John Edward Williams
Stoner

LA RECENSIONE

On the back cover:

“Stoner speaks of resilience and it is among the best novels for uncertain times that I've come across. And this, ours, is an uncertain time”.

(Paolo Giordano, Italian physicist and writer, wrote his first novel in 2008 titled “The Solitude of Prime Numbers”)

Attention, start spoiler:

A softness enveloped him and a languor passed through his limbs. The awareness of his identity struck him with sudden force, and he felt its power. He was himself, and he knew what he had been.

End of spoiler, uh, copied from the last pages of the novel, while death already seduces him (William Stoner) accompanying him into eternity…

Ok, I’ll try to be brief so as not to bore, above all.

William Stoner at six years old was already milking cows, feeding the pigs, and collecting chicken eggs...

At eighteen, he completed his high school studies, continuing to help his father in the fields...

Suddenly, everything changed after a visit from the Inspector of his County...

He enrolled in Agriculture to better help his father and himself in the work he seemed destined for...

Things didn't go as expected with his family because he felt drawn towards a different and unexpected vocation...

Literature and the teaching profession absorbed him for the rest of his new life, which did not lack experiences far removed from what everyone (himself included) expected of him…

This life of his, recounted in few pages that drag us into that world at the beginning of the last century, takes one's breath away as it spans a couple of wars, the last great ones, where one reads of poetry, friendship, marital sex (little and done poorly) & extramarital sex (done properly), perseverance despite certain academic meanness, the poorly or never built filial relationship, psychology, death…

Personally, I struggled to interrupt the reading those five or six times I had to close the book… and that’s it.

p.s. this book was given to me in December 2018 for my birthday by Chiara, my little niece, who became a Doctor a couple of years ago in something that has to do with neurology and psychology, every time we see each other (like once or twice a year) I always ask her “but what exactly did you graduate in?”…