John Irving, página 3 de 9

In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable´s girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County_to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto_pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them.

Born a Parsi in Bombay and educated in Vienna, Dr Farrokh Daruwalla is a Canadian citizen, an orthopedic surgeon, living in Toronto. Periodically, he returns to India. Once 20 years ago, Dr Darwalla was the examining physician of two murder victims in Goa. Now, he is reacquainted with the murderer.

Eleven-year-old Owen Meany, playing in a Little League baseball game in New Hampshire, hits a foul ball and kills his best friend's mother. Owen does not believe in accidents and believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul is both extraordinary and terrifying.

"AN OLD-FASHIONED, BIG-HEARTED NOVEL . . . with its epic yearning caught in the 19th century, somewhere between Trollope and Twain . . . The rich detail makes for vintage Irving." The Boston Sunday Globe "The Cider House Rules is filled with people to love and to feel for. . . . The characters in John Irving''s novel break all the rules, and yet they remain noble and free-spirited. Victims of tragedy, violence, and injustice, their lives seem more interesting and full of thought-provoking dilemmas than the lives of many real people." The Houston Post "John Irving''s sixth and best novel . . . He is among the very best storytellers at work today. At the base of Irving''s own moral concerns is a rare and lasting regard for human kindness." The Philadelphia Inquirer "Entertaining and affecting . . . John Irving is the most relentlessly inventive writer around. He proliferates colorful incidents and crotchets of character. . . . A truly astounding amount of artistry and ingenuity." The San Diego Union

Severin Winter is not a man to take things lightly. His loving, like his wrestling, is decidedly heavyweighta fact not lost on Utch, a lovely Viennese lady whose husband is rather taken (literally) by the delicate Edith, Severin''s underweight wife. A bizarre menage a quatre is the result of these convoluted desires as Irving blends farce and tragedy in another bubbling, brilliant novel.

Quirky, bizarre, tragic, fiendishly funny, The Hotel New Hampshire is anything but a conventional family saga, though a family saga it certainly is. The Berry family are different. Love abounds - both healthy and incestuous. It is the overwhelming desire of the Berry father to run a hotel, which he does, with dubious success in both a former girls'' school in New Hampshire, and in Vienna. It is the Berry children who grab the readers'' attention, sympathies and love - all five of them: Frank (the eldest), Franny (the weirdest), John (the narrator), Lily (the writer) and Egg (the youngest). When Irving, or rather John, writes ''Frank''s queer, Franny''s weird, Lily''s small and Egg is Egg'' the initiated reader can do no other than shout a deafening ''yes, I know what you mean!'' From there on, the reader is held spellbound as the family Labrador, Sorrow, is first stuffed then becomes the cruel victim of a plane crash; and as John and Franny realise their incestuous desires. Stunningly readable, mercilessly involving, The Hotel New Hampshire is people with characters - and bears - that you''ll never forget.

In his latest novel, John Irving explores - in his inimitable way - the ways in which our pasts reverberate in our presents and, indeed, our futures.Juan Diegos little sister is a mind reader. As a teenager, he struggles to keep anything secret Lupe knows all the worst things that go through his mind. And sometimes she knows more. What a terrible burden it is to know or to think you know your future, or worse, the future of someone you love. What might a young girl be driven to do if she thought she had the power to change what lies ahead?Later in life, Juan Diego embarks on a journey to fulfil a promise he made in his youth. It is a long story and it has long awaited an ending, but Juan Diego is unable to write the final chapters.This is the story of what happens when the future collides with the past.

Grasping for a self identity after a life spent on the move, fifty-nine-year-old Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla visits India, where he meets a variety of colorful circus characters, including dwarf clowns, tr

The main character of John Irving''s second novel, written when the author was twenty-nine, is a perpetual graduate student with a birth defect in his urinary tractand a man on the threshold of committing himself to a second marriage that bears remarkable resemblance to his first...."Three or four times as funny as most novels."THE NEW YORKER

"Irving looks cunningly beyond the eye-catching gyrations of the mating dance to the morning-after implications." The Washington Post The darker vision and sexual ambiguities of this erotic, ironic tale about a menage a quatre in a New England university town foreshadow those of The World According to Garp; but this very trim and precise novel is a marked departure from the author''s generally robust, boisterous style. Though Mr. Irving''s cool eye spares none of his foursome, he writes with genuine compassion for the sexual tests and illusions they perpetrate on each other; but the sexual intrigue between them demonstrates how even the kind can be ungenerous, and even the well-intentioned, destructive. "One of the most remarkable things about John Irving''s first three novels, viewed from the vantage of The World According to Garp, is that they can be read as one extended fictional enterprise. . . . The 158-Pound Marriage is as lean and concentrated as a mine shaft." Terrence Des Pres

''A wonderful novel, full of energy and art, at once funny and heartbreaking. You know it is true. It is also terrific'' The Washington Post ''Like all great works of art, Irving''s novel seems always to have been there, a diamond sleeping in the dark, chipped out at last for our enrichment and delightAs approachable as it is brilliant, Garp pulses with vital energy'' Cosmopolitan

"The first of my father''s illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels." So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they "dream on" in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel by the remarkable author of A Son of the Circus and A Prayer for Owen Meany. "Like Garp, [THE HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE] is a startlingly original family saga that combines macabre humor with Dickensian sentiment and outrage at cruelty, dogmatism and injustice." Time "Rejoice! John Irving has written another book according to your world....You must read this book." Los Angeles Times "Spellbinding...Intensely human...A high-wire act of dazzling virtuosity." Cosmopolitan ...

'WHEN I FEEL LIKE BEING A DIRECTOR, I WRITE A NOVEL' John Irving John Irving's memoir begins with his account of the distinguished career and medical writings of the novelist's grandfather Dr Frederick C. Irving, a renowned obstetrician and gynaecologist, and includes Mr Irving's incisive history of abortion politics in the United States. But My Movie Business focuses primarily on the thirteen years John Irving spent adapting his novel The Cider House Rules for the screen - for four different directors. The movie was nominated for seven Oscars, winning two - for Best Adapted Screenplay for John Irving and Best Supporting Actor for Michael Caine. Mr Irving also writes about the failed effort to make his first novel, Setting Free the Bears, into a movie; about two of the films that were made from his novels (but not from his screenplays), The World According to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire; about his slow progress at shepherding his screenplay of A Son of the Circus into production. Not least, and in addition to its qualities as a memoir - anecdotal, comic, affectionate and candid - My Movie Business is an insightful essay on the essential differences between writing a novel and writing a screenplay.