- Paperback: 292 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd (UK) (Jun 2009)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 024114471X
- ISBN-13: 978-0241144718
- Product Dimensions: 23 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,021,826 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
John Updike’s first collection of new short fiction since the year 2000, My Father’s Tears finds the author in a valedictory mood as he mingles narratives of his native Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel.
“Personal Archaeology” considers life as a sequence of half-buried layers, and “The Full Glass” distills a lifetime’s happiness into one brimming moment of an old man’s bedtime routine. High-school class reunions, in “The Walk with Elizanne” and “The Road Home,” restore their hero to youth’s commonwealth where, as the narrator of the title story confides, “the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition.” Exotic locales encountered in the journeys of adulthood include Morocco, Florida, Spain, Italy, and India. The territory of childhood, with its fundamental, formative mysteries, is explored in “The Guardians,” “The Laughter of the Gods,” and “Kinderszenen.” Love’s fumblings among the bourgeoisie yield the tart comedy of “Free,” “Delicate Wives,” “The Apparition,” and “Outage.”
In sum, American experience from the Depression to the aftermath of 9/11 finds reflection in these glittering pieces of observation, remembrance, and imagination. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
“Personal Archaeology” considers life as a sequence of half-buried layers, and “The Full Glass” distills a lifetime’s happiness into one brimming moment of an old man’s bedtime routine. High-school class reunions, in “The Walk with Elizanne” and “The Road Home,” restore their hero to youth’s commonwealth where, as the narrator of the title story confides, “the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition.” Exotic locales encountered in the journeys of adulthood include Morocco, Florida, Spain, Italy, and India. The territory of childhood, with its fundamental, formative mysteries, is explored in “The Guardians,” “The Laughter of the Gods,” and “Kinderszenen.” Love’s fumblings among the bourgeoisie yield the tart comedy of “Free,” “Delicate Wives,” “The Apparition,” and “Outage.”
In sum, American experience from the Depression to the aftermath of 9/11 finds reflection in these glittering pieces of observation, remembrance, and imagination. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania, and died in January 2009. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of the New Yorker and after 1957 lived in Massachusetts until his death. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Can it really be that this will be the last time we come fresh to a work of John Updike's? Can it be that the author who has chronicled the decades for us, whose shrewd, pointed and yet loving dissections of our frailties is now a part of our history rather than our present?
Yet another collection of achingly poignant and beautifully observed short stories. Yet another assembly of profoundly lyrical and yet economical prose dissecting the human condition. Goodness we will miss him.........
Yet another collection of achingly poignant and beautifully observed short stories. Yet another assembly of profoundly lyrical and yet economical prose dissecting the human condition. Goodness we will miss him.........
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a marvellous selection of short stories made more so by the fact that the author is one of the finest of his time and also by the fact that he is nearing the end of his days and so is able to draw upon a wealth of experience and insight few others could match. Each story has its own particular charm but there is a constant theme of reflection upon fate and missed opportunities that is simultaneously heart-warming and saddening. I am still working my way through Updike's work but would recommend this collection to anyone who is curious about his style and his undoubted influence on the contemporary world of storytelling.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
My Father's Tears is Updike's last book of short stories, published a few months after he died. That it is a posthumous work is poignant: a collection of fictional memories and old age anecdotes, it exudes a before-the-grave redolence, a sense that the author knew these were his last moments in this world. The stories are unconnected, but they all have aging men as protagonists, they all are about looking back or dealing with one's declining years.
My Father's Tears' tone and style is not, say, that of a Raymond Carver, made of tiny crucial twists and hinging on odd but telling details and situations. Rather, these are pedal-tone codas, sepia pictures of remembered depression and war-era childhoods, ruminations on a changed world. The lens is turned towards long-buried relationships only evoked again thanks to a glimpsed suburban alley, a school reunion; or, kaleidoscope-like, it sees dissolved family bonds reconfigure under new, variegated patterns.
Most of the stories are set in small East Coast towns, and the reader could be forgiven for believing the divorce rate in New England is 100%, with everyone having affairs the whole community knows about, but fair enough: painful emotional choices make for more engaging fiction. In the middle of the book is a piece about 9/11: slightly eye-rolling, but I suppose American authors felt they had to do that. Nor is the collection devoid of an autobiographical air. I found the stories got better towards the end, that their pace became more varied and their lessons richer. Perhaps it is just that one gets into their slow, nostalgic stride, or that the message sinks in that old age, the approach of death, are manageable prospects after all. Maybe, retrospectively, this is a book best to be read after the age of forty.
My Father's Tears' tone and style is not, say, that of a Raymond Carver, made of tiny crucial twists and hinging on odd but telling details and situations. Rather, these are pedal-tone codas, sepia pictures of remembered depression and war-era childhoods, ruminations on a changed world. The lens is turned towards long-buried relationships only evoked again thanks to a glimpsed suburban alley, a school reunion; or, kaleidoscope-like, it sees dissolved family bonds reconfigure under new, variegated patterns.
Most of the stories are set in small East Coast towns, and the reader could be forgiven for believing the divorce rate in New England is 100%, with everyone having affairs the whole community knows about, but fair enough: painful emotional choices make for more engaging fiction. In the middle of the book is a piece about 9/11: slightly eye-rolling, but I suppose American authors felt they had to do that. Nor is the collection devoid of an autobiographical air. I found the stories got better towards the end, that their pace became more varied and their lessons richer. Perhaps it is just that one gets into their slow, nostalgic stride, or that the message sinks in that old age, the approach of death, are manageable prospects after all. Maybe, retrospectively, this is a book best to be read after the age of forty.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Poignant sign off
This is a charming, tender, and very apposite sign off from America's greatest author.
While not hitting the heights of his great novels, these poignant musings on... Read more
While not hitting the heights of his great novels, these poignant musings on... Read more
Published 10 months ago by BHA till I die
My Fathers Tears
This collection from Updike's last years show what a master of fiction he was right until the end. These short stories offer up some wonderful episodes of human life and seem to... Read more
Published 21 months ago by Spider Monkey
My father's Tears and Other Stories
Great last book by a great american author - I have a collection of ALL John Updike's books now.
Published 22 months ago by ivankivanov
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