About book The Imaginary Girlfriend (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (2002)
I pulled into Iowa City yesterday afternoon, not planning to be in Iowa at all when I had woken up that morning. But while I was mowing my front yard, my son came up to me and said his ride back to college had fallen through; there was something about a texted dispute with the girl driving him about how much gas money he would owe her, and he told me that he had told her to stick it...I suggested to him that he needed to work on his interpersonal communication skills, especially with women, but secretly I was not displeased because I was hoping to get back to Iowa City, even if it was in such an unexpected manner and for only a quick visit.So what does one do in Iowa City on an unexpected Saturday afternoon? Well, after a walk through the pedestrian mall and a gander at the vagrants, I headed over to a used book store, Murphy-Brookfield Books on Gilbert Street, and took a look, a rare pleasure for a guy like me who grew up in Iowa City with its used book shops (as well as Prairie Lights, one of the better bookstores in the world) and who finds himself sadly living now in a part of the world with barely any bookstores at all, and none of them used. And I enjoyed myself tremendously, browsing the tall shelves crammed with second hand books. I even enjoyed the cat there, and I'm not much of a cat person.And when I left, I had a couple of books in hand, one of which was an attractive copy of the British Bloomsbury edition of John Irving's memoir, The Imaginary Girlfriend, which I started reading later that evening and then finished in the middle of the night when the paper thin walls of the crappy Days Inn where I was staying failed to keep out the noise of the Coralville Strip and the voices from my neighbors' television.So what? you might ask, and I'd reply that sometimes a book's rating might be more than just in response to the words on the page; the rating could be based on an entire sequence of events, a process of sorts involving an infinite number of factors like a surprise visit to Iowa City and a cat in a bookstore and a photo on the book cover of a young John Irving in his wrestling gear, captain of the Exeter Academy wrestling team, staring into the camera without any sense of where his life would be taking him over the next fifty-some years.And so the five stars is partly based on all that, and it's based of course on my fondness for John Irving, who you'll see over to the right in my profile, listed as one of my favorite authors, and it's also based on how much of the book takes place in Iowa City (just about my most favorite place in the world) and how much of it focuses on wrestling and writing. And if you don't understand the relationship between Iowa City and wrestling and writing, then you probably don't get the attraction here because, more than anything, that is what this book is all about, Irving's lifelong relationship with wrestling and writing and about how those two pursuits have informed his life.When Irving first came to Iowa City as a student in the Writers Workshop, Dave McCuskey was coach of the Hawkeye wrestling team. Irving had wrestled for Pitt and not done particularly well there, but unlike most former wrestlers he wasn't content to just let that part of his life slide. Irving visited McCuskey's wrestling room on the top floor of the Fieldhouse and wrestled with the team now and then. Later, when Irving returned to Iowa City in the mid-70s as an instructor in the Workshop, he wrestled in the room with Kurdelmeier's squad and then with Dan Gable's team. In fact, there's a hilarious photo at the end of the book of Dan Gable throwing Irving to his back with a wicked foot sweep. And he kept wrestling, and reffing wrestling and coaching wrestling all the way through the first part of his writing career. One of the last chapters in the book is called "My Last Weigh-in," about the final tournament he wrestled after publication of The World According to Garp. And he also devotes a great deal of time talking about his two older sons' wrestling careers, and all of this adds up to the point where many of the reviewers of the book here on GoodReads have complained about "too much wrestling" in the pages of this memoir. Maybe these folks haven't been reading their Irving very closely, and maybe they just haven't read much about Irving up till now, but beyond Garp and Iowa Bob and all the other wrestling references in his novels, John Irving really loves wrestling. Maybe they just didn't know that about him. But if you aren't in it for the wrestling, and if you don't understand the way wrestling has helped create the man John Irving is today, then you don't want to read this book, and you certainly wouldn't give it five stars.Speaking of wrestling and Iowa City, in what might be considered a tremendous coincidence (a word that Irving uses several times in The Imaginary Girlfriend--and what sprawling nineteenth-century novel does not make use of the coincidence, and where would Irving [the closest writer we have to Charles Dickens today] be without ample use of the coincidence in his novels?), yesterday afternoon as I was walking in downtown Iowa City I passed Dan Gable right in front of the old Post Office by the little drive-in bank where my mother would often do her banking and where as a small boy I was constantly amazed by the little door that would pop out from the side of the wall when you pulled in for your transaction. There was Dan Gable and his wife and a group of what I could only imagine were his grandchildren on their way to some event in downtown Iowa City. Gable's old now and his hips are bad, but he's still the greatest wrestler in the world, and he's still a tremendous part of the fabric of Iowa City. As a lad I spent a lot of time in the Fieldhouse watching his teams wrestle, and I spent a lot of time in his wrestling room watching his practices before my wrestling club would use the room. Who knows, but maybe Irving was even there. Gable was relentless, and he would often stay after his practices were done, drilling alone in the room on the dummies, working on technique. Back then, even though he was long finished as a competitive wrestler on the mat, he could still beat everyone in that room, and watching him was a joy, so seeing him on the street yesterday was its own special kind of joy, as well.So that's all part of why this book gets five stars from me, even though I'm one of the few reviewers to give it five stars. And there's a lot more, but I'm sure you're tired of reading this. And I could easily understand why someone else without a keen interest in Iowa City or wrestling or the Writers Workshop might give it a one-star review. After all, the book is a bit of a toss-off, written while Irving was recuperating from shoulder surgery. It's rambling and discursive, while at the same time maddeningly brief and undeveloped (it's less than 150 small pages). Irving tosses out names without much background, and the reader is left wanting to know a whole lot more about the author than what he gives here. No doubt there is a larger, more developed autobiography coming one day from Irving, and no doubt there will be biographers both sleazy and academic who will unfold more of the mysteries of John Irving's life, but this small book isn't going to give a lot of insight to the fan who is looking for profound revelations into the life of the artist.As for me, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Here's something, though: on the "By the same author" page, the list of works ends with A Son of the Circus. And this might be another reason why I have taken so well to this small book published in 1996--it seems to me that despite the slapdash quality of the book, it's written at the peak of Irving's career, or at least at that part of his career that matters most to me as a reader. After A Son of the Circus, my appreciation of Irving's works begins to dwindle...maybe it's after Owen Meany. Even A Widow for a Year, which a lot of Irving fans seem to enjoy, fails to captivate me as well as those first seven or eight books, and what has followed Widow really hasn't impressed me too much. (I admit I haven't read the most recent book, but I'll get there soon enough.)Here's what Kurt Vonnegut told John Irving all these many years ago back in Iowa City: "You may be surprised...I think capitalism is going to treat you very well." And it has, oh yes it has. Just maybe, though, it's treated him too well, and what's left now in the second half of Irving's career is only a shadow of what he put into those first books. But The Imaginary Girlfriend has little to do with that second part of Irving's life. This is the Irving of Exeter Academy and the Writers Workshop, of New Hampshire and Iowa City, and it's the Irving who sits on my Favorite Authors list.
هذا أول عمل أقرأه للروائي الأمريكي جون إيرفينغ، ولا أظن أنه سيكون الأخير. أردت أن أجربه، أن أدخل عالمه ببطء، فسرني ما وجدت. اشتهر هذا الروائي الأمريكي بجمعه بين نوعية كتابته الأدبية العالية، والنجاح التجاري الضخم الذي رافق أعماله، مما مكنه من التفرغ التام لـ"مهنته" الأدبية في سن مبكرة، والعيش بمستوى معيشي مريح للغاية. والحقيقة أن إيرفينغ يختلف عن الراوئيين الأمريكيين الذين اطلعت على أعمالهم حتى الآن، فهو لا يعتمد على جمل "هيمنغواي" البرقية القصيرة، ولا على مونولوغات "فوكنر" التي تحتل صفحات كاملة، أو إصرار جون أوبداييك على اللعب باللغة وتوسيع آفاقها في صفحات أعماله قدر الإمكان. لا، يذكرني إيرفينغ بكتاب الرواية الإنجليز في القرن 19.أي أنه لا يخجل من اعتبار نفسه مؤرخاً لشخصية ونفسية الفرد في مجرى الحياة العامة، وبين دوائر المجتمع، مع الحفاظ على شروط الحرفة الروائية. الجميل في إيرفينغ أن بساطة نثره لا تلغي عنه في الوقت نفسه صفة الذكاء، يرسم إيرفينغ لوحة طويلة في كل فصل، هي قصة ما، يبدؤها ببطء ثم ينهيها بسلاسة وجمال، مع الضغط بكل رشاقة على زر التعجب لدى القارىء. يتحدث جون إيرفينغ في هذا الكتاب (192 صفحة) عن مشواره كمصارع أثناء دراسته في المرحلة الثانوية، لكن المثير للانتباه حقاً هو: حديث إيرفينغ عن الكيفية التي أثرت بها المصارعة على مشواره الكتابي والروائي فيما بعد.الكتاب خفيف..وشيق..ومسلي لمن يريد أن يتعرف جيداً على تكوين ونشأة أحد أهم روائيي جيل السبعينات والثمانينات في أمريكا. ملاحظة : شكل هذا الكتاب مصدر إلهام للروائي الياباني الشهير هاروكي موراكامي، وقد قرر موراكامي لدى قراءته لهذا الكتاب أن يكتب هو أيضاً، كتابا عن علاقة مشواره الكتابي مع الرياضة، وقد فعل ذلك. ثم طلب موراكامي من إيرفينغ أن يقابله وجهاً لوجه في نيويورك، ليركض معه في حديقة السنترال بارك الشهيرة. غنى عن الذكر أن موراكامي قام فيما بعد بترجمة عدد من روايات جون إيرفينغ للغة اليابانية.
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Die Autobiographie von John Irving, der nebenbei gesagt einer der Schriftsteller ist, von denen ich fast alle Bücher habe. Dieses hier habe ich durch Bookcrossing erhalten. Es war ganz nett, aber nicht unbedingt eines dass ich mir nun auch unbedingt kaufen muss. Irving erzählt davon, dass er Legastheniker ist und deshalb nicht wirklich gut in der Schule war. Er war immer sehr langsam beim Lesen, aber hartnäckig. Und irgendwann hat er dann auch am Schreiben Gefallen gefunden. Seine zweite Leidenschaft ist das Ringen. Er selbst war nur ein mittelmäßiger Ringer, der nie ein großes Turnier gewann. Das haben dann seine beiden ältesten Söhne getan. (Wovon der älteste, Colin, ziemlich gut aussieht - wie auf den Fotoseiten in der Mitte zu sehen ist). Irving spricht außerdem von Schriftstellerkollegen, so war sein Mentor Kurt Vonnegut, und er wiederum hat anscheinend u.a. T.C. Boyle in Creative Writing unterrichtet. In diesem Fach war er nämlich als Dozent an verschiedenen Unis und Colleges tätig. Ach ja, und Irving - der mehrmals für einige Zeit in Wien lebte - sagt auch dass er höchstwahrscheinlich nie mehr in diese Stadt zurück kehren wird. Er findet, dass hier alle verkappte Antisemiten sind und "Die Wiener Gemütlichkeit, eine Touristenattraktion, ist die falsche Liebenswürdigkeit von Menschen, die im Grunde unhöflich sind." Ich lebe dennoch gern in Wien, basta!
—Karschtl
At first I thought this was the other John Irving memoir, the later one, where he talks about being bisexual, which is ironic in some ways because that one sounds really interesting, but this one sounds like the memoir of someone whose life was completely uneventful and without emotional content, which can *hardly* be true of Irving. The arc of this book is from privileged upbringing as a New England faculty brat (struggling with undiagnosed dyslexia) through a mediocre college career through immediately plunging into the politics of academic writing programs and a career as an author of bestsellers. He encounters all sorts of interesting writer friends, including Kurt Vonnegut and Robertson Davies, but all he feels like recounting about those friendships is the writing advice they gave him and what he and they think of each other's books, and through it all he overlays everything with the story of his life as told through his obsession with school and collegiate wrestling. Reading this book is actually a lot like being cornered at a party by a bore whose only interest in life is wrestling and who mistakenly thought you had an interest in the subject. There is so much detail here--so much narcissistic detail, one might say--along the lines of, for each key match in his life, how much he weighed, what the score was and why, which gym it was in, and even, if he can't remember the names of specific opponents, what school they went to and what their names MIGHT have been (was it Carswell or Caswell?! he speculates breathlessly; it must have been one of the two!) that I am even led to wonder if even the other participants in these matches can possibly be as interested as he is in recalling all of this, let alone his poor readers. Some of them, you know, might actually have lives to attend to instead of rehearsing this kind of thing endlessly in their memories. I do know that *I* have a life which I took time away from to read this. And remember, this is just collegiate wrestling, sometimes even high-school wrestling, not even the big time. There is a kind of autistic quality to the level of detail, even. Then, at one point, he mentions how the best part of wrestling is how you get to rub and bang your bodies sweatily against men of your own weight class, and it's like: Ding! okay, it's starting make a bit of sense. Clearly, there's something he's not dealing with but desperately wants to talk about. Sounds like he and Mrs. Irving need to sit down and have a LEETLE bit of a Talk. I guess that's all in the second memoir, which has just GOT to be more interesting than this one.
—Christopher Roth
The Imaginary Girlfriend gets three stars rather than five because it's a memoir (though Irving makes it clear he remembers things as an author does, meaning more inventively than actually) and there's nothing jaw-dropping about reality as it happened, in my mind. It gets three stars rather than none, however, because it's written cleanly and succinctly. For a writer who says he doesn't like Hemingway (and how dare he?!), he seems to prefer sparse prose to overwritten. The book ties wrestling to writing, showing how one has bolstered the other throughout his life. There are some funny bits about travelling for matches, as well as the authors he's met during his career: "The finals were at night. Scary people from the middle of Maine emerged in the night. (My good friend Stephen King doesn't make up everything; he knows the people I mean.)"It's peppered with advice for would-be writers ("That you're not very talented needn't be the end of it"... "It is not believable solely for the fact that it happened. The truth is, the imagination can select more plausible details than those incredible-but-true details we can remember.").Also lots of simple observations about life: "It seems idiotic, but I think it's very common that we meet people of importance to us just before we are going away somewhere."Unless you're an aspiring writer or a die-hard Irving fan, I'd say skip this one, but otherwise it's a nice read.
—Shauna
