With the tacit permission of my dear Alfonso G. Jerez, published in The Cultural Supplement Tracker. http://blogs.diariodeavisos.com/blogdealfonsogonzalezjerez/ THE DISCOVERY OF JOHN WILLIAMS.
In contemporary American fiction is not unusual moral parable. Faced with the tradition of great Southern writers and their heroic techniques, the social novel between the wars or the rhetoric of the irony of Bellow, his great disciple Roth, Updike or Auster, the moral parable is an exercise to which American writers show an irrepressible fondness, and crosses authors, trends and schools. Parables are different but unmistakable moral The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway , Swimmer John Cheever, Centaur by John Updike and to some extent, The Catcher in the Rye (the worst). None of them, however, has literary value, insight and emotion Stoner, the novel by John Williams who has just been published by the Sun Dance in the translation of Antonio Díez Fernández.
John Williams (1922-1994) is a writer almost unknown in Spain. Grandson of peasants in his childhood and adolescence in Texas showed an almost invariable tendency to leakage and disciplinary punishments. In the midst of World War II he enlisted in the Air Force and in the late forties entered the University of Denver, where he majored in English literature. He later earned a doctorate and taught at the University of Missouri and again in Denver, where he managed the literary magazine University of Denver Quarterly and coordinated a workshop on narrative writing. Williams published four novels (most recently published Augustus won the National Book Award in 1973) and several books of poems.
Stoner, originally published in 1965, is a marvel of intelligence, simplicity and depth. It narrates the life of a professor a small Midwestern college, a son of farmers who falls in love with the language and literature, and terminates devoted forty years of teaching, but never ceases to be an associate professor. In a review I read that Stoner is the story of a man of integrity with bad luck. I think a mistake. William Stoner is a great person but not a man of integrity. An honest man is not weak to support a limited life and gray, allowing the collapse of his daughter and lets out a miraculous love that comes when you have forgotten even what it meant hope. Williams's novel is the story of a loser who deserved better, but an incisive reflection on losses, shipwrecks, deceptions and lies of all life and a radical incapacity for happiness. Williams is careful to the need to make nice or nasty characters, although they may be and above all do stupid things, selfish or closely abominable. William Stoner, their families and colleagues are left to live among lies, pettiness and erase mistakes until death. In his universe, which is to any of us, friendship is a nostalgia shared no love or indifference to the injury should be taught not to bleed daily.
The insignificant Stoner is an unforgettable character in his railed dignity, her love literature and teaching, in his infinite and indifferent final resignation to all offenses of mediocrity quintessential: the self and others. There is more simplicity in the technical procedures of the novel, I humbly begins with birth and ends with the death of its protagonist. Invariable effectiveness of a precise prose, backwaters and transparent, and disclaims any distraction and seems to not do anything but tell a story linearly contributes to the emotional impact of the story and is colored by an amazing capacity for observation and synthesis. Stoner may not be one of the great novels of our time, but it is a perfect narrative novel, exciting and enduring. A book becomes essential in the select library of any reader.
One can only congratulate Baile del Sol "is perhaps currently the best Canarian editorial by John Williams to add to his increasingly strong and consistent catalog: a bet that professional intelligence evidence Tito Alonso Angeles Expósito and its literary smell, its stubborn commitment to quality and sense of risk. It's a wonderful event that the introduction of Williams in the English book market, and in our language, come from the hand of an editorial in the archipelago. Professionalism, intuition, demand for quality, rigor in the catalog sense of risk: the main virtues of a publisher who, unfortunately, are becoming increasingly rare in the Islands.
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