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Sto caricando le informazioni... Basic Bech: "Bech a Book", "Bech is Back"di John Updike
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Basic Bech combines two classic titles -- Bech: A Book and Bech is Back -- from one of John Updike's most beloved characters. Henry Bech, the celebrated author of Travel Light, has been scrutinized, canonized and vilified by reviewers, academics, critics and readers across the world. Suffering from temporary impotence and not-so-temporary writer's block, Bech finds renewed fame when he returns to his native America and Think Big, his all-time blockbuster, hits the shops . . . In these classic novels by John Updike, we return to a character as compelling and timeless as Rabbit Angstrom: the inimitable Henry Bech. Famous for his writer's block, Bech is a Jew adrift in a world of Gentiles. As he roams from one adventure to the next, he views life with a blend of wonder and cynicism that will make you laugh with delight and wince in recognition. Praise for John Updike: 'Our time's greatest man of letters - as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short-story writer. His death constitutes a loss to our literature that is immeasurable' Philip Roth 'Alert, funny, sensuous. Here is a writer who can do more or less as he likes' Martin Amis 'One of the most protean of American writers . . . For a writer whose prose can be so lush and hyper-charged, he has always been in contact with the material detritus of everyday life' The Times 'He was the ideal son of a platonic union between John Cheever and J.D. Salinger, with Nabokov attending the christening as fairy godfather' James Wood John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. His novels, stories, and nonfiction collections have won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in January 2009. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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 Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni...GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classificazione LCVotoMedia: (3.17)
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Although Updike wrote three books about Bech, they have never reached anywhere near the legion of fans that the Rabbit series of books have (indeed, if you look on Amazon there are a mere handful of reviews). There is a simple reason for that - the Bech series is simply not as enjoyable as the Rabbit books - but having said that, although I plodded through these two in places, there was undoubtedly a lot of the usual Updike brilliance in there too.
Bech is a celebrated American author who has had one meteoric success which entered the hallowed halls of 'classic' status, as well as writing a handful of other books which invariably declined from OK to poor. In Bech: A Book, the stories are based on Bech eking out a living by doing book tours around the world on the back of his first major success. A few of these travels were to communist countries during the Cold War era, which were particularly interesting and comic in places, but often they descended too far into literary musings and I definitely grew weary at points. The focus on this book was more on the places and the life of a celebrated author than on Bech's character. There were glimpses of his black humour and commitment phobia (imagine a more intelligent version of Rabbit Angstrom), but as these were short stories his romantic dalliances were brief, and without a consistent set of supporting characters Bech himself wasn't developed as much as I'd hoped.
In Bech is Back Updike writes more about Bech's reluctant descension into domesticity and eventual marriage, and with a more consistent backdrop of characters this book showed more of the Updike that I love. After more than a decade in the writing wilderness, Bech is strongly 'encouraged' into writing another book by his wife. It feels semi-autobiographical in places as Bech describes his process of figuring out characters, and carries around the fear of never being able to write as well as his first big success. I wonder if this is how Updike felt after the success of the Rabbit series.
Overall this collection of two books was hit and miss for me, probably more miss than hit, but when I started to get agitated at the tedium of some stories I forced myself to focus on the language again and appreciated more what I was reading.
3 stars - mediocre, but my Updike love affair holds strong. (