Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

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And now this. I had not actually read any of Richard Yates's work before, but it was pressed upon me; and I am immensely grateful for it. I have always felt obliged to like your Carvers and Cheevers, with a resulting impatience; here is a writer whose control is obvious with the first words you start reading. Atlas, trying to be kind, misses Yates’s gist entirely. Yates does not play favorites; the world, according to his vision, grinds all his characters down alike, and–as in Kafka–the more they struggle, the more painfully they fail. The worst that can be said of Yates’s people is that they don’t know when to give up and instead continue to humiliate themselves even as we, the reader, want them to stop. That’s what makes them so exasperating.

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates | Goodreads

Their meeting in the dressing room is awkward and prolonged. Afterward, driving home, Frank tries to tell her it doesn’t matter by ridiculing the other members of the cast, the audience, the entire suburban society of America, but April doesn’t want to hear it. They fight and end up screaming at each other by the dark roadside, the lights of their neighbors’ cars strobing over them. As in Fitzgerald, the dream has soured, given way to disappointment. If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lays their tragedy.” – Richard Yates, interview Yates himself must have been discouraged with the book’s reception. Unable to support himself by his books, he continued to teach and write through the early ’70s, still plagued by drinking and depression. He had remarried in 1968, and in 1974 he divorced again, his second wife retaining custody of their daughter. Richard Yates shone bright upon the publication of his first novel, Revolutionary Road, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961. It drew unbridled praise and branded Yates an important, new writer. Kurt Vonnegut claimed that Revolutionary Road was The Great Gatsby of his time. William Styron described it as "A deft, ironic, beautiful novel that deserves to be a classic." Tennessee Williams went one further and said, "Here is more than fine writing; here is what, added to fine writing, makes a book come immediately, intensely, and brilliantly alive. If more is needed to make a masterpiece in modern American fiction, I am sure I don't know what it is." Queste sono le istruzioni per realizzare il miglior processo di sintesi minimalista, peccato che siano inutili se non si possiede il talento di Richard Yates.However, Yates began to find himself as a writer cut adrift in a sea fast turning towards postmodernism; yet, he would stay true to realism. His heroes and influences remained the classics of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flaubert and short-story master, Chekov. I'm not sure why it took all the years of my life up until this point to discover the brilliance of Richard Yates, but it did. The novel’s opening scenes show April starring in a local production of “The Petrified Forest.” She plays Gabrielle (Bette Davis in the film version), a waitress at a cafe in the middle of the desert, an amateur artist who moons over Villon and daydreams of going to Paris. Gabrielle is both a romantic and a sentimental fool, and her falling for the big talk of Leslie Howard’s sham romantic puts him in the position of taking a bullet from Bogie’s real villain, Duke Mantee.

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness - Richard Yates - Google Books

Le sue parole non avevano nessuna importanza (per un attimo sembrò che non avessero mai avuto importanza), ma sulla faccia di Carson Ken vide dipinta l’espressione, stranamente familiare, del suo stesso animo, la medesima espressione che lui, Platt Culo di Lardo, aveva mostrato tutta la vita agli altri: lo sguardo di un essere tormentato, vulnerabile, incapace d’indipendenza, desideroso di sorridere, uno sguardo che diceva: «Non lasciatemi solo, per favore». Yates is a realist par excellence, the natural heir to Hemingway's pared-to-the-bones style and the antecedent of Carver's flat minimalism. There is something else though: a kind of transparency, almost a translucency, that owes more to Fitzgerald, his great literary hero... Read and weep" (Kate Atkinson Guardian)Yates lived the kind of life he might have written about - indeed, he wrote about little else. By the time he died, of emphysema, in 1982, all his work was out of print. It is even possible that a part of him would have relished history's treatment of him. In "A Glutton for Punishment" he describes, with startling acuity, the inner processes of a man with a flair for, and warped appreciation of, his own failure. But this was his genius: the precise dissection of people's unhappiness. "I'm grateful that I know a little more now about honesty in the use of words," says the narrator of "Builders". For all that the narrator may be at that point not quite as honest as he avers, this honest use of language is Yates's central concern, and the reason his stories are so fulfilling, so rich, even as they delineate their characters' internal poverty. I have perhaps not made these stories seem enticing, but I assure you they are: you may groan with second-hand despair as you read, but they are still the kind of stories you sneak off to read when you should be doing something else. That's how good they are. Qui abbiamo un campionario di undici esistenze paradigmatiche nella loro solitudine. Un campionario di disadattati, delle loro nevrosi, manie, fallimenti. The Best of Everything How can Grace feel lonely and depressed on the eve of her wedding day? It happens, especially when you are not sure what you want and you settle for what is available. She couldn’t marry him – she hardly even knew him. Sometimes it occured to her differently, that she couldn’t marry him because she knew him too well.