John Williams’ “Stoner”
It is fiction, but a fiction so real — screaming a realistic anguish.
Who should read: Those who want to get a little adventurous and read something quite underrated. Those who don’t mind getting consumed by a story brimming with life’s harshest truths, stoicism which we all display on an everyday basis; and those who take a keen pleasure in spending a few days under the clouded effect of melancholy that grips some of us after reading a remarkable story.
Why: It can be read in one sitting, the literature is very easy and not demanding at all. It is a beautiful rendition of how a reader can, in a sitting, start from the adolescent period of the protagonist and sweep past his life till his infirmity. It is fiction, but a fiction so real.
Why not: It is not a thriller nor a dab of American history. It’s just fiction screaming realistic anguish.
- “His stiff fingers careful as they turned the pages, as if in their clumsiness they might tear and destroy what they took such pains to uncover.”
- “He thought of his parents, and they were nearly as strange as the child they had borne; he felt a mixed pity for them and a distant love.”
- “The scholar should not be asked to destroy what he has aimed his life to build”
- “He wondered again at the easy, graceful manner in which the Roman lyricists accepted the fact of death, as if the nothingness they faced were a tribute to the richness of the years they had enjoyed; and he marveled at the bitterness, the terror, the barely concealed hatred he found in some of the later Christian poets of the Latin tradition when they looked to that death which promised, however vaguely, a rich and ecstatic eternity of life, as if that death and promise were a mockery that soured the days of their living.”
- “The face bore deep marks of what must have been a habitual dissatisfaction”
- “Like many men who consider their success incomplete, he was extraordinarily vain and consumed with a sense of his own importance”
- “The talk went on, but it was interrupted by long silences.”
- “It was as if from moment to moment his mind were emptied of all it knew and as if his will were drained of its strength. He felt at times that he was a kind of vegetable, and he longed for something — even pain — to pierce him, to bring him alive.”
- “He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge; that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.”
- “It was a dissociation that he had never felt before; he knew that he ought to be troubled by it, but he was numb, and he could not convince himself that it mattered. He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind hime that he cared to remember.”
- “They had been brought up in a tradition that told them in one way or another that the life of the mind and the life of the senses were separate and, indeed, inimical; that one had to be chosen at some expense of the other. That the one could intensify the other had never occurred to them.”
- “…that he ought to be beyond the force of such passion, of such love. But he was not beyond it, he knew, and would never be. Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was there, intense and steady; it had always been there. In his youth he had given it freely, without thought; he had given it to the knowledge that had been revealed to him — how many years ago? — by Archer Sloane; he had given it to Edith, in those first blind foolish days of his courtship and marriage; and he had given it to Katherine, as if it had never been given before. He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem it said simply: Look! I am alive.”