Until I Find You: Paperback, 848pp
From Our Editors
The publication of a John Irving novel is always a major literary event, but its magnitude shouldn't obscure the more simple pleasures. In his 11th work of fiction, Irving stakes out the story of actor Jack Burns, the son of Alice, a Toronto tattoo artist, and William, a runaway Edinburgh organist. Alice does not take William's disappearance lightly; with young Jack in tow, she travels from European seaport to seaport, searching unsuccessfully for her former mate. In Jack's subsequent life in Hollywood and elsewhere, he too remains a searcher.
From the Publisher
"According to his mother, Jack Burns was an actor before he was an actor, but Jack's most vivid memories of childhood were those moments when he felt compelled to hold his mother's hand. He wasn't acting then."So begins John Irving's eleventh novel, Until I Find You — the story of the actor Jack Burns. His mother, Alice, is a Toronto tattoo artist. When Jack is four, he travels with Alice to several North Sea ports; they are trying to find Jack's missing father, William, a church organist who is addicted to being tattooed. But Alice is a mystery, and William can't be found. Even Jack's memories are subject to doubt.Jack Burns goes to schools in Canada and New England, but what shapes him are his relationships with older women. John Irving renders Jack's life as an actor in Hollywood with the same richness of detail and range of emotions he uses to describe the tattoo parlors in those North Sea ports and the reverberating music Jack heard as a child in European churches.The author's tone — indeed, the narrative voice of this novel — is melancholic. ("In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us — not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.") Until I Find You is suffused with overwhelming sadness and deception; it is also a robust and comic novel, certain to be compared to John Irving's most ambitious and moving work.
From The Critics
The New Yorker
Irving’s vast novel recounts the life of an actor as he tries to find the father who abandoned him and to come to terms with the traumas of his youth: a mother who was an itinerant tattoo artist and occasional prostitute, schooling at an all-girls academy where he was tormented by older classmates, sexual molestation at the hands of a woman who had been a kind of nanny. The story gets off to an energetic start as he and his mother scamper through Scandanavian seaports looking for the father, but it quickly becomes bogged down by unnecessary detail. When we finally meet the father, now ailing, we get a clearer impression of his illness and his doctors than of the man himself. This curious absence is all the more disappointing as Irving has said that the novel is based on his own youth, but it’s unfortunately typical of a book in which the main characters seem two-dimensional.
Publishers Weekly
Actor Jack Burns seeks a sense of identity and father figures while accommodating a host of overbearing and elaborately dysfunctional women in Irving's latest sprawling novel (after The Fourth Hand). At the novel's onset (in 1969), four-year-old Jack is dragged by his mother, Alice, a Toronto-based tattoo artist, on a year-long search throughout northern Europe for William Burns, Jack's runaway father, a church organist and "ink addict." Back in Toronto, Alice enrolls Jack at the all-girls school St. Hilda's, where she mistakenly thinks he'll be "safe among the girls"; he later transfers to Redding, an all-boy's prep school in Maine. Jack survives a childhood remarkable for its relentless onslaught of sexual molestation at the hands of older girls and women to become a world-famous actor and Academy Award-winning screenwriter. Eventually, he retraces his childhood steps across Europe, in search of the truth about his father-a quest that also emerges as a journey toward normalcy. Though the incessant, graphic sexual abuse becomes gratuitous, Irving handles the novel's less seedy elements superbly: the earthy camaraderie of the tattoo parlors, the Hollywood glitz, Jack's developing emotional authenticity, his discovery of a half-sister and a moving reunion with his father.
Library Journal
Jack Burns, child of a tattoo artist mother and a missing organist father, has spent his life searching. As a boy he and his mother traveled throughout northern Europe to find his father; as a young man, he sought love and acceptance through a series of relationships with older women. Later in life, when the truth about his absent father continues to elude him, Jack finds himself questioning even his own memories. Irving's 11th novel may disappoint longtime fans-this is a quieter, more contemplative journey than his previous works (e.g., The Cider House Rules), requiring some patience and reflection. Journeys take time, and Jack, whose setbacks tend to involve women and his own insecurities, has a long road ahead of him. Irving's strength has always been his characters, and this novel is rich with them: Jack himself; his best friend, Emma; his no-nonsense psychiatrist; his distant mother and fun-loving father; and his teachers, lovers, and, yes, even his childhood sexual predator all come alive to make this novel a rewarding and meaningful experience.
All the Names: Paperback, 245pp
From Our Editors
Our ReviewWhat's in a Name?As you might imagine, the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths is organized in the following manner: active files (birth and marriage certificates) are kept up front; inactive files are stored away in the back. Files become inactive when the death certificate is attached. Because the number of new active files matches the number that become inactive every year, the active section never grows or shrinks, while the death archives grow infinitely as the years pass. This bastion of administrative bureaucracy is soberly manned by a small regiment of lackeys and lorded over by the wise and untouchable Registrar. One low-level lackey, Senhor José, is the hero of Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago's latest novel, All the Names.
A dependable, unobtrusive employee, Senhor José leads a simple life. He has one good suit, lives alone in a humble apartment that through a quirk of urban development connects in the back to the Registry, and he spends his free time keeping scrapbooks of famous people. Senhor José's safe, quiet life takes a sudden turn when he decides one evening to up the ante on his celebrity scrapbook by including birth, marriage, and death certificates, which entails sneaking into the Registry after hours to borrow the necessary documents. In the dark, he accidentally grabs the wrong certificate and becomes, from that point on, pathologically obsessed with finding the Unknown Woman whose name he stumbles upon. His feckless investigation follows the kind of paper trail he's most familiar with: marriage and divorce licenses, school records, the inevitable death certificate and autopsy report, and, finally, a graveyard map that leads him to a numbered plot in the suicide section of the General Cemetery. There, in the first light of dawn, Senhor José meets a prankster shepherd who switches around the markers on the new graves, delivering the dead back into anonymity and saving them from the indignity of being just a number, certificate, or name. And so, on the last possible stop of Senhor José's search, he loses his Unknown Woman. Yet, through the often hilarious twists and turns of his strange and reckless investigation, he's unearthed the story of her life. Perhaps more importantly, he's created a memory where there was none, and come to care for a woman he never met and never would meet.
From the necropolis of index cards to the quintessential figure of a lonely, fearful, clerk, All the Names has the makings of a Kafkaesque parable about the loss of humanity -- except it's a beautiful, platonic love story, a love story that's made all the more wrenching by how very one-sided it is and by the nagging question, unique to suicides: If she'd known how much she was loved, would she still have wanted to die? Critics have variously described Saramago as a postmodern writer or a political writer, but the most convincing description is of Saramago as a metaphysical writer. His 1998 novel, Blindness, an allegory about the curse of vision in a world succumbed to blindness, certainly has political implications. But the underlying question of Blindness is metaphysical: Do I exist if others can't see me? It's the same kind of question that defines All the Names: Do you exist if you're dead? And, if you're loved, how can you not exist? The dead are not filed away in an endless, dark, labyrinthine archive but are among us in memory and in their stories. A clerk who traffics in human existence according to forms and certificates finds and loses love in a single gesture. He brings a woman back to life in the same way a great novelist brings characters to life in our imaginations. All the Names is a testament to the power of compassion and imagination, to the miraculous feat of storytelling.
From the Publisher
Senhor José is a low-grade clerk in the city's Central Registry, where the living and the dead share the same shelf space. A middle-aged bachelor, he has no interest in anything beyond the certificates of birth, marriage, divorce, and death that are his daily preoccupations. In the evenings, and on weekends, he works on bringing up to date his clipping file of the famous, the rising stars, the notorious. But when one day he comes across the birth certificate of an anonymous young woman, he decides that this cannot have been mere chance, he has to discover more about her. After all, to know a name is not to know the person.
Under the increasingly mystified eye of the Registrar, a godlike figure whose name is spoken only in whispers, the now obsessed Senhor José sets off, in every moment he can steal from work, to follow the thread that leads him to the woman's school, to her godmother, to her father and mother-but as he gets closer to a meeting with the unknown woman, he discovers more about her, and about himself, than he would have wished....
The loneliness of people's lives, the effects of chance and moments of recognition, the discovery of love, however tentative...once again José Saramago has written a timeless story.
About the Author:
José Saramago was born in Portugal in 1922. He is the author of six novels, including Blindness, Baltasar and Blimunda, and The History of the Siege of Lisbon. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
From The Critics
Robert Irwin - The New York Times Book Review
...a fine powerful parable.
Times (London)
The Swedish Academy's citation called his novels 'parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony.' It is a description which perfectly captures his latest novel.
Merle Rubin - Christian Science Monitor
Saramago's gentle voice rings with the unmistakable authority of the true artist.
Philip Connors - The Wall Street Journal
...a master far from content to rest on his laurels.
Jean Charbonneau - Denver Post
...a highly intelligent, complex novel, both exasperating and impressive...a book that's not simply read, but experienced.
Winner of the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
The March : 416 Pages
From the Publisher
"In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched his sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces and lived off the land, pillaging the Southern plantations, taking cattle and crops for their own, demolishing cities, and accumulating a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the uprooted, the dispossessed, and the triumphant." The author of Ragtime, City of God, and The Book of Daniel has given us a work with an enormous cast of characters - white and black; men, women, and children; unionists and rebels; generals and privates; freed slaves and slave owners. At the center are General Sherman himself; a beautiful freed slave girl named Pearl; a Union regimental surgeon, Colonel Sartorius; Emily Thompson, the dispossessed daughter of a Southern judge; and Arly and Will, two misfit soldiers.
From The Critics
John Wray - The Washington Post
The March conjures up the War of Secession -- also known as the War Between the States and the War of Northern Aggression -- as vividly as any contemporary account I've read, and more plausibly than most. Devotees of our nation's darkest hour, as well as that subset of Confederacy buffs willing to entertain the possibility that all may not have been roses in the antebellum South, will find a great deal to admire in its pages.
Michiko Kakutani - The New York Times
It is Mr. Doctorow's achievement in these pages that in recounting Sherman's march, he manages to weld the personal and the mythic into a thrilling and poignant story. He not only conveys the consequences of that campaign for soldiers and civilians in harrowingly intimate detail, but also creates an Iliad-like portrait of war as a primeval human affliction - "not war as adventure, nor war for a solemn cause," but "war at its purest, a mindless mass rage severed from any cause, ideal, or moral principle," a "characterless entanglement of brainless forces" as God's answer "to the human presumption."
Publishers Weekly
America's greatest internal conflict is brought startlingly to life in this masterful fictional exploration of the slaves, soldiers and leaders who lived through it all. The action focuses on Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's 1864 march through Georgia and the Carolinas-a march that led more than 60,000 Union troops across the land, leaving a swath of destruction and ruin in its wake. Morton handles the voices of the diverse cast with incredible variety and precision. He shifts seamlessly from the cold, proper dialect of the surgeon Colonel Sartorius, to the lowborn speech of Pearl, a light-skinned slave who is passing as a drummer boy in Sherman's army. Morton's narration, like Doctorow's prose, is quietly powerful, and propels the story forward as relentlessly as Sherman's advancing armies. Morton has always been a terrific character actor onscreen, and he brings those same outstanding qualities to this audiobook production. His performances does more than simply translate a book to audio; it truly enhances the reading experience. Simultaneous release with the Random House hardcover.
Library Journal
Doctorow portrays William Tecumseh Sherman's army, which devastated Georgia and the Carolinas during the Civil War, as a living organism, several miles long, moving forward, devouring everything in its path. He paradoxically achieves a panoramic view by focusing on the stories of a wide variety of individuals, from freed slaves and soldiers of both sides to physicians tending the wounded, displaced widows and orphans, and even Sherman himself. As in Ragtime, Doctorow cuts back and forth among these fascinating stories, achieving a rhythm that echoes the chaos of the historic events. The March educates as it entertains and finds laughter amidst tragedy. Such a wide spectrum of characters gives reader Joe Morton a nearly unique opportunity, and he excels, voicing characters of varying races, ages, genders, and regions with aplomb. Nominated for a National Book Award, this is clearly one of the best novels of 2005; every library will want it.
The Known World 416 Pages
Finalist for the 2003 National Book Award, Fiction.
From the Publisher
Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor — William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation — as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love beneath the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend estate, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave "speculators" sell free black people into slavery, and rumors of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years.
An ambitious, luminously written novel that ranges seamlessly between the past and future and back again to the present, The Known World weaves together the lives of freed and enslaved blacks, whites, and Indians — and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multidimensional world created by the institution of slavery.
About the Author
Edward P. Jones was born and raised in Washington, D.C. Winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award and recipient of the Lannan Foundation Grant, Jones was educated at Holy Cross College and the University of Virginia. His first book, Lost in the City was originally published by William Morrow in 1992 and shortlisted for the National Book Award. Mr. Jones was named a National Book Award finalist for a second time with the publication of his debut novel The KnownWorld (Amistad 2003). He lives in Arlington, Virginia.
From The Critics
The New York Tinmes
At the end of Edward P. Jones's stunning new antebellum novel, an artist recreates the book's plantation setting as "a map of life made with every kind of life man has ever thought to represent himself." One of the characters says, "It is what God sees when He looks down."
The author's viewpoint has the same effect in this book about slavery, property, freedom and family, all in a most unusual setting. With hard-won wisdom and hugely effective understatement, Mr. Jones explores the unsettling, contradiction-prone world of a Virginia slaveholder who happens to be black. — Janet Maslin
The Washington Post
The bizarre world of American slavery has been the subject of much fiction, some of it uncommonly good, from Harriet Beecher Stowe to William Faulkner to Toni Morrison. This extraordinary novel -- the best new work of American fiction to cross my desk in years -- takes as its subject one of the most peculiar anomalies of that endlessly provocative and troubling subject: In the antebellum South, where whites systematically enslaved blacks, there were free blacks who themselves owned black slaves. — Jonathan Yardley
The New Yorker
On a small plantation in Manchester County, Virginia, in the eighteen-fifties, a freed black man named Henry Townsend lives with his wife and the thirty-three slaves he has bought, some with the help of his former owner. This kaleidoscopic first novel depicts daily life for Henry and his friends (“members of a free Negro class that, while not having the power of some whites, had been brought up to believe that they were rulers waiting in the wings”); for the plantation’s slaves, one of whom believes that he, too, will be transformed into an owner after Henry’s death; and for the county’s white inhabitants, who coexist uneasily with their slaves and their emancipated black neighbors. Jones has written a book of tremendous moral intricacy: no relationship here is left unaltered by the bonds of ownership, and liberty eludes most of Manchester County’s residents, not just its slaves.
Publishers Weekly
In a crabbed, powerful follow-up to his National Book Award-nominated short story collection (Lost in the City), Jones explores an oft-neglected chapter of American history, the world of blacks who owned blacks in the antebellum South. His fictional examination of this unusual phenomenon starts with the dying 31-year-old Henry Townsend, a former slave-now master of 33 slaves of his own and more than 50 acres of land in Manchester County, Va.-worried about the fate of his holdings upon his early death. As a slave in his youth, Henry makes himself indispensable to his master, William Robbins. Even after Henry's parents purchase the family's freedom, Henry retains his allegiance to Robbins, who patronizes him when he sets up shop as a shoemaker and helps him buy his first slaves and his plantation. Jones's thorough knowledge of the legal and social intricacies of slaveholding allows him to paint a complex, often startling picture of life in the region. His richest characterizations-of Robbins and Henry-are particularly revealing. Though he is a cruel master to his slaves, Robbins is desperately in love with a black woman and feels as much fondness for Henry as for his own children; Henry, meanwhile, reads Milton, but beats his slaves as readily as Robbins does. Henry's wife, Caldonia, is not as disciplined as her husband, and when he dies, his worst fears are realized: the plantation falls into chaos. Jones's prose can be rather static and his phrasings ponderous, but his narrative achieves crushing momentum through sheer accumulation of detail, unusual historical insight and generous character writing. Agent, Eric Simonoff. (Sept.) Forecast: This is a new tack for Jones, whose collection Lost in the City was set in Washington, D.C., in the 1960s and '70s. Amistad is sending the novel off with a bang-a 10-city author tour, a 20-city national radio campaign-and it should attract considerable review attention.
Library Journal
This ambitious first novel by National Book Award nominee Jones (Lost in the City: Stories) looks at slavery from an unusual angle. Henry Townsend is a former slave who was purchased and freed by his own father. Through hard work, he has acquired 50 acres of farmland in Virginia. Given the slave-based agricultural economy, Townsend believes that the logical (and legal) way to work the land is with slaves, and, eventually, he owns more than 30. Although he is less brutal than his neighbors, most of his slaves dream of escaping north. When they try, Townsend must pay the white patrollers to return them or be seen as irresponsible. But as rumors of bloody slave rebellions spread through the South, unscrupulous bounty hunters begin to round up free blacks, Native Americans, and white orphans along with the escapees. By focusing on an African American slaveholder, Jones forcefully demonstrates how institutionalized slavery jeopardized all levels of civilized society so that no one was really free. A fascinating look at a painful theme, this book is an ideal choice for book clubs. Highly recommended.