My Father's Tears
And Other Stories
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3.1 • 9 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A sensational collection of stories of the American experience from the Depression to the aftermath of 9/11, by one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series.
John Updike mingles narratives of Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel: “Personal Archaeology” considers life as a sequence of half-buried layers, and “The Full Glass” distills a lifetime’s happiness into one brimming moment of an old man’s bedtime routine. High-school class reunions, in “The Walk with Elizanne” and “The Road Home,” restore their hero to youth’s commonwealth where, as the narrator of the title story confides, “the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition.” Exotic locales encountered in the journeys of adulthood include Morocco, Florida, Spain, Italy, and India. The territory of childhood, with its fundamental, formative mysteries, is explored in “The Guardians,” “The Laughter of the Gods,” and “Kinderszenen.” Love’s fumblings among the bourgeoisie yield the tart comedy of “Free,” “Delicate Wives,” “The Apparition,” and “Outage.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two of the three posthumous Updike books publishing this year deal heavily with late-life laments.My Father's Tears and Other StoriesJohn Updike. Knopf, $25 (304p) Updike compresses the strata of a life in his delicately rendered, tremendously moving posthumous collection. In Free, the memory of a life-affirming affair buckles against a man's loyalty to his deceased wife: he recognizes that becoming a well-bred stick offers more consolation in old age than the sluggish arousal of his sensuality. In The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe, the retired protagonist, depressed by what he perceives as the universe's indifference to human affairs, is done in by the accumulated detritus of his life. Many characters are haunted by a sense of isolation, such as the protagonist of Personal Archaeology, who roams his Massachusetts estate, searching for traces of previous ownership while sifting through his own petty contribution, or the emotionally stranded absentee landlord of an Alton, Pa., family farm in The Road Home, who returns after 50 years and finds himself lost in his hometown. From Kinderszenen, which depicts the anxious time of smalltown late 1930s, to Varieties of Religious Experience, in which a grandfather watches the twin towers fall, time ushers in brutal changes. With masterly assurance, Updike transforms the familiar into the mysterious.
Customer Reviews
Old favorite
I looked forward to revisiting this collection of marvelous short stories and was enchanted all over again. However, several pages were missing that contained crucial passages. How does that happen? Boo!