Oh What a Paradise It Seems

might hit too close to home if you are a closeted dude who drinks a lot of polluted pond water

Per comprendere un'opera letteraria o artistica, è necessario conoscere la vita e le ossessioni dell'autore?Romanzo bizzarro questo. Leggerlo è stato come stare in macchina con alla guida un autista che non ha chiaro quale sia la destinazione. E la guida quindi si compone di brusche virate, di inversioni a U, di repentine deviazioni.Un romanzo che ha al suo interno tante contraddizioni (come la vita dell'autore?) e puntate di lirismo veramente notevoli."Vorrei che la storia che sto raccontando [...]

Cuando John Cheever estaba enfermo de cáncer y a punto de morirse, escribió una novela breve con mensaje ecologista y extrañamente optimista, llamada ni más ni menos ‘Esto parece el paraíso’. El protagonista es un hombre mayor al que le encanta patinar sobre hielo y que, a lo largo de la novela, empieza una relación con una mujer y después otra con un hombre, pero los dos más jóvenes que él, mientras que también lucha para evitar que una laguna se convierta en un vertedero de resi [...]

Gradevole e forse qualcosa di più. Il concatenarsi di eventi ad effetto lo rendono un po' incredibile, ma la scrittura è buona ed anche la narrazione. tutto inizia attorno ad un uomo che pattina su un laghetto ghiacciato, laghetto che viene poi trasformato in discarica. Decisione a cui lui si oppone per vie legali, con scarso successo. Più successo avranno le anonime minacce (attentati!) di una madre di famiglia indignata. Ma non è la storia, quanto lo stile della narrazione, che si muove pe [...]

Sears, um homem já de certa idade, viúvo duas vezes, telefona à filha, que mora em Janice, perto do Lago de Beasley, antes de ir passar um dia a patinar no lago gelado. Duas semanas mais tarde, já com o lago descongelado, percebe que o transformaram num local de descarga de entulho, controlado pela Máfia que controla o Conselho Municipal, para quem Salazzo, um antigo barbeiro local, faz as cobranças ilegais. Sears contrate Chisholm, um advogado e ativista ambiental, para litigar sobre o la [...]

Este livro de John Chever - "Parece Mesmo o Paraíso" é absolutamente desconcertante.A linguagem própria do autor, a sua descrição perfeita das personagens e das situações, tudo ali está, como nos seus contos.Mas Cheever é quase surrealista na forma como encadeia as situações, como enquadra as personagens que vai apresentando, algumas delas nem "fazem parte do enredo", se este livro tem enredoTrata-se de algo simples que o autor vai "desdobrando" e que se resume em poucas palavras - a [...]

“He skated and skated. The pleasure of fleetness seemed, as she had said, divine. Swinging down a long stretch of black ice gave Sears a sense of homecoming. At long last, at the end of a cold, long journey, he was returning to a place where his name was known and loved and lamps burned in the rooms and fires in the hearth. It seemed to Sears that all the skaters moved over the ice with the happy conviction that they were on their way home. Home might be an empty room and an empty bed to many [...]

Bello e noioso come stare in ParadisoUn protagonista che si divide tra ricordi, incontri con una signora passionale e prestazioni omosessuali col primo che capita, un "paradiso" che è un lago che sta per diventare una discarica, dialoghi folgoranti composti senza un'apparente logica, una generalizzata sensazione di decadenza della civiltà.Un romanzo con spunti narrativi originali, scritto con momenti di pura e intensa poesia (alternati a momenti abbastanza tediosi) ma che però non si capisce [...]

The second star is really just General Cheever Goodwill, because I do really love Cheever -- the stories, the Wapshot stuff, especially Falconer, which is beautiful. But this book: yeah, not so much. I think it gets shelved in the "slightly amusing cranky old man" section, next to a few of Philip Roth's lesser novels.

This novella has everything I like about Cheever--lovely clarity of language, a knowingness about people's inner lives and yearnings, and a slight sense of the absurd. I also liked the unexpected environmental message. Hurray for the Cheever revival!

Kept waiting for this story's soul to show up, but I guess it was taking a long lunch.

"Oh what a paradise it seems" is Cheevers laatste boek; terwijl hij het schreef was hij dodelijk ziek en hij wist dat ook. Duidelijk een zwanenzang dus, en bovendien een "ecological fable" waarin veel aandacht bestaat voor milieuvervuiling en de nefaste invloed daarop van voze politici en maffiosi. De hiertegen agerende hoodfpersoon is, net als degene die met hem samenwerkt, dan ook nog eens oud en doordesemd van teleurgestelde nostalgie, en vol van tamelijk weemoedig liefdesverlangen. Ingredien [...]

"This is a story to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night. The dogs are asleep and the saddle horses -Dombey and Trey-can be heard in their stalls across the dirt road beyond the orchard. The rain is gentle and needed but not needed with any desperation. The water tables are equitable, the nearby river is plentiful, the gardens and orchards -it is at a turning of the season- are irrigated ideally. Almost all the lights are out in the little village by the waterfall where the mill, so m [...]

"This is a story to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night."So begins Cheever's 1982 fable. The story is about an idyllic village ("it presented no fast food franchises of any sort"), with large mansions that "had not been reconstructed to serve as nursing homes for that vast population of comatose and the dying who were kept alive, unconscionably, through trailblazing medical invention." The village contains an equally idyllic pond, on which the hero, an older man named Lemuel Sears, e [...]

This is my first book by Cheever and I meant for it to be a novella; I tend to read shorts by acclaimed authors before delving into their other longer books to get a grasp and a feeling of the author's style. Cheever did not disappoint and I had fun reading this novella. I don't know how to classify it, whether drama or mystery. It is, definitely, a slice of life novella. At times, it reminded me of the melancholic "A Single Man" (film). I was going to give it 3 stars (my "good & enjoyed it" [...]

Structurally neat and tidy, which is especially interesting given it’s a product of Cheever’s personal unraveling. (Best review says: “Might hit too close to home if you are a closeted dude who drinks a lot of polluted pond water.”)Even with the pond, this is not quite the enviro story the Sierra Club set might get excited for when they read the jacket copy—rather, the same nostalgic New England NIMBYism you get in The Wapshot Chronicle. It works, though.

I love the way that Cheever writes. Its frankness and mystery at the same time is amazing.This is a book about a small town, corruption, love and pollution. They don't really seem to go together, do they? But somehow, Cheever makes it work.A short work but a good one. I am ready to reread it already.

This novella seems to be about nothing in particular. A pristine pond near a small village in upstate New York is being used as a dumping site by what perhaps might be mafiosi, and randy old man who likes to skate on the pond sets out to try to stop the dumping. The problem for me with this story is the way it is told. While the main characters are associated with the pond - our randy old timer Lemuel Sears, a woman who lives next door to family relations of the mafiosi dumping in the pond, an i [...]

Here Cheever’s style is as distinct and remarkable as ever. The scenes he paints of suburbia are striking in their nostalgia and borderline sentimentality—which he at once reveals to the reader to be little more than a sham, leaving us with circumstances that neither the reader nor especially the protagonist desires. Cheever’s characters are utterly specific yet eerily relatable in a text that feels reminiscent of Phillip Roth’s Everyman. The fabrics with which he weaves his narrative ar [...]

È la storia, tragicomica, di come un laghetto fu salvato grazie al vecchio Sears, a un ambientalista dal cuore puro e a una giovane donna agguerrita. Ma, soprattutto, è la storia di Sears: politicamente scorretto, sessualmente indeciso, ingenuo, esilarante, salace, poetico. Acuto e irriverente.

Slight, occasionally disjointed, still in many ways typical Cheever. Too much seems to resolve itself by happy coincidence, and the reader is always conscious that this is a late, incomplete work.

A good novella about aging, love, lust and politics. His descriptions of people are extraordinary as always.

Not bad at all, but at 100 pages it feels just about the right length.Lemuel Sears feels a bit miscast as the protagonist. Although I haven't a single thing to base this on, he seems to me a stand-in for Cheever: dashing old man, still a little sexy, healthy and active, something of an intellectual and a world-traveler. He got a bit tedious. I preferred being with sweet old Betsy and Henry.Some striking ideas showed up here and there: "He felt so lonely that when the car ahead of him signaled fo [...]

Daca tot am obsevat ca am o serie de carti parcurse acum ceva vreme, dar asupra carora nu mi-am exprimat parerea, am zis ca ar fi timpul sa ma pun pe treaba.Totul pare un paradis e un roman scurt, dar surprinzator de bun. Cel putin asa a fost pentru mine. Lucrurile sunt prezentate intr-o maniera directa si clara, in asa fel incat cititorul intra instant in atmosfera oraselului care e personajul principal, si care se cheama Janice, much to my surprise, as it is a woman's name. La marginea orasulu [...]

John Cheever's novel "Oh What a Paradise It Seems" seems to me a slight book in more than just its less than a hundred pages. I'm no expert in Cheever's writing, even though I once read all of his collected short stories and thought them entertaining enough to read all at once, but this book is full of literally wonderful unlikely sentences said by characters made out of a brilliant writer's somewhat jaundiced imagination rather than anything likely to actually happen. At least not all of it all [...]

"At the time in which I am writing," is the beginning of several key sentences in "Oh What A Paradise It Seems". Cheever has always been a great example of 'period' writing, in the sense that he depicts the trends in society. His last published work, "Paradise" seems to be a summation of this impulse, tracking the trends of 1970s and early 80s life while also looking back on the past.I love this 'period' part of Cheever's work - actually it's the main reason I like him, combined with his sensiti [...]

I stayed up all night reading a short book by John Cheever What a Paradise It Seems which was, from what I can gather, his last.That things had been better was the music, the reprise of his days. It had been sung by his elders, by his associates, he had heard it sung in college by Toynbee and Spengler. Things had been better, things were getting worse, and the lengthening moral and intellectual shadows that one saw spreading over the Western World were final. What a bore it had been to live in t [...]

E’ una storia particolare che, ci informa subito l’autore, dovrebbe essere letta “a letto, in una vecchia casa, in un giorno di pioggia”. Ruota intorno all’anziano protagonista, amante dei paesaggi di montagna del nord America e dei suoi laghi gelati: su uno di questi, in particolare, ama pattinare dolcemente durante l’inverno e quando scopre che personaggi senza scrupoli lo stanno trasformando in una discarica intraprende una battaglia legale per difenderlo. Solo e due volte vedovo, [...]

La última novela de Cheever, Parecía un paraíso no parece uno de sus maravillosos relatos. Más bien, parece algo escrito rápido, sin tantas ganas, sin ningúna preocupación por las transiciones dramáticas (un hombre encuentra el amor en un ascensorista luego de haber ido a buscar supuestamente al amor de su vida) y con un esbozo bastante grosero de los personajes. De un lado, los buenos y del otro lado los malos. En el medio, la clase media y la clase pudiente con conciencia ecológica � [...]

John Cheever's last piece of work is a parable set in the idyllic Small Town, USA, being riddled with frustration and melancholy over what was vs. what is and what could've been. We're told the story of an elder businessman, Lemuel Sears, a man's man forged in the heat of WWII, with eyes like the sea and a fisherman's tan; a man who's troubled by the ever-changing world and the politics that make it go round, a man who's just looking for something steady to hold on to and make him feel young aga [...]