A father's words (dedikált példány)

Fülszöveg

Richard Stern, whose fiction was honored in 1985 with the prestigious Award of Merit from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, awarded every six years to a leading American novelist, has long been recognized as one of our finest contemporary writers. Written with astonishing virtuosity and insight, A Father's Words is a masterful portrait of fatherhood in late middle age, as revealed through the words of one passionate and engagingly comic father, Cyrus Riemer.
Cy is both a seeker of truth and a master of evasion. So preoccupied is he with looking for truth—and making sure he stays in control of relationships with people he loves and needs—that he fails to notice certain crucial things about himself and those closest to him. Shrewd enough to know that something is missing in his relationship with his youthful girlfriend, Emma, he refuses to recognize that the main source of her depression is his refusal to marry her and give her a family of her own. Cy also... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Richard Stern, whose fiction was honored in 1985 with the prestigious Award of Merit from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, awarded every six years to a leading American novelist, has long been recognized as one of our finest contemporary writers. Written with astonishing virtuosity and insight, A Father's Words is a masterful portrait of fatherhood in late middle age, as revealed through the words of one passionate and engagingly comic father, Cyrus Riemer.
Cy is both a seeker of truth and a master of evasion. So preoccupied is he with looking for truth—and making sure he stays in control of relationships with people he loves and needs—that he fails to notice certain crucial things about himself and those closest to him. Shrewd enough to know that something is missing in his relationship with his youthful girlfriend, Emma, he refuses to recognize that the main source of her depression is his refusal to marry her and give her a family of her own. Cy also senses that his children resent him, but he evades the criticisms of his daughter Livy, who berates him for looking for truth in books and museums instead of within himself. Above all, he wants happiness for his son Jack, a brilliant ne'er-do-well whom Cy sees as a distorted image of himself. Jack shamefacedly but cheerfully evades his father's unceasing attempts to hint and nag him into making more of himself. Unable to accept his family on their own terms, and insistent on playing relationships (and life) his way, Cy constantly deludes himself, even as he seeks, relentlessly, to understand the truth about his life. Gradually, however, both life and his children demonstrate the
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impossibility of his keeping them within his control and propel him into a growing awareness of himself, his children, and the woman he loves.
Of A Father's Words, John Hollander, eminent poet, critic, and scholar, has written, "Stern's father's words are of a peculiar wisdom, treating skeptically, generously, and without any trace of self-hatred, of what Wallace Stevens called 'the real that wrenches the quick that's wry.' His tale's ending, in a mark of the highest art, seems at once to have been unpredictable and inevitable."
In this wise and compassionate novel, Richard Stern subtly illuminates how the stresses of a father's affection and tyranny cannot be handled by reason, by words, but through the wrenching process of self-understanding.
Richard Stern, a professor of English at the University of Chicago, is the author of numerous award-winning works of fiction and nonfiction.
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