A Widow for One Year
Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character--a "difficult" woman. By no means is she conventionally "nice," but she will never be forgotten.Ruth's story is told in three parts, each focusing on a crucial time in her life. When we first meet her--on Long Island, in the summer of...
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Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character--a "difficult" woman. By no means is she conventionally "nice," but she will never be forgotten.Ruth's story is told in three parts, each focusing on a crucial time in her life. When we first meet her--on Long Island, in the summer of 1958--Ruth is only four.The second window into Ruth's life opens in the fall of 1990, when Ruth is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career. She distrusts her judgment in men, for good reason.A Widow for One Year closes in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother. She's about to fall in love for the first time.Richly comic, as well as deeply disturbing A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force. Both ribald and erotic, it is also a brilliant novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief.
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Format: hardcover
ISBN:
9780812968576 (0812968573)
Publish date: May 20th 2003
Publisher: Modern Library
Pages no: 576
Edition language: English
I realised as I opened this book that parts of it are set in Amsterdam, which was funny as I was heading for Amsterdam when I opened this. Kinda pretentious and wordy it could have been a better story if the author wasn't too busy trying to psychoanalyse the characters.
What can I say? Irving rocks. I saw the movie before I read the book, so I knew the plot for the first part, I never expected it to go on as epically as it did. The combination of rich details and deep, convincing characters really makes this a book to savor.
I violently hated this novel in its first 300 or so pages and only came to tolerate (and even mildly like) the story as it wrapped up its final threads. I state this at the very beginning in order to establish that I am emphatically not the target audience for this novel, but it doesn't mean that Jo...
What I really liked about this book, and I always like John Irving novels was the imagery. I can't get the "feet" out of my mind.
I thought the supporting characters were a lot more interesting than Ruth.
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