The huge, inert and grumpy Dead Father is being hauled all across the land…Time passes and humankind keeps hauling a corpse of dead traditions, customs, beliefs, misconceptions and rituals along the trail of history...You are killing me. We? Not we. Not in any sense, we. Processes are killing you, not we. Inexorable processes. Even if some dogmas and tenets are discarded in the process of the constant progress they don't let us go and we keep carrying this burden of the past on our backs.

To understand my rating, you need to do some basic math.Most of the book, I thought was a 3-star deal, mainly because I found some of the sections (particularly the long moments when Emma and Julie talked to each other) to be borderline incomprehensible, and while I'm sure Barthelme knew exactly what he was doing, it was one of those situations where I was holding a book in my hands and processing words and then feeling stupid. And maybe I was too dense to understand what was going on, but regar...

Some of the conflicting thoughts that ran through my mind as I read this . . . My, Barthelme is funny.And smart.Sometimes he's also obnoxious.His bag of tricks is clever and sophisticated.If I'm being honest, though, I like a novel better than I like a bag of tricks.I'm probably not very sophisticated.Was there a male writer from the 2nd half of the 20th Century whose writing about sex wasn't a total embarrassment? It's like they all went to the same school of sex for schoolboys.This Dead Father...

Re-read after a 3-year interval while grabbing something quickly on the way out the door - updated review.Mid-70s Barthelme had just the right contemporary counterculture approach to faintly Dada-ist allegory to impress my teenage self mightily. On a subsequent reading in adulthood, it seemed a bit facile, but on what I expect to be the final go-round (ars longa, vita brevis and all that), it returns to 80% satisfactory.The Father in question is mainly He of the Judeo-Christian tradition but wit...

Surreal, hilarious, weird and what Barthelme says about the different types of fathers and sons is very very true! Barthelme successfully weaves up a style redolent of the best moments in Beckett, Joyce and even Borges (with many many lists). He even wrote one chapter in a spin-off style of Finnegans Wake. Very cool. One of the hippest writers who ever lived. Check dis out.

Crazy shit goes on in this book. But it's hilarious crazy shit. I think Barthelme rambles on like Henry Miller but with more humor and wit and containment. Though there are many intellectual indulgences in this book, you begin to identify emotionally with The Dead Father and his traveling circus of a family.In one case, to enter a land that does not allow "fathers," dead or alive, they allow the Dead Father's leg to be cut off and barbecued. Hey it's either kill the Dead Father or barbecue his l...

I don't yet understand how he was able to make this so emotional at the end, how so silly got so serious so fast without ruining the experience. I don't yet understand, but I will bygod. I will.

Imagine if you will a plate. A rather large plate. In the middle of the large plate a small morsel of postmodern food. More negative space of plate than actual food. You scoff at the food. With a shrug and a roll of the eyes, you take a bite. A hundred flavors, some you recognize, others you do not, some you miss. You eat away, the food disappearing, wondering as you are eating what food is this, what are its textures. When you are finished, you are full but you are not sure why or how it happen...

My favorite work of Barthelme's, and one of my favorite books ever. I'd give it 8 out of 5 stars, but Goodreads has no HTML code for this. A book for anyone who has a father, who had a father, who had an absent father, who had a father who loved too much or not enough or the right amount; a father who beat them or taught them to ride a bike or both. A book perhaps not for fathers, but a book for fathers who had fathers themselves (and so, a book for fathers).This is the story of a son & his love...

I remember reading this twice in the '70s, but I didn't remember much about it. I remember thinking I got it pretty well. Now I'm unsure if my understanding is complete. Because Roland Barthes said the reader is creator of the text I wonder if we're being encouraged here to create because it's so shotgun-patterned that it seems to suggest rather than to mean or define. It's a novel about myth and the hero. The dead father serves as all myth as well as all the cultural weight we've accumulated an...

Plotless postmodern novels, if you believe the hype, aren't supposed to be fun, they're supposed to be think pieces that make you reconsider your epistemological premises, through chilly techniques cribbed from scientific and technical writing, through unconventional word choice, through use of archaisms, slang, high culture, low culture, etc. etc. and you're supposed to come out of the whole thing not necessarily happier, not necessarily entertained, but more aware.Then, why was The Dead Father...

I've never encountered a prose style that reads so much like poetry. There's a tightness, a smooth imbrication of dialogue and narration. I read it in three or four gulps; the flow carries you on, and one would just as soon stop randomly in this novel as leave a bookmark between the stanzas of a short lyric. And that is what struck me as the stylistic eminence of it all: his idiom and sense of humor, while incredibly elegant and effective, are nothing unfamiliar to readers of Joyce, Beckett and

Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father is a masterpiece of postmodern fiction. A rumination on fathers, life, love, and of course language. Barthelme can make you laugh out loud with his wit and then stop you in your tracks with a turn of phrase. Not to be missed.

Characteristic of most post-modern literature, the Dead Father has virtually no plot at all. Consequently, this book was extremely hard to get into and the read was somewhat laboured. However, that being said, the 'Manual for Sons' excerpt was amazingly written and somewhat redeems this novel. The last few lines also hit quite hard.

It is amazing how much I thought of Beckett while reading this. It is a wondrous book, though not one I felt I entirely understood (hello again elements of Beckett).

Amazing. Hilarious, irreverent, witty and and kinds of shit. It reminded me a lot of Beckett, but even funnier.