The Spectator Bird

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Furthermore, Joe is not aging gracefully. He thinks to himself at one point that “I am just killing time till time gets around to killing me.” His dark outlook on life is partly due to a heart problem and the pain he experiences from the onset of rheumatoid arthritis, but it is also because he feels that he has lived an empty life. He is both retrospective and introspective; he broods about the past and the present – and the future. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2012-03-07 18:53:57 Boxid IA179501 Boxid_2 CH118801 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York, N.Y., U.S.A. Donor I would add I usually don't recommend books I've already read, because I don't like to re-read. So it's always uncertain if the books I recommend here will be a winner as I never know if the book will fit the above criteria that I think makes a book a good group read. The best we can do is give it a good try.

I'll let you know how the discussion goes when these two books come up in the rotation for the F2F group. the main character felt he was a spectator in life. I would have titled it The Spectator. Why he added bird, I'm not so sure. I did think the kiss incident was a little overblown. To me it was more that Joe was getting intersted in Astrid and that with time something might have happened between them. To an extent I think he also wanted to protect Astrid, take her away from her suffering, maybe being able to make a diffeence in her life, something he feels he was not able to do with his Son. Just a thought. Set mostly in Denmark, “The Spectator Bird” centered on Joe Allston, a 69-year-old retired literary agent, his wife (Ruth), and their summer friendship with a Danish countess who had fallen from grace. The arrival of a postcard from Astrid Wredel-Krarup stirred up memories of a “therapy” trip the Allstons had undertaken twenty years ago, and evoked feelings that mattered to Joe because the interlude was "that irruption of the irrational, that reversion into adolescence". The narration was interspersed with journal entries Joe had made from that trip as he read it aloud to his wife (at her insistence).Joe didn’t deny being smitten with Astrid - he wanted to do something for her. He hated to leave her behind. Cultural differences, particularly the Scandinavian lifestyle in comparison to the American, is amusingly and insightfully drawn. The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner is about Joe Allston. He is 70 years old, difficult to deal with, and a former literary agent who has no goals in life. He considers himself a spectator in life. Besides Ruth, his wife, the rest of his family is dead and he has no relatives. One day, Allston receives a post-card from one of his friends whom he has not seen for many years. The post card prompts him to look at the records of a trip he took many years ago. Reading the journals makes Allston reminisce about the past. Arm in arm with Stegner, Joe dips into the past, examines the shadows, and is rewarded with a transcendent return to sunlight. The book is about one’s thoughts as one nears seventy. It is about family relationships and guilt and misgivings and about accepting that how you feel you ought to be is perhaps not how you can be. There is a lot here about daring to voice one’s innermost thoughts. The book is about connection to others. Look at the title. Are you a “spectator-bird”, observing others at a distance, or are you one who lets others come close?

One of the things that makes me more tolerant is that Joe had a rough childhood (as did Stegner) and I don’t think I originally made enough allowance for that fact. He is also unable to come to terms with the death of his only child twenty years earlier, who was described as an over age beach bum who died either due to an accident or suicide. Part of Joe’s grief can be traced to the fact that he and his son were in constant conflict and he feels that he was not a good father and thus was partly responsible for his rebellious son’s death.

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The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year. Joe Allston is 69, a retired literary agent. He lives with his wife Ruth. Their son died years earlier and Joe still harbours a lot of Bitterness about the hand life has dealt him. He seems to be cutting himself of from friends and becoming more and more grumpy and solitary. He feels his life has been lived as a spectator. When he receives a postcard from a woman he and Ruth knew years before it sends him searching for the journals he wrote during his time in Denmark. It was during this time that he and Ruth returned to his mother’s birthplace and met the countess. Spoiler Etiquette: Please put a spoiler warnings at the top of your posts when giving away a plot element or when replying to a post that gives away a major plot element. Guilt, regret, and selfishness were secret emotions Joe carried inside him. With a gentle push from Ruth, Joe reads Ruth the all that he wrote. It takes many evenings. Much gets exposed - not particularly comfortable - but Ruth was wonderful. I think she knew it had to be painful forJoe to read them to her. ( hard for her to hear too- but there was no hardening or accusations coming from her).

In Susan Wise Bauer's book on reading she gave some questions to keep in mind while reading. Of course, not all book warrant such introspection and not all questions apply to all novels. I think SB is a literary novel that can stand such scrutiny.Wallace Stegner's 1976 novel, The Spectator Bird, tells the emotive story of Joe Allston, a retired literary agent who feels as if he has lived his life as a "spectator," both during his career and during his retirement. His loving and obliging wife, Ruth, is more engaged socially, and does her best to bring her husband out of his shell. Joe's neighbor, Ben, is a foil for Joe, as he seems to age with poise and complacency. According to the begrudging Joe, "Ben is the very chief of the tribe that makes old age out to be a time of liberation" (9). Their other neighbors, Edith and Tom Patterson, are a demure and distinguished older couple. Tom is an architect, and Edith is friendly with Ruth. The couple frequently invites Joe and Ruth over for dinner. Both books were nominated for awards and this one was the winner. But I enjoyed reading its precursor more as the Danish segments here came off a bit disconnected from the story that seemed to be unfolding. Ultimately, as expected, it all came together. Stegner’s observations of married life are always sweet and sorrowful, profound and full of truth and wisdom.

Perhaps, this novel would seem drearily depressing to individuals in the prime of their lives. It speaks candidly about the dignity (or indignity) of growing old and the realities of a long marriage. People who have been blessed with an enduring marriage may be able to identify with this observation, “After forty-five years we can still, if we let ourselves, bristle and bump one another around like a pair of stiff-legged dogs.” Additionally, there is sobering reflection on aging: “It is not arthritis and the other ailments...It is just the general comprehension that nothing is building, everything is running down, there are no more chances for improvement." Brutal realization for disgruntled individuals such as Joe for whom it seemed life happened. During the Great Depression, the toss was between becoming a "broke talent" or a "talent broker". A significant personal loss deepened his sense of helplessness and found him having to “scratch dead leaves” over what he did not wish to see. The Spectator Bird is a 1976 novel by Wallace Stegner. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1977, one of the two most prestigious literary awards in the United States. [1] Sometime in the mid-80’s, I read Wallace Stegner’s All the Little Live Things, which was published in 1967 and set in that decade. Despite being an admirer of his work, I wasn’t impressed. I found his main character, Joe Allston, a retired literary agent pushing sixty and living with his wife in the hills near Palo Alto, California, to be tiresome. How would I describe Joe? How about crabby, curmudgeonly, crotchety, bitter, brooding, acerbic, opinionated, argumentative? Yes, any one of those will do, because they all describe Joe.

Stegner wrote many novels, including All The Little Live Things (1967), Angle of Repose (1971), The Spectator Bird (1976), and Crossing to Safety (1987). He won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. And he started the creative writing program at Stanford and was a beloved professor — his students included Edward Abbey, Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, and Wendell Berry. I enjoyed every minute I spent with this book. Every line spoke to me. The lines had me alternately thinking or smiling.