Really enjoyed this as with all of Irving books! He has such a knack for imaginative storytelling and telling these beautiful whole life kind of stories. Really enjoyed the humor balanced with the seriousness of this one.

I had heard great things about this book. It deals a lot with feminism, parental paranoia, and the challenges of career ambitions. I kept assuming this book was on the brink of something totally earth-shattering, so I kept turning the pages, and it never came.

This broke my heart, then broke my heart a little more every time. Why did I continue? Habit, I guess. It’s damn well written even if not really a dazzling ball of a time. I always read through the pages no matter how upsetting because something better might happen, or something else. I guess in this case it paid off because, if you’re reading this, then I’ve written a review. I promised myself I’m going to write something worthwhile, but honestly I feel like this won’t live up to the sincerity, this’ll probably be crap. I just hope it’s the kind of crap that’ll make you feel better, or the kind of crap that’ll emphasize something important you already know, or the kind of crap that feels real, like my experience with this book. Well, here goes.

The World According to Garp is a powerful caricature of life’s odds and evens, a condensed experience of what hearts go through in all the years you’ve had and all that’s left. The novel tells the birth, life, and death of T.S. Garp, father, husband, son, writer, feminist, wrestler, and cook. His joys, his troubles, his weaknesses, his anxieties, all abound in the pages.

There really is a sort of characteristic richness to American literature that separates their body of work from other countries, and there is no better writer who exemplifies this literary richness like John Irving. It is a dying form really, works of grand narratives and sweeping lifetimes. But maybe in this dying field this book of fatalities called The World According to Garp is one of the best ever written. I know, it is quite unfair to generalize this as a book about deaths, quite hard to really pinpoint what the central theme is. It mires itself in a whole range of issues from feminism, rape, sexuality, infidelity, and parenting to name a few. In any case, it’s a book about life, fittingly, chock full with deaths. It’s also a very forward-thinking book about women and their plight, especially for a book written in the 70s. It’s a book about a lot of things, somewhat a little too muddled at times, but it’s its got its heart in the right place, and a lot of heart it has.

One of the more significant elements to this novel is marriage. I’ve always approached the topic with careful apprehension. Not because of any experience, my parents’ marriage is fine despite its blemishes, better than most I would think. However these days I’m not sure about how practical it can be, especially among my disillusioned generation. Despite that, Garp’s marriage gives me a little insight to the flawed sensibility of marriage, if not its perfection. I have never forgiven nor tolerated infidelity. I’ve suffered at the receiving end of it, and it is one of the worst experiences a human can withstand. In my experience, I never forgave her. Yet in this case, I understood how married people can survive it. How marriage can work despite rough, gruelling patches. How parents, husbands, wives can learn to forgive, if not for each other, then for their children. I felt hurt reading this, but I felt love despite the faithless nature of human beings. Its raw emotions got through to me, I felt the glasses in my heart break and mend. I don’t want to seem impressionable, but after some thinking maybe marriage might not totally be a bad idea after all, just maybe.

There is this recurring theme in the novel of an ‘under toad,’ called as it is because Garp’s youngest son, always warned to be careful of the sea’s undertow by his parents, mishears it as ‘under toad’ and has always imagined a giant toad hiding under the sea ready to drown him if he ever strays too far. This symbolic under toad would go on to represent the anxieties and fears of Garp and his family, especially with regards to death. A living being, an amphibious undertaker, whose presence one never detects until it has come and plucked you with its tongue like an insect to be devoured. It does seem like an appropriate analogy. Like the underwater current transformed into a giant amphibious monster, maybe we do indeed transform death into a monster of our own imaginings. And maybe what we dread and loathe is something different from the final departure of a beloved. Often we fear the monster inside our heads, but then maybe what we fear is, in reality, a peaceful current taking those we love into the eternal sea we too shall reach one day. Is it really so dreadful? Maybe life really is like that, maybe the things that hurt appear from time to time, cloaked with our anxiety amplifying our pain. Usually it’s the surprise that elevates our suffering, coming out of nowhere, not unlike a slippery beast ensnaring its unsuspecting prey. It hits us when we are most vulnerable and we crumble as a result. You can’t blame people for seeing it worse than it is, but you can help the bereaved feel that life still has more in store for them, that life is still rich, that people come and go but our memories and our stories can never be taken by the monsters inside our heads. And in the same space occupied by our monsters, our anxieties, there lies our memories and the stories of the angels we hold dear. Life is bittersweet, but it’s not so bad, right?

“Horace Walpole once said that the world is comic to those who think and tragic to those who feel. I hope you’ll agree with me that Horace Walpole somewhat simplifies the world by saying this. Surely both of us think and feel.”

Garp always says that life is a tragic comedy, he’s not wrong. In life our strongest memories are often associated with either laughing or crying. Not opposite emotional responses but two beautiful things. When we cry it helps lessen the pain we feel, when we laugh it provides an outlet of joy we can share to those around us. They’re both infectious mechanisms as well, these outward manifestations of emotions like sadness and mirth enable us to empathize to the people who exhibit them. We all experience one or the other, sometimes, amazingly, both at the same time. Isn’t that also a nice aspect to life?

People are born, they fall in love, have children, make mistakes, they cry, they live through their mistakes, they forgive, they make mistakes again, they learn, they laugh, they grow old, then they die. Haha. Life is funny, is painful, it’s messy, it’s meandering, it’s even repetitive, but hey, it feels real, so does this book.

Ένα ωραίο βιβλίο, με χιούμορ και ευαισθησία. Το τελευταίο κεφάλαιο είναι τελείως περιττό κατά τη γνώμη μου, αυτή η προσπάθεια να κλείσει η ιστορία εξιστορώντας τι απέγιναν ένας ένας όλοι οι ήρωες του βιβλίου και πως πέθαναν χαλάει λίγο τη συνολική εικόνα που δημιουργεί το βιβλίο. Για έργο που δίνει τόση έμφαση στη φαντασία ως βασικό στοιχείο της λογοτεχνίας, δεν άφησε και πολλά στη δική μας φαντασία. Πάντως, γενικά μου άρεσε και ήταν πολύ καλή καλοκαιρινή επιλογή.

This is a story about a man who seems to think that being an absolute shitheel is an acceptable way to go about living life, and yet throws a tantrum whenever someone mildly mirrors his idiotic behaviour. He never grows as a person, even though he is surrounded by semi-decent human beings. He is, by far, the least interesting character in the book, despite the fact that the book is about him. He is the literary equivalent of the sound of styrofoam being rubbed together. I hope this was on purpose, but I deeply suspect that it wasn't. Even the girl who wears diapers into her teens is more likeable than T.S. Garp.

One star for Roberta Muldoon.

Garp’a Göre Dünya, çağdaş Amerikan edebiyatının kült eserlerinden. Aynı isimle beyaz perdeye de uyarlanmış. Ben kitaba konusunu okumadan ve filmini izlemeden başladım, böyle bir eser radarımdan kaçtığı için üzgünüm ve fakat ayrıntılara çok vakıf olmazsanız daha çok etkileneceğiniz bir kitap olduğunu da düşünüyorum.

Oldukça sert, lafını esirgemeyen ve zaten amacı da genelgeçer kabulleri sarsmak, çarpık değer yargılarını sorgulamak, toplumsal -özellikle cinsel- eşitsizliklere dikkat çekmek olan, son derece feminist bir eser Garp’a Göre Dünya. Cinsel eşitsizlik, tahammülsüzlük ve şiddete yazarın bir başkaldırısı. İlk sayfadan itibaren de hissediyorsunuz bunu.

Kitap, 1940’ların başında, ABD’de zengin bir ailenin hemşire olarak kendi ayakları üzerinde durduğu bir yaşamı tercih eden kızı olan Jenny Fields’in hikayesiyle açılıyor. Zamanın ve hatta zamanımızın kalıpları dışında düşünen ve yaşamak isteyen Fields, çocuk sahibi olmak isteyen ama evlenmek ya da bir erkekle daimi bir ilişki kurmak istemeyen bir kadındır ve bir gün buna bir çözüm bulur. Oldukça sıra dışı karakteri okumak çok keyifliydi. Ancak sonrasında Jenny’nin çocuğu Garp’a kayıyor kurgunun odağı ve aslında kitap, doğumundan ölümüne Garp’ın hayatını anlatıyor.

Oldukça sıra dışı ve güçlü girişin ardından, özellikle Garp’ın büyümesiyle beraber hikaye biraz Hollywood filmi tadında ilerliyormuş hissi verse de, ilerledikçe yazarın nereye varmaya çalıştığını görüyorsunuz. Garp’ın büyüme, evlenme, çocuk sahibi olma hikayesi ekseninde cinsiyet rolleri, eşitsizlik, cinsel şiddet, ebeveynlik gibi pek çok sosyal meseleyi masaya yatırıyor Irving. Kadının ‘makbul bir eş’ bulabilme olanağı nedeniyle üniversiteye gönderildiği dönemlerden yaklaşık yarım yüzyıl sonrasına geliyoruz kurguda ama kadın cinayetlerinden kürtaja pek de koşulların değişmediğini görüyoruz Irving’in kendine has kara mizahı eşliğinde.

Kitabın ufak bir bölümünde de yazar olmak isteyen Garp’ın kaleme aldığı kısa öykülere yer vermiş yazar; bunlarla da aslında muhtemelen kendi serüveninden de hareketle, bir yazarın kendi yaşadıklarını kurguya dökme hikayesine tanıklık ediyoruz. Hem kendini sağaltmak hem de yaşadığı deneyimlerden de faydalanarak başarılı bir kurgu ortaya çıkarmak amacıyla insanın yaşadıklarının içinden sanki sızıp giderek bir kurguya dökülmesinin iç hesaplaşmasını da yansıtmış kitaba. Bu da ayrıca etkileyiciydi.

Tabularınız konusunda hassas bir okursanız sizi rahatsız edebilir Garp’a Göre Dünya, ki amacı da tam olarak bu, ama cinsiyet rolleri, cinsel eşitsizlik konularına ilgi duyan, feminist edebiyatı seven ya da benim gibi iyi bir eserin biraz da sarsması gerektiğini düşünen okurlara muhakkak öneririm.

Lo primero que debe decirse sobre “El Mundo según Garp” es que es una novela maravillosa, llena de energía y arte, a la vez divertida, espeluznante y desgarradora, e inmensamente gratificante. La novela toma la forma de un extenso comentario sobre la vida del novelista T.S. Garp, autor de “El Mundo según Bensenhaver”, y una exploración de la relación entre el arte de Garp y su vida, los cuales llevan una pesada carga de catástrofe. Bensenhaver es, de hecho, una especie de parodia de Garp, así como el propio Garp parece en parte una parodia de John Irving, una relación compleja aunque claramente no una correspondencia exacta.

Garp es hijo de una enfermera autosuficiente que, según sus propias palabras, quería un trabajo y quería vivir sola. Conocida en el hospital como la Virgen María Jenny, encuentra, en 1943, una víctima de guerra condenada y virtualmente descerebrada, y decide que será él quien la dejará embarazada.

En el mundo exuberante, extravagante, inquietante y profundamente conmovedor de esta novela, pocos eventos son claramente inequívocos, aunque muchas mujeres se cortan la lengua para honrar a una niña violada y mutilada; un ex-jugador de los Philiadelphia Eagles, ahora transexual, se convierte en el mejor amigo y compañero de Garp; la madre de Garp, ahora enfermera en una escuela preparatoria de Nueva Inglaterra que no admite niñas, se convierte, cuando se publica su autobiografía, en una heroína feminista. Pero Garp, que cocina y limpia en su propia casa, es considerado debido a sus novelas un villano explotador por los más fervientes adoradores de su madre.

En el mundo de Garp nos reímos de lo horrible y lloramos de lo ridículo; son, después de todo, a menudo la misma cosa. “El Mundo según Garp” es esencialmente una novela sobre relaciones imperfectas, a menudo desconcertantes, pero duraderas entre marido y mujer, padre e hijo, madre e hijo, amigos y amantes, hombres y mujeres; entre la memoria y la imaginación, la vida y el arte: todas las redes frágiles que hombres y mujeres levantamos contra los peligros del mundo (aunque de alguna manera las mujeres parecen "mejor equipadas que los hombres para soportar el miedo y la brutalidad, y para contener la ansiedad de sentir lo vulnerables que somos a las personas que amamos", como escribe Garp en su novela ficticia, pero que también se aplica a la novela de Irving).

Hay que notar los temas extraños con los que John Irving parece estar obsesionado. La mutilación, la malformación, el sexo de la manera más salvaje posible, la lucha libre, los osos, los escritores, la ansiedad... todo esto podría dar como resultado una novela disparatada, pero Irving es muy hábil en la forma en que escribe. Integra estas variables como una parte normal, casi saludable de la vida. “El Mundo según Garp” en realidad se trata de un escritor que lucha por equilibrar sus sueños y sus responsabilidades, lo cual es una premisa aburrida, pero John Irving lo hace un viaje poblado de encantadores y coloridos inadaptados que dan vida a una obra tan seca y abstracta.

Esta novela es como un acertijo metanarrativo convincente, pues es obvio que el enfoque de Irving sobre la vida de Garp es biográfico. Es la biografía de un personaje ficticio y, sin embargo, la biografía de Garp está escrita por un escritor llamado Donald Whitcomb. También hay inmersiones en la propia escritura de Garp y ellas trazan paralelos con su propia vida. Y también se pueden dibujar paralelos a la propia vida de Irving. Él también nació de una madre soltera, y luchó y escribió mucho sobre Viena, entre otras cosas. La forma en que Irving se desliza entre las capas narrativas de sus novelas mantiene las cosas frescas e impredecibles.

Las fallas en esta red, algunas de ellas aparentemente tan importantes como el hecho de que no se reemplazó la perilla de la palanca de cambios de un automóvil, se suman a la espantosa y devastadora calamidad en el centro de la novela, un accidente del cual Garp es aún más responsable que su esposa, un accidente que destruye a un niño, mutila a otro y deja cicatrices en los cuerpos y los recuerdos de todos los involucrados, incluido un desafortunado estudiante incapacitado para siempre mientras recibe un acto de felación de despedida. La obsesión de Garp por proteger a su familia del daño le ha llevado casi a la ruina, no menos conmovedora por su ironía, su horror o su absurdo. "Si a Garp se le hubiera podido conceder un gran e ingenuo deseo", escribe Irving, "habría sido que pudiera hacer que el mundo fuera seguro. Para niños y adultos. El mundo le parece a Garp innecesariamente peligroso para ambos".

La catástrofe de la familia lo persigue. En el mundo de Garp, la memoria se apodera de la imaginación pero la imaginación transmuta y trasciende la memoria. El resultado es esencialmente inútil pero cierto. La verdad, por supuesto, tiene su propio valor, y un libro, como observa la mujer de la limpieza en la oficina del editor de Garp, "se siente verdadero cuando se siente verdadero. Un libro es verdadero cuando puedes decir, "¡Sí! Así es como se comporta la gente todo el tiempo”.

Y sabemos que “El Mundo según Garp” es verdadero. También es genial. En el nivel más elemental, lo seguimos leyendo para averiguar qué sucederá a continuación y cuando finalmente sucede todo, no queremos que se detenga. Así que seguramente lo leeremos una segunda vez, y lo encontraremos tan lleno de la hilaridad de la supervivencia como del dolor, como una telenovela para adultos que va de lo ridículo a lo sublime.

Reseña completa sin spoilers en mi canal de YouTube ➡ Maponto Lee

The first of Irving's blockbuster novels that won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1980. Be forewarned that there is a hyper-focus on sex in this book. It can be shrugged off for the most part. But he is consistent in this area and unabashedly remained true to a motif of explicitness throughout the book.

So I didn't fall in love with any of the characters. Helen, Garp's wife, is perhaps the most likable of the characters but she herself has a lot of baggage and is embroiled in several affairs over the years including being caught in the act during the infamous car accident scene towards the end of the book. Garp's mother, Jenny, is perhaps the most memorable character. She seems to be somewhere on the autism spectrum. Jenny clearly accomplishes the most of any of the characters including her work for women's issues.

Lest we think Irving is clueless, he does make fun of his own tendency to obsess in writing about sex. In the book within the book T.S. Garp is also a bestselling writer and his latest book is entitled 'The World According to Bensenhaver'. Garp is maligned and attacked by women over his chauvinistic attitudes. He also writes a lot about wrestling which I did not find terribly interesting.

4 stars. It is clear from the first pages of The World According to Garp that Irving is a mega talented writer. I probably don't give him enough credit but this is a memorable book that is tied up with a neat bow and one I won't forget soon. His writing seems effortless at times and it's easy to follow his plot lines. I just wanted him to write about something different. Eventually he did just that with his masterpiece Cider House Rules -- a more mysterious and better constructed novel.

A novel that revived my faith in fiction. I am in awe of Irving's ability to horrify me and make me laugh on the same page. My copy of the book is chock-full of underlining, commentary, and sticky notes. While I enjoyed the world according to Jenny Fields a bit more, and found the novel slipping into sentimentality by the end, I feel like I lived a lifetime with T.S. Garp and his family. What a trip! I cannot wait to read more from the author.

Looking back, such a great book, have to re-read this one too!

Blah, why this people love this book is beyond me. Maybe in the same way I find Seth's protagonist in It's a Good Life..., to be enduring while it's easy to see him being pretty repulsive people can find this self-absorbed character to be similarly enduring. Maybe it's a generational thing. Maybe Garp should have bought an AK-47 during this novel and gone and shot Rabbit and then turned the gun on himself. Maybe though just thinking of the book as the World According to Fart is enough.

Recently this Very Cool GR Friend (the kind of guy you want to have around you in a fight - as in ninja-fast-kapow cool!) and I were chatting. I'd like to share with you his thoughts:

VCF: ....another of my favorite authors, John Irving, has built his whole career on writing about characters who have gone through highly similar experiences to his own. Almost every one of his books has a relationship between the main character (usually a young man, either late teens to early twenties at the start of the book) and an older woman. He's recently talked in interviews about how this is a way that he has tried to deal with some personal issues, including a--gasp--relationship with an older woman when he was very young! Add to this the fact that many of his characters have been wrestlers (he was a wrestler in college), have some peripheral involvement in politics without it being the focus of the novel, and encounter sudden violence when the reader isn't expecting it. He carries a LOT of themes with him, and I suspect ALL of them come from his personal life.

But, for me as a reader, this has no effect on how I see the books. Perhaps it took a person with Irving's background to write A Widow for One Year. Regardless of what ingredients went into the pot, the meal that came out was damned tasty, in my opinion.

*****

Well. That spun the cogs in the old gear box. Wait a minute. I'd read Irving too. Just when was that?

When I was 15 and all hot under the collar about the person who had lent it to me and I was caught in that web which Irving weaves to so effortlessly wrap the reader. It was like being Garp at the same time as being a painful 15 year old. I'm sure I didn't understand half of what I was reading, in fact I hardly remember anything of the story. Just one tragedy involving a nurse.

I had no idea about Irving as a person when I read him. But the sense of the sheer emotional tumult I experienced reading the book still remains - hence 4 stars. Although 5 would be fine, too.

You've reminded me to take a look at his other books, VCF. And into the bargain, I've discovered a few other folks around here who are happy to discuss and share my thoughts on looking into Irving again. Thanks for the encouragement. I can't wait to start.