was I getting into? The world that Garp inhabits is a strange wonderful world full of rich peculiar characters and absurd situations. The more I delved the more I was enticed by the world of Garp. I loved parts of this more than others but what I loved I really loved. What kind of man is John Irving to write such an interesting book and character with such groundbreaking issues.

This book really has so much to offer. Garp is full of contradictions and inner turmoil being the son of a leading feminist mother, he enters this world under questionable methods, Garp was always destined for an interesting life. Such diverse characters bring so many social issues to the fore, there is so much covered and artfully written how can you go past a book that thrusts rape, mutilation, feminism, sexuality, transgenders and depression and still entertain with humour. Garp having a prominent feminist mother conflicts with his own ideas of masculinity and gender identity bringing tumult and acute anxiety to his world, Garp is a multilayered complex character, often portraying the internal processes of a tortured writer causing the omnipresent Under Toad to lurk beneath the surface.

This book is a wonder, on one hand it's depressing as hell, there is death (a lot of death) references of rape is a recurring theme but amongst all the heaviness and serious issues what it's best at is finding the flaws but also embracing the eccentricities, these are the people that colour Garp's world and it's a joy to behold.

DNF 1/4
Nie wykluczam, że wrócę, ale na pewno nie w najbliższym czasie.

A dry witted, sarcastic masterpiece, the funniest novel Irving wrote and dealing with the creative process, free love, emancipation, and parenthood.

A cool fact about Irvings´ writing style is how he mixes epic descriptions with prosaic, short passages and especially hides shocking plot twists in a way that creates ultimate WTF moments that leave the reader staggering between laughing and catatonia. And he does it again and again, one reads, doesn´t expect something because everything is easygoing, subtle, and funny and again, insidious out of nothing, bam, in your face, the next attack in the quality of a high class thriller.

Another trademark is that the characters are often partly omniscient, extremely smart, and close to mentalists and oracles, but stay stoic and ultra badass cool regarding their own fate, happenings around them, the world in general, quite kind of Chuck Norris style like „John Irvings´ characters don´t get surprised by calamities, calamities are awaited by emotionless superhuman psi powered protagonists and then ignored.“

The novel gets really dark towards the end and I guess that the one or other reader might not finish it for this reason, but the allegories and metaphors around abuse and how society and victims react to it, leave room for endless discussions and interpretations. And when I say dark I mean worse than normal horror with jump scares and then it´s over, this is a terror that stays forever with one in the readers' mind.

When the novel was released in 1978 the themes, especially transsexuality, sexual abuse, and feminism, were surrounded by, for today's standards, unbelievable conservatism, bigotry, stigmas, and hatred and the reason why Garp was Irvings´ breakthrough may lie too in the unique way he dealt with those topics and brought them to a broader audience. And his genius, of course.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...

"Oduvek sam znao da je potraga za savršenstvom smrtonosna navika." Neko je napisao da je ono što ćete naći u Irvingovim romanima raskoš. I upravo bih se zadržala na ovoj ključnoj riječi. S toga, nemojte da vas iznenadi okruglo 600 stranica, digresija i izleta, brojnost likova,.. Samim tim, nije za svakoga.