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‘A great book from one of America’s greatest writers. “July, July” is beautifully written, very moving and very, very funny. It is also packed with some of the best characters I’ve read in a long time.’ Roddy Doyle
‘The Class of ’69 revisit their pasts and contemplate the thwarted dreams of the Sixties generation. Savage and funny.’ Sunday Express
‘A feast – the rare kind that leaves you satisfied rather than stuffed. A book whose main delight is one of constant surprise in word and deed. Playful and profound…nightmarishly funny.’ Glasgow Herald
‘O’Brien’s characters are instantly recognisable. Psychologically acute…he writes piercingly about relationships, particularly the ones that don’t work.’ Irish Times
‘A great novel. So much human truth in so few words…the very definition of fine writing.’ Esquire
‘A book for all seasons. Funny and poignant, it looks into the nature of our dreams and how fulfilment eludes us.’ Edna O’Brien
Roddy Doyle
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THE REUNION DANCE had started only an hour ago, but already a good many of the dancers were tipsy, and most others were well along, and now the gossip was flowing and confessions were under way and old flames were being extinguished and rekindled under cardboard stars in the Darton Hall College gymnasium. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Of the individual short stories (for July, July is a novel made of individual short stories) some were excellent, some were merely good, all were written with the author's customary verve, pathos and an assured technique which can create humour.
The reunion itself didn't seem to go anywhere or resolve much, the characters just seemed to fizzle out in the same way they were going before but at least the short stories let you know how they got there and the crossroads they faced to plunge them into their own personal abyss.
Not as out-and-out funny as Tomcat In Love or as cumulatively powerful as, say, The Things They Carried, I would still rate July, July within O'Brien's top four.
If you like to read a top author with good ideas, fully fleshing out his theme and using language beautifully, this book's well worth your time. If you prefer more action packed thrills building to a dramatic climax...this book will leave you up in the air.
Basically I found the characters to have little depth, each had a chapter with their story, yet often the interaction between characters seemed confusing and at times quite vauge.
I found the book also had the little humour, that it was praised for.
The idea of the book appealed whilst not being original and was overall very dissapointing and quite un memorable.
July 1969.With a man about to walk on the moon in front of their very eyes and the whift of revolution permeating the air; For the graduates of Darton Hall College it must have seemed as if no achievement was beyond their reach. As the class of '69 reconvene in the summer of 2000 with a new era of possibility beckoning, thirty years of hopes and failures, dreams and disappointments, births and deaths are revealed in the stories they have to tell.
The class reunion scenario is hardly the most innovative theme for a novel and, in all honesty, Tim O ' Brien does nothing too radical with the format. Yet, this is a great piece of work, unassuming and unsensational maybe, but one of the novels of the year nonetheless. In effect, a portmanteau of stories revealing our innate and often undignified desire to be loved what drives 'July, July' are O' Brien's ear for conversation. This is a listener's novel, the result of a lifelong devotion to the minutia of everyday speech. Insidiously, effortlessly, O'brien's baby-boomers talk their way under of skin. Whether it's Spook Spinelli with her harem of husbands, Karen Burns and her fateful inability to separate fact from fiction or Marv Bortel's big, big lie, these tales of American lives reverberate with truth, wisdom and disarming honesty. So there we have it-another month, another major work from an American author.
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