- Paperback
- Publisher: Berkley Publishing Group (Nov 1985)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0425091422
- ISBN-13: 978-0425091425
- Product Dimensions: 17 x 10.4 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
Celestial Navigation
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More About the Author
Product Description
Book Description
One of eight Anne Tyler novels to be reissued in 2008 with stunning new jackets
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Product Description
Jeremy Pauling is a bachelor with a passion for making sculptures out of odds and ends. He is also fearful of beautiful women, so when his new lodger, Mary, arrives, he is faced with a challenge he really cannot handle. From the author of THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST and BREATHING LESSONS.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a story spanning 13 years and centring around the misanthropic Jeremy Pauling. The structure is unusual for Anne Tyler with different narrators for each chapter, but despite her usual excellent writing, the storyline left me feeling, like other reviewers, ultimately unsatisfied.
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a novel about an artist, perhaps a great one, not at all an easy thing to attempt: you have to navigate around the shoals of sentimentality about tragic suffering (see Van Gogh); and describing plastic art in a way that conveys more than your own enthusiasm is very difficult too. This artist, Jeremy, is not at all unlike Joseph Cornell, the maker of boxes, famously reclusive, modest, shy and poor, unwilling to leave his house - but even Cornell had more outside life than Tyler gives Jeremy, though he didn't have a wife.
The wife of the great artist is also a commonly attempted subject nowadays, and in this book we root as much for Mary as for Jeremy. The trouble is, I think, that, though we are pleased when they get together and have their many rather faceless children, we don't believe it. Therefore when the end of the book comes, perfectly logically, we don't like it.
But there is a good deal to like in Celestial Navigation - the strange sense of timelessness (with Anne Tyler we always seem to be 20, 30, 40 years behind the given date), the sheer length of life, the dreamlike innerness of an old many-storied house, the sharp pain of regret at uncommunicated love - and the other characters; another damaging mother (as in Homesick Restaurant), a parasitic young drifter, a spinster who finds her role.
Five or six books compete for the title of Tyler's best novel. This one would come sixth or seventh, but still essential reading.
I sometimes have a sense of her as a writer for very old children, people like us perhaps.
The wife of the great artist is also a commonly attempted subject nowadays, and in this book we root as much for Mary as for Jeremy. The trouble is, I think, that, though we are pleased when they get together and have their many rather faceless children, we don't believe it. Therefore when the end of the book comes, perfectly logically, we don't like it.
But there is a good deal to like in Celestial Navigation - the strange sense of timelessness (with Anne Tyler we always seem to be 20, 30, 40 years behind the given date), the sheer length of life, the dreamlike innerness of an old many-storied house, the sharp pain of regret at uncommunicated love - and the other characters; another damaging mother (as in Homesick Restaurant), a parasitic young drifter, a spinster who finds her role.
Five or six books compete for the title of Tyler's best novel. This one would come sixth or seventh, but still essential reading.
I sometimes have a sense of her as a writer for very old children, people like us perhaps.
Format:Paperback
Oh yet another book about asperges , I think? If I sound in doubt, apologies its just that Ms Tyler never really spells it out so one can't be sure. Despite reading this book as best as I could I also knew very little about some of the main characters either and I was left frustrated at the sadness and emptiness of their lives.
Jeremy's sadness and loss was well portrayed though and I wanted to know what happened to him though the 'end' result though not of my choosing was skipped and rushed a little as are many novels when one has a dead line to keep [ please note writers , readers do noticed] I still found it to be the most realistic . Alas unlike the idea that he may have fathered all of those children in the circumstances. Only for the die hard Tyler fans I believe.
Jeremy's sadness and loss was well portrayed though and I wanted to know what happened to him though the 'end' result though not of my choosing was skipped and rushed a little as are many novels when one has a dead line to keep [ please note writers , readers do noticed] I still found it to be the most realistic . Alas unlike the idea that he may have fathered all of those children in the circumstances. Only for the die hard Tyler fans I believe.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Better than expected!
If I had merely read the other reviews and taken them at face value I would have missed what I consider to be a good book. Read more
Published 22 months ago by freda
Navigates Nowhere
This book is the one that finally opened my eyes to the fact that Anne Tyler is not the great novelist that she is sometimes thought to be. Read more
Published on 1 Jan 2005 by Whatever
melancholia
I came out after reading this book feeling awfully depressed. throughout the book, we keep wondering - is there hope for Jeremy? Read more
Published on 16 Aug 2001
melancholy Tyler, not at her best.
Jeremy deserves more. Tyler leads us in, very slowly, to a claustrophobic house, where Jeremy lives, hermit-like. Read more
Published on 1 Jan 2001
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