Story of Holden Caufield with his idiosyncrasies, penetrating insight, confusion, sensitivity and negativism. Holden, knowing he is to be expelled from school, decides to leave early. He spends three days in New York City and tells the story of what he did and suffered there.
Bez znajomości kontekstu książka jest dużo słabsza. Jeśli czujesz, że bohater jest bardzo irytujący, a jesteś dopiero w pierwszych szkolnych rozdziałach, śmiało przewiń do momentu, w którym bohater szkołę opuszcza. Wtedy robi się troszkę ciekawiej.
Bohatera można nawet polubić. Przynajmniej mam takie wrażenie. Długo zachowuje się on jak dzieciak, co sam zresztą przyznaje. Dlatego też myślę, że gdybym przeczytał tę książkę mając mniej niż 18 lat, zrobiłaby na mnie większe wrażenie.
Review of 'The Catcher in the Rye' on 'Storygraph'
5 stars
When I read The Catcher in the Rye as a teenager, I was underwhelmed. I don't remember much of the book. Only three images stuck in my mind: Holden Caulfield on the train to New York, Holden on the phone in his hotel room and the title image: Holden as the catcher in the rye. Other than that, I remember only that I was disappointed. So many people had told me to read the book. Many of them seemed to feel an affinity with Holden Caulfield. I didn't feel that kinship with Holden, and the book as a whole came nowhere near meeting my expectations. I didn't dislike it, but I didn't love it either.
Rereading it now is an entirely different experience. I went in curious about what had changed in the thirty years (has it really been that long?) since I last read the book.
I was immediately …
When I read The Catcher in the Rye as a teenager, I was underwhelmed. I don't remember much of the book. Only three images stuck in my mind: Holden Caulfield on the train to New York, Holden on the phone in his hotel room and the title image: Holden as the catcher in the rye. Other than that, I remember only that I was disappointed. So many people had told me to read the book. Many of them seemed to feel an affinity with Holden Caulfield. I didn't feel that kinship with Holden, and the book as a whole came nowhere near meeting my expectations. I didn't dislike it, but I didn't love it either.
Rereading it now is an entirely different experience. I went in curious about what had changed in the thirty years (has it really been that long?) since I last read the book.
I was immediately struck by the voice: a pitch-perfect 1950s teenagers. It's hard to believe that Salinger wrote this in his thirties. As I read more, I realized that it felt like a twelve or thirteen year old, not a sixteen year old. While Holden is by his own admission immature, and several of the people he encounters tell him this, nothing in the book reinforces that Holden is frozen in time as much as his own words and the way he uses them.
For the first half of the book, I had this nagging feeling: there was something disturbingly familiar about Holden's voice: the repetition of key phrases, the hyperbole, the high praise for some and the ability to dismiss so many as morons and phonies, the way he spoke about women. Yes, it pointed to Holden's immaturity, but it also brought to mind the Twitter stream of a current individual who has risen to the heights of power. It's remarkable that these words that were so carefully crafted to represent the thoughts of an immature sixteen year old could at times sound exactly like the way the most power person in the world has chosen to represent himself on Twitter.
I couldn't shake this feeling for the first half of the book, and it affected the way I felt about Holden, but things started to change in the second half of the book. As Holden's attempts to find human companionship became more and more desperate, as he almost as desperately pushed many of those same people away, I felt like I was beginning to feel differently about Holden. I began to hope that Holden could find that he was looking for. I wanted Holden to find the person who could talk him through what he was unable to go through himself.
The images that stayed with me—Holden on the train talking to a woman, Holden on the phone in his hotel room, Holden as the catcher in the rye—weren't just random images. Each of those images captured Holden's predicament. They weren't the only images that did. I wonder now why other images—his brother's baseball glove, the ducks and the frozen lake—didn't stay with me over the years.
As I came to the end of the book, I had the realization, obvious in hindsight, that it wasn't Holden who was the catcher in the rye. As much as he may have wished he'd been able to, it wasn't Holden who needed to do the catching. It was Holden who needed to be caught, who needed someone to stop him "going over the edge."
That realization was the difference. I missed it the first time around and was underwhelmed as a result. Strangely enough, I was probably too much like Holden as a teenager to appreciate the book. It isn't so much about feeling an affinity with Holden, it's hoping that he finds someone to catch him. I'm glad that I've come back to it after all these years. Having finished the book, it makes perfect sense that Salinger wrote it in this thirties, but that doesn't make it any less remarkable.
Continuing on my journey of the classics, I picked up this book with a lot of expectations - and that's where I went wrong. Maybe if I had read the tagline "for teenage readers", the outcome would've been different. This story is from the perspective of a teenage boy going through his high school year & revolves around his general distaste of people, alienation and angst toward humanity in general. We all have gone through this phase at some point in our life and that's why I could somewhat relate to his ramblings. Without spoiling much, I would say this is a good (and light) read, but probably not a book amongst "the great literary classics".
The last time I'd read Catcher, I was a teenager. My big brother the novelist gave me the book like a final exam that I'd better pass if I was a brother of his. All I could appreciate at the time was Holden hated phonies and was "oppressed" accordingly. I hoped that was sufficient to keep my brother who I worshiped then, like Phoebe did Holden.
Reading it now is a completely different experience. I can see all the Salingerness in it. I notice that Holden even contemplates running away to a cabin in the woods. They send him to schools to prepare him for the real world but he resists them. Not for lack of ability, but for inner purity.
The big values in Catcher, and all of Salinger, really, are innocence and observation. Innocence allows you to see the falsity of the adult world. Observation permits you to …
The last time I'd read Catcher, I was a teenager. My big brother the novelist gave me the book like a final exam that I'd better pass if I was a brother of his. All I could appreciate at the time was Holden hated phonies and was "oppressed" accordingly. I hoped that was sufficient to keep my brother who I worshiped then, like Phoebe did Holden.
Reading it now is a completely different experience. I can see all the Salingerness in it. I notice that Holden even contemplates running away to a cabin in the woods. They send him to schools to prepare him for the real world but he resists them. Not for lack of ability, but for inner purity.
The big values in Catcher, and all of Salinger, really, are innocence and observation. Innocence allows you to see the falsity of the adult world. Observation permits you to see what everyone else is ignoring. These are super powers. The real world is built of kryptonite.
We can hate phonies along with Holden, forgetting for the brief time we read that we are the phonies. Oh, not really, we say--it's just that we have to live in the real world, right? Inside, we're still pure, we tell ourselves and by appreciating the book, we prove it to ourselves. Fact is, a phony has lost the ability to see their own phoniness. No one caught them in the rye and it's too late for them now. Them, not us, right? It's not too late for us because we can read Salinger.
"I know he's dead! Don't you think I know that? I can still like them, though, can't I? Just because somebody's dead, you don't stop liking them, for God's sake-especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than people you know that're alive and all."
Apparently this came out in 1945. I love how it's written in the way we still talk.
Reviews go that this is a great novel, it is one of the best ever written, depicts New York in that time perfectly; so on and so on but this gets a solid "it was okay" from me. I disliked Holden Caulfield too much to enjoy it. If Dolores Umbridge (Harry Potter) was a lead in a book I still think I would dislike Holden Caulfield more.
I struggled with rating this book, it is one of the few this year I could probably write a longer review on. Because it made me feel something it should get a higher star rating. On the other hand Holden didn't grow as a character. He dislikes people because they are phoney and not intellectual enough for him, but I like to believe that everyone else is smart enough to realize Holden is a lazy, unmotivated drop-out and is not worth their time …
Reviews go that this is a great novel, it is one of the best ever written, depicts New York in that time perfectly; so on and so on but this gets a solid "it was okay" from me. I disliked Holden Caulfield too much to enjoy it. If Dolores Umbridge (Harry Potter) was a lead in a book I still think I would dislike Holden Caulfield more.
I struggled with rating this book, it is one of the few this year I could probably write a longer review on. Because it made me feel something it should get a higher star rating. On the other hand Holden didn't grow as a character. He dislikes people because they are phoney and not intellectual enough for him, but I like to believe that everyone else is smart enough to realize Holden is a lazy, unmotivated drop-out and is not worth their time to socialize with. And still Holden is too dense to understand why he can't integrate in society.
A morbid part of me wanted Holden to run through Central Park in a drunken stupor, sit down on a bench and freeze to death; at least he would no longer be a strain on his parents and whatever "friends" he had. Instead he hits rock bottom, ends up out west where everyone is phoney and that's that. That kills me.
Only just noticed that I didn't give this a review.
Read this a few years back now, around the time I started reading grown up books. I hated it, it takes a very talented writer to create a character that is so horrible you actually want to go into the book and pulverise him. Everything he does is annoying, everybody he meets is annoying and everywhere he goes is annoying. For the whole story I was cheering on anything that might have the slightest chance of blowing up in his face.
Salinger is a genius for managing to get these emotions out of readers, especially when you consider that this isn't a long book, he gets a lot done in a short time. The book itself is well written and deserves 4 stars.
What can I say about this book that hasn't been said a thousand times before? Well, this, actually:
I first read The Catcher in the Rye when I was in school; it might have been late elementary school, or it could have been junior high. In any case, it was in the late 1970s. And I believed that it was a contemporary book. Years later, I discovered that it had been published in 1951. That simply amazed me.
Some of it certainly went over my head as a young teen, of course. I was fairly innocent back then. Now I get it, of course. But even now, in early middle age, I can't help but feel that Holden is a friend.
I see I'm wandering into cliche.
One thing: I did find a book which is remarkably similar in tone to The Catcher in the Rye. It's fundamentally …
What can I say about this book that hasn't been said a thousand times before? Well, this, actually:
I first read The Catcher in the Rye when I was in school; it might have been late elementary school, or it could have been junior high. In any case, it was in the late 1970s. And I believed that it was a contemporary book. Years later, I discovered that it had been published in 1951. That simply amazed me.
Some of it certainly went over my head as a young teen, of course. I was fairly innocent back then. Now I get it, of course. But even now, in early middle age, I can't help but feel that Holden is a friend.
I see I'm wandering into cliche.
One thing: I did find a book which is remarkably similar in tone to The Catcher in the Rye. It's fundamentally different, mind you; I certainly don't want to imply that there was plagiarism involved. Not at all! The Teddy Bear Habit by James Lincoln Collier was written in the 1960s, for the 10-16 year old age group (roughly speaking), and includes a lot of humor as well as action and suspense; the hero has problems, but they're nowhere near as serious as Holden's. On the other hand, the book is set in Greenwich Village.
But something about the internal narration by young George Stable is so reminiscent of Holden's inner voice that in my memory I've sometimes mixed the two together. So if you love The Catcher in the Rye, you may want to give The Teddy-Bear Habit a try. See if you can pick up one of the older editions, illustrated by New Yorker illustrator Lorenz; they complement the text wonderfully.
