The farmer is a demented zealot, given to inflicting routine beatings for the most minor offence, such as spilling milk or stuttering at prayers. In 1902, when he was about four, he arrives in the mountain village where he will spend his life and is taken in by a relative: a gruff, brutal farmer whose motivation for claiming the only child of a disgraced sister-in-law is the few bank notes in a leather pouch hanging around the youngster’s neck. He didn’t even really talk until his first year at school.”Īndreas has his reasons. As a child he “had never shouted or cheered. Work is the language he best understands. A deliberate lifeĪndreas Egger is a solemn man of few words but deep, complex feeling that he seldom articulates. A Whole Life has the mood of an Alistair MacLeod story and will resonate with Irish readers for its physical evocation of the remote mountain village as well as for its understated melancholy, which is reminiscent of Sam Hanna Bell's classic December Bride (1951). Yet again its power rests in its candid simplicity. The speed is not surprising, and it is wonderful to see a gentle, tender work devoid of sentimentality yet so evocative and moving being presented to an international readership. So, too, is Paul Harding's more recent Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers (2009), in which an old man lies dying as his confused memories coalesce into a vivid pageant in his mind. William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow (1981), a heartbreaking, confessional story about how a boyhood moment of weakness earns the narrator a lifelong guilt over his cowardly act of betrayal, is another understated masterwork. Yet subtle mood-fictions such as Stoner create a hunger for similar, thoughtful works. Hype dictates nowadays, meaning calm, understated novels are often overlooked. Williams was a career academic and Stoner was his third of four novels.

Since then, John Williams's subtle account of a farmer's unassuming son who attends a midwestern college to study agriculture, only to discover literature and instead become a university lecturer, continues to beguile readers across the world. John McGahern lovingly championed Stoner and wrote an introductory essay of rare critical intuition and insight. In order to secure the wider reverence, the support of a master was sought. And yet again, the reaction was positive, if muted.Īlmost 30 years would pass before a publisher decided to reissue it. Some time later, in 1973, Stoner was published in the UK, again without fanfare. Yet readers loved Stoner and it would become a book that lives through the insistence of word of mouth. Fifty years ago an American writer published a tender, quiet novel that caused barely a ripple.

A whole life by robert seethaler