The Afterlife and Other Stories
A quiet story about an old sandstone farmhouse, family memory, and the passing of generations. The feel of disappearing time lingers in the background with gentle ache.
Work Information
A quiet story about an old sandstone farmhouse, family memory, and the passing of generations. The feel of disappearing time lingers in the background with gentle ache.
A quiet story about an old sandstone farmhouse, family memory, and the passing of generations. The feel of disappearing time lingers in the background with gentle ache.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Knopf
- Published
- 1994-10-25
- Pages
- 336 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 14.1 x 2.9 x 20.5 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780679435839
- ISBN-10
- 0679435832
- Price
- 8325 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Anthologies & Literary Collections/General
From one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Rabbit series: t wenty-two stories that explore life beyond middle age. To Carter Billings, the hero of John Updike’s title story, all of England has the glow of an afterlife: “A miraculous lacquer lay upon everything, beading each roadside twig, each reed of thatch in the cottage roofs, each tiny daisy trembling in the grass.” All twenty-two of the stories in this collection—John Updike’s eleventh—in various ways partake of this glow, as life beyond middle age is explored and found to have its own particular wonders, from omniscient golf caddies to precinct sexual rumors, from the deaths of mothers and brothers-in-law to the births of grandchildren. As death approaches, life takes on, for some of these aging heroes, a translucence, a magical fragility; vivid memory and casual misconception lend the mundane an antic texture, and the backward view, lengthening, acquires a certain grandeur. Travel, whether to England or Ireland, Italy or the isles of Greece, heightens perceptions and tensions. As is usual in Mr. Updike’s fiction, spouses quarrel, lovers part, children are brave, and houses with their décor have the presence of personalities. His is a world where innocence stubbornly persists, and fresh beginnings almost outnumber losses.
JOHN UPDIKE was the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels, including The Centaur, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2009.
Reviews
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Updikeの真骨頂！
4月22日注文、5月9日到着。本の状態はよく、安心しました。この中の短編"Farrell's Caddie"を俳優の素晴らしい朗読で聞いて、読みたくなり注文しました。
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"The birds in the trees, the sunflower at the edge of the orchard,the clumsily pasted up valentine received years ago from a distant grandchild, all have a worth which might at any moment be called into account. It was a way of advertising that one's life was infinitely precious" so updike writes in the SANDSTONE FARMHOUSE. THese short stories complement the early short stories and the essays updke wrote on the james brothers henry and William as well as the scarlet letter and highlight the religious sensitivity of updike. The god consciousness of the writer is apparent on every page as he also writes some short stories on Hinduism and Jainism highlighting the worthiness of everything that exists and goes beyond Christendom. The worthiness of all people and all things is highlighted in this collection and the collection complements the essays updike wrote and which can be easily obtained detailing the various religious ideas which updike professed over the years and I encourage the reader to peruse the essays and early short fiction which show updike at his best. Updike has been accused of being a misogynist and that can be gleaned from the stories where the hero travels to a foreign country as in this collection with his 3rd or 4th wife and they are at each other's throats. The writing in these stories is not very good and shows that updike was not always at his best when detailing the interrelationships between men and women and sometimes the banter between men and women becomes unglued andcan never be happy with any women only with the absolute or is this what updike is getting at in these stories. The stories where the hero travels to Italy and Ireland are especially redolent of this aspect of misogyny and the stories suffer as a result but the collection as a whole is recommended as detailing the god consciousness of updike in his short stories and essays and reviews the novels also show these attributes.
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It's been almost ten years since Updike died and I still mourn for him as if I lost a friend. It's weird. I've never felt that way about any other great writer or famous person.
Related Literary Awards
- O. Henry Award Edition 71 (1991) ・Winner