John Kennedy Toole
Paperback | Pages: 162 pages Rating: 3.71 | 5807 Users | 446 Reviews
Mention Containing Books The Neon Bible
| Title | : | The Neon Bible |
| Author | : | John Kennedy Toole |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 162 pages |
| Published | : | January 12th 1994 by Grove Press (first published 1989) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Classics. Novels. Literature. American |
Narrative In Favor Of Books The Neon Bible
The Neon Bible tells the story of David, a young boy growing up in a small Southern town in the 1940s. David's voice is perfectly calibrated, disarmingly funny, sad, shrewd, gathering force from page to page with an emotional directness that never lapses into sentimentality. Through it we share his awkward, painful, universally recognizable encounter with first love, we participate in boy evangelist Bobbie Lee Taylor's revival, we meet the pious, bigoted townspeople. From the opening lines of The Neon Bible, David is fully alive, naive yet sharply observant, drawing us into his world through the sure artistry of John Kennedy Toole. John Kennedy Toole, who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces, wrote The Neon Bible for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript languished in a drawer and became the subject of a legal battle among Toole's heirs. It was only in 1989, thirty-five years after it was written and twenty years after Toole's suicide at thirty-one, that this amazingly accomplished and evocative novel was freed for publication.Declare Books Supposing The Neon Bible
| Original Title: | The Neon Bible |
| ISBN: | 0802132073 (ISBN13: 9780802132079) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Rating Containing Books The Neon Bible
Ratings: 3.71 From 5807 Users | 446 ReviewsNotice Containing Books The Neon Bible
This was honestly hard for me to read at times. I abandoned it the first time I tried to read it, about 6 years ago. It just oozes sadness and it can get to be a bit unbearable at times, but after I got into the heart of the book this second time I started reading it, I also found it to be really compelling and it really drew me into this world. The young boy telling the story uses perfectly believable language to describe his world in clear detail. I've found that books with a young narratorI found the book very easy to read and each page seemed to promise something new and appealing. I intended to specify that it's easy to read because I was thinking of all the vampire novels people are reading because they want something easy, that flows and all that, and of this article about the issue: http://www.salon.com/books/laura_mill....This is a novel that you can finish reading pretty quickly. Yet, I suspect that people that go for Dan Brown and co. do it not for the unsophisticated
"The Neon Bible" is a remarkable work in many respects, most notably because it is the early work of an author still in the embryonic stages of becoming a writer, and while it bears almost no tonal or stylistic resemblence to the work that would make Toole famous, it is still a quite solid read.Whereas "A Confederacy of Dunces" seemed almost hyper-obnoxious with its lead character, Ignatius Reilly, as its figurehead, "The Neon Bible" is a marathon of calm observation. In the former, Toole
Win Butler swears that Arcade Fire's album and title track of the same name are of no relation, but they are so close in subject matter and tone that I am skeptical of the claim.The Neon Bible is an immensely sad book and, having also read The Confederacy of Dunces, leads me to believe that there are whispers of autobiographical confession in its pages. The understated emotion of a young boy trying to make sense of the absurdities and hypocrisy that surround him.4.0/5.0
John Kennedy Toole wrote this when he was sixteen years old. He later dismissed it as adolescent, however, I think it shows promise. That promise was fulfilled in his novel A Confederacy of Dunces, which was published posthumously. He committed suicide in 1969 at the age of 31 after his novel was rejected. Such a loss.
This was a strange read: on the one hand, a story that does not move until the very end, on the other, glimpses of fine writing and intense feeling. In the end, the glimpses were too few and far between, so I can't say I enjoyed (much) this book; the difference between the writing of the sixteen year-old John Kennedy Toole and the mature and wonderful A Confederacy of Dunces (a five-star) was just too big.
Yeah, I've placed this on the back-burner a several times before. Why? Since "Confederacy" takes up such a large portion of my heart, my soul, I absolutely knew in my bones that this, Toole's first effort into novel-writing (& the only other one-- he wrote solely two), would suck. Of course it would. And the beginning trembles, and the plot is thin, and the observations somewhat... pedestrian? But it is nonetheless exactly what John Kennedy Toole fans like myself would die for: testament of
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