Trade Paperback, 278 pages
English language
Published Nov. 8, 2006 by New York Review Books.
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward …
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world. --back cover
One of the truest characters I've ever read, but not an uplifting read. Stoner is the best depressing book I've read in years.
It's like reading the book of Job.
Yet another book I've discovered through the read list of Philipp. I should have been warned as from my experience he doesn't make claims like «The saddest book I've read so far» too lightly.
It's a pretty quick read (~ 2 1/2 hours worth of reading time) but it stays in your head for much longer. Basically the whole book is the 101 on «How many small bad decisions - which not looked too bad at the time - tend to pile up and can destroy your life if you run with them» (or to borrow from another review: «life sucks and then you die (in my own words)»).
Which I found pretty easy to relate to and reading this book on my commute to work was probably one of the worse decisions I made recently.
5/5. Would suffer again.
I can understand the people who quit halfway through this book and then complain about how it's overrated. I kept going to the end, though, and I'm glad I read it. I don't know how to explain why. It was like living someone's life through, and being reminded by doing that all lives are to some extent meaningless, that contentment washes out regrets, and that it all ends. I can't possibly explain why that was good, but it was.
A Dreiser-like panorama of tsouris, life sucks and then you die. The satisfaction comes from how well it is written and from observing the principle character stand amid hostile Society like Jimmy Stewart.
