John Williams was born on August 29, 1922 in Clarksville, Texas. He served in the United States Army Air Force from 1942 to 1945 in China, Burma and India. The Swallow Press published his first novel, Nothing But the Night, in 1948, as well as his first book of poems, The Broken Landscape, in 1949. Macmillan published Williams’ second novel, Butcher’s Crossing, in 1960.
After recieving his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Denver, and his Ph.D from the University of Missouri, Williams returned in 1954 to the University of Denver where he taught literature and the craft of writing for thirty years. In 1963 Williams received a fellowship to study at Oxford University where where he received a Rockefeller grant enabling him to travel and research in Italy for his last novel, Augustus, published in 1972. John Williams died in Arkansas on March 4, 1994.
I know that I am late in reading stoner, but oh boy was this a ride that i did not expect. This whole story for me a gut wrenching novel as a whole even though I can see the reasons why people claim it to be a slice of life and slow living novel which to be honest is kind of misleading because there where a lot of surprises waiting for me through the novel, I really loved how John Williams prose and writing was so good and well done and how the passage of time in the novel was phenomenal that it doesn’t drag on also doesn’t feel rushed but just the right amount for us (the readers) to see the characters develop and interact - its like moving in slow motions it feels as time is standing still and you get lost in his world a world full of academia, introversion and loneliness. Williams is a stunning writer his very simple but its very evocative and his descriptions are beautiful.
The opening of the novel and the ending of the novel was done so great even though after spending a while life time with the protagonist stoner you feel sort of melancholic and just gaze at this passage of time filled with interactions and different tasks called “life”, what does it mean to live? and is there even a way one should live? - I felt like those where the questions that were tackled alongside many other questions in this novel.
While it does certainly stand up to much of the hype it gets there indeed are some questionable characters and motives through the novel that didn’t sit right with me to the point that my whole mood for the day was altered because of that but it kind of shows what life is.
This book is one that will always remain in the back of your mind, the of the way John Williams describes the intricacies and details of life it was so just beautifully crafted. I would definitely recommend this to anyone and will always be that book that I do recommend whenever prompted because it was that good, I do believe that if I had read this book earlier in life I wouldn’t have appreciated it as much. Because stoner is not a remarkable man - he is just average and his life is just mundane and if you know me for my movie tastes you do know I am a sucker for the mundane, the minutia of life.
How do you reach deep down and bring out the spark that you know you have and feel ?, in a sense this novel is also an existential one. Reading this story was like drifting in and out of a dream.
Man Katherine Driscoll and Dave Masters were such a God sent, ifykyk.
Highlights
- It takes being in love to know something about yourself.
- Nothing had changed. Their lives had been expended in cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed. Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them. Slowly the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would touch their flesh, and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances. And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves.
- The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.
- You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you’re trying to decide what to do.
- He had no plans for the future, and he spoke to no one of his uncertainty
- He had known that his mind must weaken as his body wasted, but he had been unprepared for the suddenness. The flesh is strong, he thought; stronger than we imagine. It wants always to go on.