Tobias WolffRecensioni

The narrator has learned to mimic the demeanor and manners of his adoptive tribe while hiding as much of himself as possible in an effort to blend in at his prep school in New England. But in his last year, everything he is worked for falls apart, and his destiny takes him in unexpected places.
The literary culture of the school is deeply ingrained, and for many boys, this leads to an obsession.

This collection strikes a good mix between well-known tales and exceptional pieces by lesser-known writers. The stories I read by authors I had never heard of before pleasantly surprised me.½

Winner of the Pen Faulkner Award

I listened to the Audible version. Stories were chilling, prophetic, suspenseful, cautionary. Liked the reader very much!

I Feel Incredibly Ambivalent

I am really not sure how to feel about this very short story about the final moments and final memory of an amusingly awful caricature of a book critic. I wondered if reading a bunch of reviews would help, but this story seeks to be rather polarising with me bouncing around in the middle.

It is undeniably written with exemplary prose and some genuinely amusing, ridiculous, and thoughtful moments and ideas...but there is also a sense that the writing is overwrought and self congratulatorially smug. This is particularly apparent when coupled with the protagonist himself and how the ultimately the story is about the death of an contemptible (misogynistic, possibly racist) critic and the quaint and incongruous memory they have in their final moment.

Good art makes you feel something and I definitely feel things (I just can't tell how positive they are about the story or not), and works can simultaneously be great, while obviously sniffing their own farts, so...yeah. If I'm honest, I think there are so truly exquisite lines, but the smugness spoils it for me.

The performance is spectacular and it's still well worth a listen if you have Audible.

Judging by the majority of the reviews here, I'm going to chalk up my experience to autism, childhood trauma, and a lack of affection for my parents because I just read an extremely short story about a selfish and ignorant father who, inspite of it being Christmas Eve and his marriage being on the rocks, stayed late on the slopes, drove in dangerous conditions while pontificating about himself and denigrating his son. Yeah, he has a moment or two of brief solipsistic thought about his feelings about his relationship without actually considering his partner or child or list don't to them, but that doesn't mean he actually cares or cares enough not to respect her time and the safety of their son.

Cis men need to be held to a higher standard because this wouldn't read the same or be treated anywhere near the same if this was a character of any other gender or experience. I mean, sure he only thought about himself all day and put him and his son in serious danger, but he really wanted to get back and everything to be OK. What a guy!

Honestly, getting myself a bit worked upwriting this and I can't tell if it's the dad being a total arsehole, reminding me of my crap folks, or getting all in my head about the positive and deep emotional reactions I'm seeing in other reviews.

I seriously thought this was going to end with a horrific accident.

OK. I'm really losing it now. People are saying the message is to live in the moment and not care about the future? That the organised kid (who to me seriously reads as neurodivergent and possibly grasping on to whatever stability he can with his parents splitting up) is finally loosening up and seizing the day? What in the fresh privileged, devil may care, cisheteronormative neurotypical masc hell are we talking about here? Screw your wife and her plans for Christmas Eve. Yours and your son's safety and likelihood of ending up in the back of a squad car, ambulance, or hearse before you get home. Seize the day, baybeeeeeee! EVERYONE! GET UP ON YOUR DESKS!!!

I get the kid idolising the rebellious, read: reckless, father. What's everyone else's excuse?

I'm leaving the review at two, as the prose is great, but I want to give it a one so bad.

(Oof. I am really tired, grumpy, and neurodivergent tonight with that nightmare chronic pain. This must be my most autistic review yet.)

Fighting Misogyny with Racism?

This is a very short story from a clearly talented and lauded author about a woman going to interview for a job at a college as a concession to their statute about at least interviewing women. When she discovers she never had an actual chance at the job she goes off script in her guest lecture, going on a racist and unsubstantiated tirade about the torture and murder of a preacher by the Native American people whose stolen land the college is on. Like, I'm all the way in for sticking it to the man and highlighting the plight of anyone in academia who isn't a cishet white man, but an (assumed) white woman going on a demonising and felacious rant about what I understand to be a confederacy of multiple tribal nations as if they are one inhuman people is not the way to go about it. Honestly, it feels like she basically did the thing the Kramer guy did -- going on an abhorrent outburst of racism because of a perceived wrong.

I just...don't know about this one folx. It's bad to be a sexist POS, but being racist or bigoted in any other way is also absolutely unacceptable, and suffering one kind of discrimination doesn't give you the right to do that to another group, regardless of intersections. It makes a mockery of what seemed to be the point of the story, and the way her lecture is handled and how it abruptly ends feels triumphant for her, so it doesn't seem to be making any commentary on how those who lack certain privilege still discriminate those who have equal or less privilege.

Am I way off here? No one else seems to have really addressed this issue, beyond one review saying she says some 'un PC stuff'. Maybe this is a case of this being the first thing of this author I've read and many others already being spellbound by his other work? I don't know.

In this extraordinary memoir of Wolff’s Vietnam experience, there is a haunting scene that reveals the major cultural differences between the American soldiers and Vietnamese culture. Wolff was a first lieutenant (he was a special forces member) assigned as an adviser to a South Vietnamese unit. He had spent a year at language school in the United States and was fluent in Vietnamese. He and some ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) soldiers are hanging out when two of the ARVN find a small puppy wandering around. Wolff watches, annoyed, as one of the soldiers swings the puppy by a leg around his head and then ties it to a tree. Wolff wanders over and asks what they intend to name the dog. The Vietnamese laugh bemusedly at this remark, but when Wolff persists, they laugh maliciously and reply, “dog stew.” The sergeant grabs the dog and, knowing it will drive Wolff nuts, swings the puppy slowly over the fire. Wolff tries to get them to stop, knowing they are playing with his mind, but the cultural reality and his whiteness prevent his interference.

Racial issues pervade the story. Wolff was attacked by a group of Vietnamese outside a bar. He keeps yelling he must be the “wrong man,” but they continue until another American steps out of the bar and the attackers realize they have the wrong person. Wolff realizes that to them all white people look the same. When he tries to explain it to his black sergeant, the sergeant understands him immediately and simply says, “You nigger.” The analogy to his experience in the United States is unmistakable.

Wolff's analysis of the Tet offensive is striking. "As a military project Tet failed; as a lesson it succeeded. The VC came into My Tho and all the other towns knowing what would happen. They knew that once they were among the people we would abandon our pretense of distinguishing between them. We would kill them all to get at one. [Iraq come to mind, anyone?:] In this way they taught the people that we did not love them and would not protect them; that for all our talk of partnership and brotherhood we disliked and mistrusted them, and that we would kill every last one of them to save our own skins. . . .They taught that lesson to the people, and also to us. At least to me."

A second read, the first was more or less when it was published, thirty years ago. Tobias is ten and he and his mother are fleeing Florida and yet another of her bad relationships, headed for Utah; it is the early 50's. When she and Tobias's father split, each took one child. The other, Geoffrey Wolff is also a writer and among other things wrote about their father in The Duke of Deception- a handsome, brilliant, charismatic man who was unable, basically, to ever tell the truth. He tells the story of this six or so year period of his life in a series of connected stories in sections--each section focussed around a place and a situation and that are further divided into separate vignettes.

If possible the memoir was even more rewarding the second time around because my understanding of both the emotional difficult and the writing 'craft' that went into the creation goes so much deeper. Wolff achieves (what is more or less impossible) writing a memoir about that specific (and critical) period between pre- and late-adolescence not as a narrative but as a series of stories, dialogue and all, that is utterly convincing as a memoir. While it is written as if fiction, it feels and is, surely, the truth of that period of his life. Perhaps only his truth, but truth. One could discuss why this works for days or weeks. Wolff himself says in his preface: "I remember the past in terms of stories. That's how I think of it, how I talk about it, and how I've written it here." I've written plenty of stories that are based on my life experiences, but I deviate from the facts knowingly to shape the story the way I want it to go. Most of us can't help doing that, interfering with and remaking our past in that way. Here, Wolff ruthlessly re-imagines the past exactly as he remembers it, I say ruthlessly because he doesn't spare himself for one second. He is his father's son and lying and subterfuge come naturally to him, sometimes with (some) justification, sometimes not. Also he re-inhabits the mind of the boy he was, with no judgement from his adult self about the things he did (and didn't) do. Such as regret, yes, or even something like disbelief at his stupidity or naivete but never judgement. He was a kid, this is how I coped. The self-awareness that went into the work is blinding. *****

i really hate how this book talks about women.

Boys at a 1960s New England prep school feverishly compete for the honor of meeting Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Ernest Hemingway. Old School was good, although the slimy first-person voice is disturbingly intimate. The narrator is a callow weasel, and spending time in his company makes you want to take a shower. (cf. A Separate Peace)

I'm not really a short story fan, but this was recommended to me by a colleague and I really liked most of the stories; especially the one about the college professor! 192 pages

En Vida de este chico, Tobias Wolff narra sus recuerdos de niño y adolescente, cuando, divorciados sus padres, recorría con su madre con la que formaba una auténtica «pareja telepática» las carreteras de Estados Unidos de un lado a otro del país. Toby o Jack, como le gusta llamarse a sí mismo en homenaje a su adorado Jack London absorberá entre mapas, whisky, peleas a puñetazos, amistades y traiciones, la esencia de esa América de los años cincuenta que marcará irremediablemente su juventud. Una juventud con toques minimalistas y dickensianos a un tiempo y que sirve aquí a su autor para trazar con humor y ternura el retrato de un tiempo pasado en el espejo de su propia imagen.

Decidido a encajar en su elitista colegio, el narrador ha aprendido a mimetizarse con sus compañeros y a competir con ellos por un lugar en el que hacer realidad su vocación literaria. Pero en el camino deberá aprender a contar la verdad sobre sí mismo. Wolff nos acerca la mirada de un joven escritor a la vez que nos pregun ta: ¿Quiénes somos? ¿La persona que creemos ser, la que mostramos a los demás, o la que los otros imaginan que somos?

A gift from a neighbor, I decided to read it based on the review quotes on the back cover, many heralding it as a 'tour de force" and "achieves a real profundity". It does indeed pay homage to the art of story, but not without some strong opinions, of which one in particular stood out. A fan of Ayn Rand's books, as well as 'objectivism', the theme that drives both "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead", he makes her look like the anti-christ. Regardless, a story focused on writers and the skill/pit falls of writing, this one pales in comparison to others I've read. Rather than belabor the subject, I'll beg off further insights or opinions for now.

The hundreds of reviews here say everything I'd like to say about this book so there's little I can add. This Boy's Life was recommended as a powerful example of a Memoir and it did not disappoint. Wolff's writing illustrates the power of the "show-don't-tell" principle. He's not having a long internal dialogue telling the reader what to think of his situation. Wolff's together with Mary have similar struggles and they are my favorites for memoir. Will look to read another of his.

Well written and absorbing novel of being in a prep school surrounded by wannabe writers. Helps to know something about Ayn Rand, Frost, and Hemingway. It is short but has a lot of impact. About truth and pretending.

Pretty good memoir of a young boy who has to deal with a lot of obstacles, including an abusive step-father. I should try to watch the movie, but haven't yet.

An oddly satisfying short story about three "friends" (I use that term lightly) on a hunting expedition in the snow. Wolff changes our view of one of the three 180-degrees before the end of the story and it is done deftly and quite marvelously.

I pondered a bit about what message he might have been trying to convey and settled with: to have a friend, you must be a friend; if you fail at that, beware the consequences.

Short story that I was able to read online for free. The main character clearly has no regard for anyone but himself. He is jaded and due to his mundane routine he cannot take anything seriously. Not sure if there is some hidden message, I took it as life being so boring that when something traumatic happens, you don't know how to deal with the curve ball thrown at you. Despite it being short, the story was a good read.

Wolff drifted into the army at the age 18 in 1965 after dropping out of school and deserting from the merchant marine after an attempt on his life, having given little real thought to the war. During basic training he found that he was suited to the physical requirements, and he became an idealistic recruit but when he is recommended for officer's training school, he soon realises that he is unsuited to the rank. The US Army progressed him, anyway.

Wolff passes out as a Lieutenant in the Special Forces and spends a year learning Vietnamese before being posted abroad as a military liaison to the South Vietnamese Army. He soon realised that his posting was less hazardous than his fellow boot-camp companions' assignments in the north of the country. He has a couple of close shaves, but his main enemy was boredom.

The book is written with a non-linear narrative but is told in thirteen chapters that read like short stories. There is an economy to the prose, but Wolff still manages to capture the arbitrary nature of life during a war. So why didn't I enjoy it more?

The simple truth is I felt that the events could have taken place anywhere in the world at any time and I didn't really get a feel for the Vietnam War. Equally I didn't really see Wolff as a naive, callow youth heading off to a life altering experience. It was an OK read but I'm sure that there are far better Vietnam War books out there.

Short stories. Well written, but won't boost your spirits!!

Interesante. Ironico. Muy Bukowski.

Tobias Wolff is the one writer whose work I simply cannot critique. I think he's the best, and while this isn't the first title of his I would recommend, it carries an incisiveness no other writer is capable of. I wish more people read his work. I didn't love this book as much as I did This Boy's Life or The Barracks Thief, but I have a feeling that from now on, whenever I think of the Vietnam War, images from this memoir will come to mind.

Earlier this year I read a short novel by Tobias Wolff, Old School. It was the first thing I had read by him; I enjoyed it thoroughly and was very impressed. So I bought another, put it on the shelf and recently picked it up. The Barracks Thief by Tobias Wolff is a novella. Based on what I have read so far, Tobias Wolff writes shorter works, but The Barracks Thief made up in power what it lacked in weight. Clean, crisp prose that I loved. The story of three young men, all recently having joined the army and on the verge of going to Vietnam. The narrative is straightforward but made interesting by some events being told from more than one point of view. The story was full of sadness and anger and frustration and yet I could not expect the characters to feel any differently. And when I was done, it was not a story I could quickly or easily put away.