Journal Entry 1 by Antheras from Waterloo, Ontario Canada on Sunday, November 20, 2005

From Amazon.com
Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mom with a baseball and believes--accurately--that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery O'Connor's work. Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen's orphaned best friend), the rough comedy. The scene of doltish the doltish headmaster driving a trashed VW down the school's marble staircase is a marvelous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. But it's all, as Highlights magazine used to put it, "fun with a purpose." When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't cancel the fact that he was born to be martyred. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy--from Vietnam to the Contras.

The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies's Deptford trilogy, and the fatal baseball relates to the fatefully misdirected snowball in the first Deptford novel, Fifth Business. Tiny, symbolic Owen echoes the hero of Irving's teacher Günter Grass's The Tin Drum--the two characters share the same initials. A rollicking entertainment, Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history, and God. 

Journal Entry 2 by Heaven150 from Edmonton, Alberta Canada on Friday, December 23, 2005

Removed from Marci's Relayers General Fiction Bookbox

Have add it to my TBR pile 

Journal Entry 3 by Heaven150 from Edmonton, Alberta Canada on Friday, October 16, 2009

I absolutely loved this book. It took me longer to read than most other books, just because I wanted to savor it. My favourite John Irving novel so far. 

Journal Entry 4 by Heaven150 from Edmonton, Alberta Canada on Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Loaned to my mom. Will probably send it on as a RABCK after she's done. 

Journal Entry 5 by Heaven150 at Edmonton, Alberta Canada on Monday, August 23, 2010

Received back from my mom, going to donate to the 1001-library 

Journal Entry 6 by 1001-library at Helsinki, Uusimaa Finland on Sunday, September 05, 2010

Thanks so much for your donation Heaven150!

This book is now part of the 1001-library. If you want to take this book from the library but don't know how to proceed, please refer to the 1001-library bookshelf.