Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
This book intrigued me and pulled me all the way through to its end--but once I finished it, I felt like a dope. Normally I pride myself on "sophisticated" or at least marginally intelligent fiction analyses--well, in my own head, anyway, since I usually feel like I 'get' a book, even if I can't or don't try to do it justice on Goodreads. Most books at least make some kind of internal sense within my brain.This, however, I did not 'get.' (view spoiler)[ The 'abstractification' of the ending and
This book is sadly underrated among Updike's oeuvre. I think it's his best literary accomplishment. The Centaur is both a distorted, modernized retelling of the myth of Chiron and a moving story of a father and son. The prose is dense and rich, heavy with classical illusion; this isn't the easiest read, but it's worth the work. Updike's erudition and his gorgeous way with a sentence are on display here to a degree unmatched by any of his other work.
I thought I was done with Greece for a while but it turned out, not exactly. The Centaur is John Updike's third novel, it won the National Book Award in 1964, and is a loose retelling of the Greek myth of Chiron, noblest of all Centaurs. George Caldwell is Chiron. It is 1947 and George is unhappily though gratefully employed as a high school teacher in the small Pennsylvania town where some of Updike's novels are set. The story takes place over a few winter days in the life of George, his wife
”It must be terrible to know so much.”A pause.“It is,” my father said. “It’s hell.” Chiron depicted in Roman art. The Greeks always depicted him with human front legs. Chiron educated the children of the gods and goddesses so he is an apt mythological creature for George Caldwell to identify with.George Caldwell is a school teacher at Olinger High School. He struggles with teaching, not because he isn’t good at it, but because he wants it to be so much more. His mind is so expansive that it o...
It wasn't a bar bet, exactly, but one night not long ago I made a few sweeping (and whiskey-fueled) statements about the irrelevance and sexism of mid-century white dude novelists like Roth, Cheever, and Updike that quite unexpectedly garnered such a thoughtful, knowledgable defense of Updike from my friend Dave that the only possible way I saw to save face was to immediately promise to read the Updike novel of his choosing. (Jodi was there, she saw it go down.) Which is how I came to The Centau...
One of the most beautiful things I've ever read was from this book:"My vast canvases- so oddly expensive as raw materials, so oddly worthless transmuted into art- with sharp rectangular shoulders hulk into silhouette against the light. Your breathing keeps time with the slow rose. Your solemn mouth has relaxed in sleep and the upper lip displays the little extra racial button of fat like a bruise blister. Your sleep contains innocence as the night contains dew. Listen: I love you, love your prim...
This book tells the story of three days in the lives of a man and his son, living in rural Pennsylvania in the early 50s. The dad is a teacher at his son's school, and is convinced he is going to die. Soon. He also likens himself to the mythological beast Chiron, the centaur, and parts of the book are told from this point of view. The son is a typical teenager, somewhat embarrassed by and for his father, and never feeling like he quite gets the attention he feels he deserves. He also feels prote...
An interesting novel which finds meaning in the mundane of everyday life; concerning George Caldwell and his son Peter, a boy in his mid teens. There are strong autobiographical elements. It is set in rural Pennsylvania, where Updike grew up. Updike's father was a schollteacher and like Peter in the book, Updike had psoriasis and loved art. Woven into all this is Greek mythology; hence the title. George is the centaur Chiron and all the other characters are have their mythological equivalents. T...
The Centaur is a rich, thought-provoking novel worth reading and rereading. Having read it just now for at least the third time (including before I got on Goodreads), I still admire it for its exploration of the teacher/student relationship and the father/son relationship, the setting in late-1940s Pennsylvania, and the beautiful turns of phrase--even if I still do not understand everything that is going on!Reading this novel as a teacher and as a father is a moving experience. As a high-school
I read The Centaur in my senior year of high school. Rereading it now, I realize either that I cheated and didn't actually read it before I wrote the book report - or I'm just getting so old that I don't remember it at all. My book report was on its parallels with Greek mythology, which are numerous and complex. Could be I just thumbed through and wrote down all the names of the gods, then looked them up in the encyclopedia so I could make some kind of diagram about how their relationships fit t...
Since reading the biography of John Updike, "Updike By Adam Begley", earlier in the month, this was a gap in the writer's work that I had not read. Reading it now, I can appreciate the obvious biographical nature of the novel. Names of places and characters have been changed, but, there is no doubting that this is Updike writing of his own family. He gives a graphic account of the conflict in gifts between his articulate self and, in particular, his inarticulate Dad. His father is totally lackin...
Tons of easy sentimentality and very little real drama. The "suffering, heroic dad" is a lot less memorable than the brutal, Harvey Weinstein lechery of the high school principal -- which Updike seems to accept as part of the natural order of things.
Somehow The Centaur is my most favourite John Updike’s novel – it is pristinely poetic and sparkling with the freshness of adolescence…And John Updike was the one who with his wondrous words turned adolescence into a miraculous saga.The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take
when updike croaked out edmund white wrote that the father/son sections of the centaur were his personal favorite of the dead man's writings. the rabbit cycle has gotta be updike's greatest work, the one that continues to grow with time, and the one that is more than the sum of its parts. but the book with the best parts? dunno, maybe white is right. the guy can pack a lot inside just a few sentences: "I had loved that tree; when I was a child there had been a swing attached to the limb that was...
Updike certainly has a unique prose style that is enjoyable. The father/son interchange fell flat, in part it felt because of the attempt to tie the story into a broader mythological realm. Maybe it worked better back in the day, but the story seventy years in the past didn't seem to have the same universality as the mythology upon which it was loosely based.
Not my favorite Updike book, but an interesting one. Take his writing style and add some Greek mythology to the mix. This is a modern take on the story of Chiron. There is an index in the back of the book telling you which gods are mentioned, but kind of wish they told you who's who.
In this modern retelling of ancient Greek myth (à la Joyce's Ulysses) Updike presents us with the famed myth of Chiron, the centaur. Set in late-40s small town America we have the stories of George Caldwell, a teacher in his 50s, and his son Peter, 15 years old and laden with psoriasis. The father's and son's narratives switch every second chapter with the father's narrative being in the third-person and the son's in first-person.The narratives that we are presented with can be read as coming-of...
Lit-fic is really not my genre. Lit-fic books often feel as if they're trying too hard to be meaningful and authentic, yet without standing for anything or having any particular aim beyond producing a profundity of feels in the reader. (The film Stranger Than Fiction did a great job playing with the prototypical lit-fic playbook). But I keep trying various famous titles and authors who are felt to be "important," either critically or popularly. The Centaur was my first Updike.And it won't be the...
Updike captures angst like no other author. This short novel set in 1947 in small town America, depicts the relationship between a father and his adolescent son by watching them over three days. These characters were so vividly portrayed that I felt as if I had inhabited their skin. Interspersed between chapters narrating the events of these days in a traditional form, were short passages in which these figures were transmuted into mythological figures. My knowledge of these figures is simply to...
This is my second Updike (the other being "The Poor House Fair"). I am wondering if one reads Updike on two levels. The first is simply his prose which is, for me, rather like a big box of candy. That is, irrespective of story, plot, or continuity, I am stunned and charmed by its deliciousness. For example, on page 190 of the first paperback edition: "In the pervasive descent an eddy of air now and then angrily flings a tinkling icy handful upward into his warm face. Peter had forgotten what sno...