I'm not a John Irving fan. Before this,I tried the Hotel New Hampshire. It didn't interest me. I see a lot of positive reviews of Garp. I found the humour pretty crude. There wasn't much of a story,and I really couldn't care.

The background to this book, is more interesting than the story itself. Seems John Irving didn't know who his father was,and threatened his mother,that unless he was told,he would invent one in a book.
His mother,also found Garp,too explicit for her.

Another addition to my abandoned shelf.

"The World According to Garp" was recommended to me at university by a friend, back in the olden days when there were not even any smart-phones, can you believe it?
Anyway, I started reading this masterpiece one sunny day, and by the end of the next sunny day I'd finished it, satisfied in the knowledge that I had just completed a book that deserves the accolade of masterpiece. Did I tell you I like this book?
Irving's work is nothing short of genius, and one of my three favourite books ever (the other two are Crime and Punishment and Catch-22).
I love the unconventional when it comes to fiction, and TWATG is certainly that.
Funny and sad, optimistic and fatalistic, this work takes you on a magic carpet ride with a cast of some of the most outrageous, lovable and grotesque characters you'll ever encounter in a book.
From Garp's stubbornly focused mother, Jenny, to lusty Garp himself, and the show-stealing transgender Roberta Muldoon, these folks leave you breathless as they careen through their roller-coaster lives.
Gender roles - such a hot and controversial topic today - was foreshadowed as a big social issue by Irving all those years ago. And sexuality as a theme is also pervasive, which itself has to be interesting to readers, right? And of course, everybody's favourite topic, death, gets plenty of airtime. There are some very unusual sticky ends that score high marks for originality and perverseness.
So, do yourself a huge, huge favour, and get a hold of this book. If you haven't seen the movie with Robin Williams in the starring role and John Lithgow giving a superb performance as Roberta Muldoon, watch it. It's also a beauty!

I can't finish this book. I'm really bothered by a character ummm trait? Habit? Depravity?

Oh John Irving. You are a twisted man, who writes about twisted sex and violence between twisted characters who are clearly very thinly veiled versions of yourself. I hate you. The only reason I finished your book is that I am obsessive about finishing things.

But maybe I did this backwards -- I read A Widow for One Year first, and THEN WAtG. I think most folks do it the other way around. So all of the issues covered in Widow seemed re-hashed to me, or re-covered, or just basically more of the same: struggling writer (whose crappy stories you are forced to read), his explicit sexual needs and fetishes (I know I sound prudish, but seriously, one of the major themes is Man's Uncontrollable Lust and How It Hurts Ladies), his marital problems, and then, very graphically, the Terrible Things That Happen to His Kids. In Widow the kids are actually killed before the start of the book and the book is all about the main characters dealing with the tragedy. In Garp the book just kind of goes, and goes, and then you're like: Okay, John Irving. You have just spent the last 2 pages explaining your main character's fears that something will happen to his family and also that the car is malfunctioning in an odd way. I can't imagine what happens next. And then it does. And then it does some more. And then the book continues for like 1000 more pages. Damn this book was annoying.

Good parts: all the stuff about Garp's mom, Jenny. She is a complex, well-painted psychological portrait. (To be fair, I guess Garp himself is too -- but he's a complex, well-painted psychological portrait of John Irving... which I find boring.) Jenny, however, is written to be an odd duck, and it's neat to watch John Irving use her as a tool to discuss the early feminist movement. I wish the whole book were about her.

Bilo je ovo jedno duuuuuugooo putovanje! Ali na kraju, ipak, osećam sreću što sam na ovo putovanje uopšte i pošao! Pre pola godine ili nešto više na Laguninom sajtu je bio članak u kom je trebalo izabrati broj i nekada u životu pročitati knjigu koja se krije iza tog broja. Ili je, pak, bilo u pitanju u kom ste mesecu rođeni, ne sećam se baš. Elem, meni je zapao Svet po Garpu. Za rođendan sam ovu knjigu dobio od svojih roditelja i početak oktobra sam posvetio njoj.

Do niedawna ta książka stała na mojej półce "powieści do zabrania na wyspę bezludną". Naprawdę ją uwielbiałam. S.T. Garp, jego oryginalne poczęcie, jego zawzięta matka, jego niekończące się przygody, dorastanie w uniwersyteckim kampusie pełnym zbereźnych młodzieńców, spadanie z dachów, odgryzane przez psa (i psu) uszy, łamane kończyny, tracone oczy, ucięte języki szalonych feministek, walka z weną i maszyną do pisania, płodzenie dzieci, erekcje i walki zapaśnicze, miłości i zdrady, kariera i sława, dramaty i rodzinne tragedie - jako nastolatka byłam tym wszystkim zachwycona i czytałam "Garpa" w kółko (tak samo zresztą wciągnął mnie "Hotel New Hampshire" Irvinga - bo już inne jego powieści o wiele słabiej) - mój egzemplarz jest zaczytany na śmierć i każda kartka lata osobno.
Odświeżenie sobie tego wszystkiego po latach nie było najszczęśliwszym pomysłem. Aż trzy gwiazdki daję tylko z sentymentu oraz dlatego, że jest to naprawdę porządnie napisane powieścidło. Jednak tylko powieścidło, obyczajówka, na dodatek z mocno mnie tym razem irytującymi bohaterami (wszystkimi! jak kiedyś kochałam wszystkich, tak teraz każdego nie znoszę) i wieloma różnymi niespecjalnie urzekającymi mnie dziś szczegółami. Szkoda.

This is one of the best books I have ever read, with a cast of characters that, by the end, all feel like members of the family. Even to try and "review" it would be more than I am qualified to do. I read it, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I can recommend it to anyone who enjoys a really good book.

A near perfect novel. A wonderful summation of a life lived.

Prior to reading this book, I had only read half of one novel by John Irving. I'm not going to mention the title here because I don't think it's quite fair to speak ill of a book which I didn't even finish, but suffice to say that I had no immediate plans to read another half of any of his work. That changed though when a friend talked me into taking The World According to Garp on a trip that I was planning. I thought the book was fantastic, and since I have no life I'm going to spend Friday night writing an overly detailed review on the deeper themes of it for the enjoyment of the few people with the dedication to read the whole thing. I welcome any response.

Authors are often told to write about what they know because they are already de facto experts. Inevitably this leads to "autobiographical fiction". This can range from an autobiography which is published as fiction (i.e. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath) all the way to a fanciful tale that is sold as an autobiography (A Million Little Pieces by James Frey). There are some people that say that they only read non-fiction because they prefer something "true" or "genuine" as opposed to something that an author just "made up". These are the people that should read The World According to Garp.

When we read fiction, we are omniscient. A character once committed to paper cannot change; they grow only to the extent that our understanding of them grows. The essence of the character, however, does not change. Jay Gatsby is the same person today that he was in the 1920s. I would argue that because of this immutability we have the capacity to truly know a fictional character better than we will ever know either a memoirist, or one of our intimate friends. To illustrate my point consider this, a friend might tell you that they are admiring your new hardwood floors; but only an author can tell you that our protagonist couldn't make eye contact belying the guilt they felt at the way they coveted your hardwood floors upon which they gazed. Few people are self aware enough to make those observations in retrospective memoirs, and the social contract doesn't engender that kind of honesty in day to day life.

In The World According to Garp, Irving plays with the story in a way to make you assume that it's autobiographical while at the same time mocking the reader for asking whether or not it is autobiographical. It's a very sly way of critiquing one's own work. Garp tells his children a bedtime story that is clearly based on reality, but then only admits to making up the parts of the story that the listener doesn't believe. In short, anything you believe to be true is so. Anything you don't believe to be true must need improvement. The question of course being, can we improve on the truth?

While weaving readers into this maze of almost understanding, the author peppers the novel with stories from his children's childhood’s that the reader is meant to assume are in fact true. How much of this story is true? The answer of course is that it doesn't matter. When we read a novel, we read it with the hope that the author knows his characters so well and has crafted his plot so meticulously that the next event happens because it is the absolute best possible event that could carry the story forward. We cannot worry that a dramatic change in plot occurs for reasons so trite as the fact that we're reading what really happened in the event on which the story is based. That would not be fiction, and it might not even be art. To further this line of thinking, the author critiques the protagonist's writing by saying that Garp's work gets progressively weaker as his writing becomes more autobiographical.

Fiction has GOT to be better than non-fiction. If it isn't, then it would seem to imply that our dreams are no better than our reality. If that is true, then our future indeed looks grim.

A very important book about intolerance. Some middle class pussies with swampy aspirations will not get it. This is a really good book.

"Svet po Garpu" je roman koji je ne samo vrlo interesantan, nego roman koji je vrlo pametno napisan. Zaista neverovatno slojevit, simboličan i bitan, ali u isto vreme i jako duhovit ali i tragičan i tužan kada je to potrebno. Jedan pravi rolerkoster emocija, i tvrdim da će se ovaj roman dopasti mnogima; posebno ako mu date šansu i ne ostavite ga po strani samo jer broji 600 strana.

I went through an extended period in my life where I re-read this book every year(1). It's a very fun read.

You can read it as a character study, watching how Garp changes as he ages and his responsibilities mature. You can read it as an analysis of the writer's experience (the bits about Garp's writing--and especially the chapter of Garps' book The World According to Benzenhurt--are excellent). You can read it as being about his relationships, primarily with women (his mother, his wife Helen, his transgendered friend Roberta, and his many indiscretions along the way).

I first read it as a book about feminism, with my mother asking "Is it a pro-feminist or anti-feminist book?" Well, it was the early 80s.

That isn't the best way to read Garp (and it has some nasty presuppositions, including that the book must be one of those two), but I decided it was pro-feminist. Not everyone agrees. At its heart, though, it's mostly anti-extremes. Garp spends his life trying tearing away from extremism: his mother embraces it as a way to define herself and he fears his own sexual and artistic urges can overwhelm everything else in his life.

It isn't a heady book, though, and it certainly isn't intellectual (in the sense that "intellectual" means "inaccessable").

From a writing standpoint, Garp does some interesting and risky things. It tells a person's story from conception to death, as opposed to skipping to "the good parts."(2) It switches focus from Garp's mother to Garp himself, leaving a protagonist dangling (and it's so well done that we barely notice). And 2/3 of the way through he take an extended break to read an engrossing chapter from one of Garp's books, making the entirety of Garp's life a frame story for that chapter (and in some sense for his writing).

So take that last part. Garp is a frame around his writing, and that writing culminates with that chapter, condensing his whole understanding of his life into that. So what is that chapter? We could argue about that longer than we would about Garp's meaning as a whole. And Garp lets us ask ourselves the question: can one writer's life be summed-up in his writing, or does that miss something important.

When you get to the last line, pay attention. If you find it sad, remember that he was a father and a writer and he connected (in both pleasant and unpleasant ways) with many people. Then re-read the line again.

It bears re-reading.

1) I also re-read Little Women annually, usually right before or after Garp. I don't know what the connection between the two is.

2) Irving likes this technique. When it's handled well, it's extremely effective. If you like it, check out The Ass Saw the Angel by [Nick Cave]