הפעם השלישית שאני קורא את הספר. זכרתי את הקריאה הראשונה לפני כשישים שנה אבל לא זכרתי שקראתי אותו שנית לפני כשבע שנים. רק להדגים מה קורה לזכרון שלי בשנים האחרונות. אין לי הרבה מה להוסיף על הביקורת הקודמת ועל השפעתו של ג'ון בארט עלי. אומר רק שגם בקריאה השלישית נהניתי מכל רגע ונראה לי שהערכתי יותר מאשר קודם את הוירטואוזיות של בארט. את המעברים שלו מדיון פילוזופי אקזיסטנציאליסטי, לסלפסטיק מאני ולבסוף לטרגדיה אמתית שמביאה דמעות לעיניים. סופר גדול. ( )

By a strange coincidence I read this right after Bernard Malamud's A New Life, which is, like this one, a very bitter comedy about a grammar teacher in a small college becoming part of a love triangle. Unlike Malamud's hopeful dreamers, Barth's guy is a different and difficult creature: sort of an existentialist narrator, but one who doesn't assume that his own apathy says anything about the world in general. His life has been short-circuited by manic depression, but since he knows he can't trust his feelings, he sometimes ends up being the most clear-sighted and humane character around. Barth indulges in some vicious satire of Objectivist supermen, and of behaviorist psychiatry: the narrator's doctor prescribes meaningless activities just to ensure that he doesn't stop moving. ( )

Sometimes buying a book because you like the cover just.... doesn't work out. John Barth's second novel, written in the late 1950s, mashes together black comedy, nihilism, ham-fisted philosophical positions, and brutal treatment of women into a weirdly readable book that will make you feel gross and unsatisfied at its conclusion.

Jacob Horner, our narrator, is a graduate student who has a bit of a break with reality and finds himself with all his possessions in a train station, unable to decide which ticket to buy. He is paralyzed there for days when The Doctor finds him and brings him to his unorthodox "farm" for psychological treatment. Part of this treatment involves getting a job as a grammar teacher at a small town teacher's college in Maryland (I said this was unorthodox). Jacob becomes friends with another teacher at the college, Joe Morgan, and his wife, Rennie, despite an initially bumpy meeting. So far so good. The Ripley-esque nature of Jacob's disconnection from society and the dark comedy and very mid-century psychiatrist business is all fine.

We quickly learn that Joe Morgan is a walking philosophical experiment in absolute rationalism. This also makes him very boring and boorish. He has also pretty much traumatized Rennie with a combination of philosophical and literal beat downs into questioning her every feeling and bending herself into his world view. Although Jacob has no personality of his own, can't make choices, and sees both sides of every question, he and Rennie are practically pushed into having an affair. Prior to and concurrent with his affair with Rennie, Jacob also somehow manages to start up a relationship with a teacher at the local high school, whom he seduces, sleeps with, insults, assaults, ignores, uses, and then hits. When Rennie discovers she is pregnant and either man could be the father, Joe's philosophical and the Doctor's psychological experiments collide in an awful and graphic ending that I really could have done without.

This was made into a movie in 1970 with Stacey Keach as Jacob Horner and James Earl Jones as the Doctor. Much like the book, the movie seems to be a pretty dated and dreary time capsule dabbling in philosophy, disaffection, and sexism, and dropping in abortion to add a little sensationalism and "currency."

Not a great one. I do still love this cover, though. ( )

So read this and then never reviewed it. Not sure why but now I will. I listened to the short book as an audio. It is the second novel by American writer John Barth, published first in 1958, and then in a revised edition in 1967. It's a dark comedy that is considered a philosophical novel. I read it along with his other list novel, The Floating Opera. This book, continues with the conclusions about absolute values made by the protagonist of The Floating Opera, and takes these ideas "to the end of the road" Jacob Horner suffers from a nihilistic paralysis he calls "cosmopsis"—an inability to choose a course of action from all possibilities. Horner's nameless Doctor has him take a teaching job at a local teachers' college. There Horner befriends the super-rational Joe Morgan and his wife Rennie. The trio become entangled in a love triangle. The story narrates the first-person confession Jacob Horner in the form of a therapeutic psychodrama (a real type of therapy). The novel addresses controversial topics of the time; abortion and racial segregation.

Themes and motifs
1. Choice; where and how to sit, to stay married or not, pregnancy or abortion.
2. bust of Laocoön sculpted by a dead uncle. As Laocoön was bound by serpents, Jake feels himself bound into inaction
3. "cosmopsis" in The End of the Road for a sense of seeing and comprehending all available paths of action and the futility of choosing among them
4. "Mythotherapy" to move Jake beyond his paralysis by giving him arbitrary decision-making principles and having him take on identities by wearing "masks"—assuming roles. He tells Jake "fiction isn't a lie at all, but a true representation of the distortion that everyone makes of life". These distortions—an approach Jake calls "mythoplastic"—people employ to with the arbitrary conditions life thrusts upon them.
5. Both Jake and Joe use their intellects to distance themselves from their emotions
6. Sexual relations:
7. horses; Horse symbols permeate the text. Rennie, an accomplished rider, and her husband whip their heads back and forth horse-like when they laugh. Joe is fond of the epithet horseshit when pointing out nonsense. His surname, Morgan, is the name of an American breed of horse. Joe's consistent sureness, his "rationality and absence of 'craft or guile'", according to Thomas Schaub, seem to echo the Houyhnhnms, the race of rational horses in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. ( )

זה הספר השני שבארט כתב והשני שאני קורא שנית לאחר כחמישים שנה מהקריאה הראשונה. זה ספר יותר טוב מהאופרה הצפה וכנראה שמשום כך גם זכרתי ממנו יותר, בפרט את הסוף המצמרר. זה ספר קר, אכזרי ומצמרר שאני חושב שהשפיע עלי לא מעט. למעשה אני חושב שלבארט היה תפקיד לא טריויאלי כלל בעיצוב האישיות שלי ומה אני חושב על עצמי ועל אנשים ועל איך ולמה הם עושים דברים. ( )