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A Widow for One Year
By : by John Irving (Goodreads Author)
ratings : 55,591
ratings reviews : 2,529
reviews
Original Title : A Widow for One Year
ISBN : English
Edition Language : English
Series : Audie Award for Fiction, Unabridged (1999)
Paperback, 576 pages
Published June 1st 2004 by Ballantine Books (first published 1998)
Characters :
Setting :
Description : “One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole woke to the sound of lovemaking—it was coming from her parents’ bedroom.”This sentence opens John Irving’s ninth novel, A Widow for One Year, a story of a family marked by tragedy. Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character—a “difficult” woman. By no means is she “One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole woke to the sound of lovemaking—it was coming from her parents’ bedroom.”This sentence opens John Irving’s ninth novel, A Widow for One Year, a story of a family marked by tragedy. Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character—a “difficult” woman. By no means is she conventionally “nice,” but she will never be forgotten.Ruth’s story is told in three parts, each focusing on a critical time in her life. When we first meet her—on Long Island, in the summer of 1958—Ruth is only four.The second window into Ruth’s life opens on the fall of 1990, when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career. She distrusts her judgment in men, for good reason.A Widow for One Year closes in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother. She’s about to fall in love for the first time.Richly comic, as well as deeply disturbing, A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force. Both ribald and erotic, it is also a brilliant novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief.Source: john-irving.com
Literary Awards : Audie Award for Fiction, Unabridged (1999)
REVIEWS :I hated this book. John Iriving's inability to write women characters was a huge problem in this book since it has a female protagonist. I didn't care about her at all and I wasn't that intrigued by the story either. I generally like John Irving's writing style, but it didn't make any difference to me with this book because I didn't like one single character. OK here's my final word on John Irving, because I will probably never read anything else he's written (though I've heard The World According to Garp is his best.) His characters are real and they were JUST ENOUGH to keep me going each of the twenty times I nearly stopped reading this novel. The plot is a rambling patchwork in which we never, ever, forget the writer sitting at his typewriter, searching for something to say. When he finds it, he riffs on it till it dies, and then searches for A Widow for One Year turned out to be better than I initially thought, although the pages featuring graphic sex scenes were kind of disturbing and felt out-of-place in the story. This book otherwise not only paints a vivid, realistic portrait of grief, but also love and nostalgia. John Irving has yet again created a whole world between the covers of a novel. Characters grow old with the reader, experience lust and loss, love and life. The thoughtfulness of his every detail and the concise placement of every word create a landscape more vivid than realityOne of the interesting topics of conversation in A Widow for One Year involves the main character’s attitude towards autobiographical fiction. Irving’s protagonist, world-famous author Ruth Cole, gives one hope that the The first thing that struck me about this book was the heart-stopping beauty of Marion, a central character near the beginning of the book. It's tough to get images that concrete in written words, but Irving handles it without strain. Its not just a physical description, its the way that the rest of the image is a bit darker, a bit fuzzier when Marion is in the picture, like Irving is using the depth of field in a photograph to highlight the subject, like her physical brilliance is so Just started... I don't know but what's with all the italicized words? Does the author do this in all his books?Omg I just finished it. It sucked so much. The characters were all flat, reduced to one quirk and one obsession, with maybe one exception (Rooie), and OMG again, why would a writer write about a writer writing about a writer? And what was it with the main character's family of writers, and her mother's lover being a writer too? And why would the author avoid simple names or pronouns, I’d forgotten what an intoxicating writer John Irving is. His compelling prose has a clarity and starkness that manages to entertain your brain and soul while permanently incorporating his characters and stories into your memory and being.Irving is not one of those writers who kicks out a new novel every year. His novels are too carefully crafted, too (dare I say it?) literary to be anything less than an evolutionary process. After reading A Widow for One Year, I suspect his books are I had really expected something different. This is the 1st of his books that I have read but I knew he wrote The World According to Garp, Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. Maybe it is just this book but I have to say that Mr. Irving has his mind in the gutter. (sorry to all of you who think this was a terrible thing to say!) He is funny sometimes and he does write memorable scenes, however... right now we are perusing the red light district in Amsterdam. There is sex on just about The first couple hundred pages of the book, before it jumps forward several decades, are the most even, and it is this part of the story that is most endearing. This first part introduces us to the story's three or four main characters and chronicles their shared summer of 1958--a summer which, you guessed it, has profound effects on the rest of all their lives.And it is much of the rest of these lives that Irving takes us through in the remaining four hundred pages, and due to the front-heavy I don't much know how I feel about this one. The first section of the book is completely brilliant. As is the last line. But in between is rushed, contrite, and full of coincidences that seems like cheap ways to move the story along. Irving gets around conflict in the second part of the book by killing people off. Don't want to deal with the Ruth/Ted conflict? Kill him off! Don't want ruth to have to face her husband about what happened in Amsterdam? Kill him off! And apparently, having a baby I hated about 89% of this book. The first part-- the whole 1958 part-- I really loved. Loved Eddie's goofy dad, the clam truck driver, Mrs. Vaughan, Ted drunkenly making Ruth grilled cheese. I was really excited to keep reading. I even loved the beginning of the next part-- Eddie running around in the rain trying to get to the book reading. After that? JUST WTF. Adult Ruth was insufferable. Hannah was about four billion times more insufferable. Ruth's journal and novel excerpts-- yep, What the hell happened to John Irving??? The man that gave us Garp, Cider House, and Owen Meany has only produced mediocre works at best since 2000. Thankfully we have Richard Russo. I was very close to not finishing this book around page 350 (the first section wasn't so bad, but the middle really lagged). It was very long (very wordy) and to be honest, I didn't care much for Ruth or Eddie. I am glad, however, that I continued reading because it got much better toward the end. I started liking Ruth only when she got married and became a mother. It changed something in her, I suppose. Although this was not one of my favorite books by far, I did like the way John Irving could This is one of those 537-page books that, after you've read about 100 pages, you realize you've pretty much seen what the author's handing out and you don't care for it. This is a drag because there is so much more of it to go and only some misguided impulse to finish what you've started goads you stubbornly onward.What's not to like? Well, here's some: At times Irving writes with the grace of a ballet dancer and at others he lumbers along like a blindfolded football player looking for an exit..
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