Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings
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Amazon.co.uk Review
John Fowles calls his essays "little bits of what I am" and declares--rather than fears--himself "only too well aware that there are many they will not please. "The 30 pieces collected in Wormholes display this enigmatic author's concerns (above all with the natural world), disdain (for passing artistic and critical fashions and various other 20th- century "manias") and crankiness. Pity the tidy suburban gardener who comes upon the following generalization: "In America, freedom from crabgrass becomes a test of social acceptability; the man with the best roses walks six inches taller." Fowles knows he's going to push people's buttons, and clearly enjoys doing so. Yet he's serious when it comes to personal and public responsibility. He's also dead right in thinking that natural life needs privacy, untidiness, and its fair share of insects. From the first entry, "I Write Therefore I Am"--as much a tirade against the so-called literary world as it is a love letter to literature--Fowles is confrontational, casual and astoundingly learned. He's also highly amusing. Witness the opening squib of "Gather Ye Starlets" (1965): "I had better confess at once that I am writing about a subject with which I have never slept; and nothing, as Genet has five or six hundred times reminded us, is quite so immoral as total innocence." Readers have long delighted in Fowles's philosophical fiction because he makes thinking a great game, and his essays openly engage--and outrage--in similar fashion. Wormholes may well be the best intellectual and emotional biography we will ever have of the man who created such modern classics as The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Review
"Wormholes is as various, quirkily learned, beguiling, opinionated and, in parts, as sumptuously written as Fowles's fiction." --Roger Kimball, "The New York Times Book Review"
"For those who have read and enjoyed Fowles's novels, Wormholes will prove similarly essential." --David Streitfeld, "The Washington Post Book World"
"The grace, wit and wisdom that we have come to expect from Fowles's fiction is also present in these essays." --"Star-Ledger"
"Who writes like this anymore, venturing freely across lines of domain, considering our experience-private and historical-under the largest contemplative aspect? We hear it in Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Virginia Woolf, in Albert Camus-the lyrical note, reflection cut across with longing-but scarcely at all in our contemporaries." --Sven Birkerts, "The Washington Times"
"For those who have read and enjoyed Fowles's novels, Wormholes will prove similarly essential." --David Streitfeld, "The Washington Post Book World"
"The grace, wit and wisdom that we have come to expect from Fowles's fiction is also present in these essays." --"Star-Ledger"
"Who writes like this anymore, venturing freely across lines of domain, considering our experience-private and historical-under the largest contemplative aspect? We hear it in Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Virginia Woolf, in Albert Camus-the lyrical note, reflection cut across with longing-but scarcely at all in our contemporaries." --Sven Birkerts, "The Washington Times"
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
What I like about Fowles is his humanism,his plain-speaking and getting intellectually to the main point,his lack of fuss.In these collected essays,introductions to books and literary articles,they are all personal writings,literary criticism,autobiography,memoirs,his literary influences,love of old books,nature-pieces and travel.What is evident is his magpie,tangential mind.We get served the idea of the lost domaine,woman as princesse lointaine,the idea of the importance of hazard in nature and creativitity.They reflect his lifelong commitment to socialism, his idea of our desire to escape into unreal worlds,his interest in `green issues',his dislike of the literary world of his day, and his desire to maintain the narrative traditions of the novel against an intellectual elite who don't wish to share their avant-gardisms with the public.He deals not with philosophical or scientific truths in his fiction,although he admits to the fictionality of fiction,he infuses it with his own personal philosophy and he uses the idea of games being played,but to appeal to `feeling truths' in the reader, who is neither critic nor writer.He admits to a love of solitude, geographically and socially.Love of both France and Greece inspired his prenovelistic self..Both as teacher and preacher he feels on a par with DH Lawrence as regards the role of the novel,with Jane Austen about central moral positions.With fellow exiles,Golding,Alain-Fournier,Hardy,he detects an irrecoverable sense of loss,Gardens of Eden,childhood innocence,idealized mothers, unattainable objects of desire. Loss is essential to the writer and drives him.Nature,Devon,his own private Eden are his sanctuary and retreat and check against that loss.He expresses anger as a conservationist against the destruction of natural landscapes. Nature needs to be respected not sentimentalised.He loves a `hands-on' approach to it.He venerates the wild,le sauvage.The novel is not dead and he dislikes absurdist pessimism fashions in life. Existential awareness of the now is what he most prizes in art,indeterminacy,the fork in the road,the unknown,the inability to end,uncertainty, mystery, secrets.He is the shaman who knows he has to lie as a novelist,but yearns to express a whole truth.`Writing is like eating or making love:a natural process,not an artificial one!'.The spark was lit for him in his youth by the love induced in him for natural history by both an uncle and a cousin. He also took to heart Socrates saying `know thyself',the quest for selfhood,thoroughness of vision,'whole sight', is more important than success,'looking at' not 'looking for'.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Superb, flawless, highly recommended collection
23 April 2006
Format:Paperback
As a longtime admirer of "The Magus", recently interested in non-fictional essays, I picked up "The Wormholes" with double interest. I was richly rewarded.
John Fowles gave the readers a collection of his musings on subjects so diverse as his work, nature, literature and other forms of art.
The essays are divided into four sections: Autobiographical, Culture. Literature, and Nature. They span quite a long time - from 1964 to 1996. I wanted to choose the best ones as examples here, but virtually all are masterpieces - my personal favourites (highly subjective, because of my particular interest in the subjects, not because they are better written!) being "The filming of The French Lieutenant's Woman", "Behind The Magus", "Greece", "On being English but not British", "Thomas Hardy's England", "Weeds, Bugs, and Americans", "The Islands", and, last but not least, "The Nature of Nature". The essays are a pleasure to read - they are not only informative, showing very sharp insight into many matters, and stimulating the train of thought, but also exquisitely worded, full of metaphors and allusions. At the end there is a bonus - an interview with Fowles done by Dianne Vipond in 1995.
Fowles was a rare erudite. These essays fully show the extent of his knowledge, his intellect, and his humanism. He is completely at ease with history and literature, and at the same time is not removed from the real world, sees the details of its beauty and deeply cares about environment. After reading this collection, I have a lot of respect for him as a person, not only as a writer.
John Fowles gave the readers a collection of his musings on subjects so diverse as his work, nature, literature and other forms of art.
The essays are divided into four sections: Autobiographical, Culture. Literature, and Nature. They span quite a long time - from 1964 to 1996. I wanted to choose the best ones as examples here, but virtually all are masterpieces - my personal favourites (highly subjective, because of my particular interest in the subjects, not because they are better written!) being "The filming of The French Lieutenant's Woman", "Behind The Magus", "Greece", "On being English but not British", "Thomas Hardy's England", "Weeds, Bugs, and Americans", "The Islands", and, last but not least, "The Nature of Nature". The essays are a pleasure to read - they are not only informative, showing very sharp insight into many matters, and stimulating the train of thought, but also exquisitely worded, full of metaphors and allusions. At the end there is a bonus - an interview with Fowles done by Dianne Vipond in 1995.
Fowles was a rare erudite. These essays fully show the extent of his knowledge, his intellect, and his humanism. He is completely at ease with history and literature, and at the same time is not removed from the real world, sees the details of its beauty and deeply cares about environment. After reading this collection, I have a lot of respect for him as a person, not only as a writer.
12 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Very interesting non-fiction from the great writer
12 July 1998
Format:Hardcover
Though I'd like to have had another work of fiction, this book of various and sundry non-fiction is most interesting when Mr. Fowles writes about his own fiction and his thoughts on the process of fiction in these post-modern times.
Indispensable to any admirer of Mr. Fowles fiction.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
"I write therefore I am"
21 Feb 2011
Format:Paperback
What I like about Fowles is his humanism,his plain-speaking and getting intellectually to the main point,his lack of fuss.In these collected essays,introductions to books and literary articles,they are all personal writings,literary criticism,autobiography,memoirs,his literary influences,love of old books,nature-pieces and travel.What is evident is his magpie,tangential mind.We get served the idea of the lost domaine,woman as princesse lointaine,the idea of the importance of hazard in nature and creativitity.They reflect his lifelong commitment to socialism, his idea of our desire to escape into unreal worlds,his interest in `green issues',his dislike of the literary world of his day, and his desire to maintain the narrative traditions of the novel against an intellectual elite who don't wish to share their avant-gardisms with the public.He deals not with philosophical or scientific truths in his fiction,although he admits to the fictionality of fiction,he infuses it with his own personal philosophy and he uses the idea of games being played,but to appeal to `feeling truths' in the reader, who is neither critic nor writer.He admits to a love of solitude, geographically and socially.Love of both France and Greece inspired his prenovelistic self..Both as teacher and preacher he feels on a par with DH Lawrence as regards the role of the novel,with Jane Austen about central moral positions.With fellow exiles,Golding,Alain-Fournier,Hardy,he detects an irrecoverable sense of loss,Gardens of Eden,childhood innocence,idealized mothers, unattainable objects of desire. Loss is essential to the writer and drives him.Nature,Devon,his own private Eden are his sanctuary and retreat and check against that loss.He expresses anger as a conservationist against the destruction of natural landscapes. Nature needs to be respected not sentimentalised.He loves a `hands-on' approach to it.He venerates the wild,le sauvage.The novel is not dead and he dislikes absurdist pessimism fashions in life. Existential awareness of the now is what he most prizes in art,indeterminacy,the fork in the road,the unknown,the inability to end,uncertainty, mystery, secrets.He is the shaman who knows he has to lie as a novelist,but yearns to express a whole truth.`Writing is like eating or making love:a natural process,not an artificial one!'.The spark was lit for him in his youth by the love induced in him for natural history by both an uncle and a cousin. He also took to heart Socrates saying `know thyself',the quest for selfhood,thoroughness of vision,'whole sight', is more important than success,'looking at' not 'looking for'.
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