This Book Will Save Your Life

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yani ben amerikan edebiyatını çok severim, özellikle öyküleri. ama para içinde yüzen pembe götlü amerikalıların bu bomboş dertleri ve aile sorunlarıyla yüzleşmeleri beni artık etkilemiyor. sorry. evet richard novak yahudi ebeveyniyle eh denecek çocukluk geçirmiş, her aile gibi abisiyle sıkıntıları olmuş, severek evlendiği karısından oğlu olmuş, boşanmış, o çocukla ne yapacağını bilemediğinden hiç ilgilenmemiş. So, Richard embarks on this crazy, sometimes too surreal to be true, but maybe it can be, sort of journey. And he becomes The Good Samaritan, The Good Neighbor, The Anonymous Benefactor. He’s the kind of guy I would hope to be if money were never an issue.

She has been the recipient of numerous awards including Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, NYFA, and The Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library, along with the Benjamin Franklin Award, and the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis. Yet, through all this you see him struggle with himself. His fear of dying, of not being a better son, brother, husband, father. This is what makes me just want to be in his presence, like maybe I’d catch some of what he is. I’d be tempted to use the word ‘aura’ but it might just be the Californian influence within the book, This is what made me hate to see the book end. This is the story of Richard, the flawed but loveable protagonist. It is equally the story of the myriad of characters that are similarly finding their way and shaping each other’s lives in the process – memorably, Anhil, the jewish doughnut maker, Cynthia the under appreciated house wife, Nic, the somewhat feral novelist, and Richard’s coming of age son Ben. In the title story, a Holocaust survivor taps into a theme of the collection when he describes the way people hold the history of previous generations inside them. ‘We carry it with us, not just in our grandmother’s silver,’ he says, ‘but in our bodies, the cells of our hearts.’”— Wall Street Journal The movie star laughs. "I'll tell you a secret," he says. "But you have to swear not to tell anyone."kitapta çok komik bir yer var. ünlü senaristle huzurevine gidip bir adamı bir günlüğüne dışarı çıkarıp gezdiriyorlar. richard’ın senaristin babası sandığı adam meğer kendini iyi hisset projesi gibi huzurevinde seçip baktığın biriymiş. böyle bir sistem bile var. inanılmaz. Rich in humanity and humor . . . Homes combines an unfussy candor with a deliciously droll, quirky wit. . . . Her energy and urgency become infectious.”– USA Today I’ve always written about families—couples and marriage—and the ways we fail ourselves and each other. And in this new novel, I’m at it once again. Despite how fractured these families may seem, I do believe strongly in family and marriage and very much want to see people learning to communicate and be more successful in their relationships. All relationships are hard work, even “just” owning a dog. For what seemed like a light-hearted romp, turned out to be a forensic examination and rumination of this reader’s own life. You know, Richard’s experiences in this story, would touch on so many people. I would be surprised if any one reader couldn’t find something to draw on here.

Homes’s keen ear for speech—surreal as her characters’ conversations often are—lends itself to varying degrees of self-aware misunderstanding, highlighting the complexity of language and the challenges . . . The impossibility of knowing another person completely is one of life’s painful truths, and [this] collection remind us of that—but [it] also shows that there are, at least, tools available to help us try.”— Vanity Fair I am truly a writer of fiction, working from my imagination, making up events and characters. At the same time, perhaps more than other books I’ve written, This Book Will Save Your Life is philosophically very much in line with what I try to put forward in my own life. A confession: I am that person who talks to strangers in elevators, who stops crying people on the street and asks if they’re OK, who offers to help an old person home with their groceries. And I find that my offer of help is equally as often accepted as it is rejected. Suffering is normal. Pain is normal, it is part of life. So why are we here? Why are we afraid of suffering? Why do we try and avoid suffering? We do we think it is wrong to suffer? We medicate, we medicate we are desperate not to suffer” Okay, do you ever get that feeling? That sense of… oh, I can’t find the right words, I can only describe it as a warm fuzzy. It’s this sense of childish hope, that people ARE good---and not good like someone letting you cut in line at the grocery store because you have 2 items to their 20 or someone following the correct etiquette of ‘merging into traffic’, but have you experienced true goodness? I have. I know I have. I’ve remembered coming home and being so excited to retell the story of something that renewed my faith in mankind. I remember grinning, not just smiling or smirking but full on ear-to-ear, pearly whites, make your face hurt, grinning. The characters in this book are quirky and utterly hilarious. Set in LA, the people tend to be blunt, if not outright rude. Richard is such a likeable character, despite the fact it’s pretty clear he’s been behaving like a bit of an ass for going on ten years. But the important point is that we can see why. It makes sense, and he’s not behaving that way because he is an asshole, but because he’s afraid, and miserable and he doesn’t know what else to do. In some respects, Richard reminded me of my father. He wants to do well, but he just can’t quite figure out what it is that other people might need.

Is everything all right?" the girl's mother asks, arriving after the fact. "I was in the Valley. The traffic was horrible." Just doing some reading, let's go." Together they walk down the hill. By now the sun is entirely up, it's a beautiful day. The sky is blue and clear, the air crisp. It is as though the movie star has changed the lighting, changed the mood. He gives away new cars, pays for his maid's hip replacement, sends the weary housewife to a spa. "This is the person he wants to be," Homes writes. "He wants to be able to do this for others, strangers, it doesn't matter who, and he wants to be able to do it for himself." His Good Samaritan impulse also inspires a series of impromptu rescue operations: A horse is trapped in a sinkhole, a hostage is trapped in a trunk, a woman is trapped in a bad marriage. These episodes are mildly amusing (for 15 minutes, he's a national celebrity, a punch line on Letterman), but because Richard is so imperturbable and his success so firmly guaranteed, the scenes never develop any real suspense. Next time you see me, I'll be up there," he says, pointing up. He throws Richard a walkie-talkie. "We're on channel 12."

It is also important to me to write books that are funny—darkly funny. I find daily life to be surrealistic. The split between what we’re able to accomplish in mechanical terms combined with human behavior and a kind of flawed social structure—e.g., an automated voice versus a “live” person, and so on—all tells me a lot about who we (Americans) are as people and who we are becoming. And despite being perpetually hopeful about what we are each capable of, I remain often stunned by what I see.

READERS GUIDE

bundan sonra anca filmlerde olabilecek saçmalıklar silsilesi devam ediyor. richard panik atak geçiriyor, yarık büyüyor, içine at düşüyor, hollywood yıldızı komşu helikopterle kurtarıyor, manavda ağlayan bir kadınla kanka oluyor, kadının kocasıyla yumruklaşıyor, kaçırılan bir kızı kurtarıyor, evden taşınması gerekiyor, arabasını donut’çuya ödünç veriyor, yeni taşındığı evde meğer abd’nin en ünlü senaristiyle komşu oluyor vs.

The hero of Homes’s latest novel (after Music for Torching, 1999)—a work of guarded but very real optimism and, ultimately, of redemption—is Richard Novak, a California-style Scrooge. The horse got into the hole, he must know how to get out of the hole." Richard goes to the window. Now there's a coyote standing at the edge of the hole, or at least he thinks it's a coyote. It's standing at the edge of the hole menacing the horse, and the horse is frightened. Not the normal genre I read but a friend recommended it, so I branched out. I wasn't sure if I would like it, but what a talented author A.M. Homes is!!! Her work has been translated into eighteen languages and appears frequently in Art Forum, Harpers, Granta, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Zoetrope. She is a Contributing Editor to Vanity Fair, Bomb and Blind Spot.Wonderfully skewed stories . . . sharp, funny, and playful . . . Homes is confident and consistent in her odd departures from life as we know it, sustaining credibility by getting details right. A fully engaged imagination [is] at work—and play.”—Amy Hempel, The Los Angeles Times Muir, Kate (May 2, 2009). "Swine flu...recession...should we all be reading Neil Strauss to survive". The Times. London . Retrieved May 1, 2010. This book left me cold. Not indifferent-this-is-failing-to-evoke-a-reaction cold. The good kind of cold. The this-feels-eerily-close-to-reality cold. This sunny and disarming story is probably the last thing you would expect from Homes, whose most celebrated work, The End of Alice, is a study of paedophilia across two generations. But she is as fearless and inquisitive about the nature of kindness as she was about child abuse; if anything, this book is braver. Artists and philosophers are forever fretting over the "problem of evil". There's relatively little written about the much more interesting problem of good. Generosity can be powerfully addictive. The real-estate millionaire Zell Kravinsky, for instance, gave away his fortune and then - to the consternation of his family - tried to give away one of his kidneys. What makes us want to help strangers at our own cost and against our own interest? It isn't thanks: do-gooder is a term of abuse. Small acts of inexplicable generosity can be as alarming as they are charming. A friend of mine once found an old man bewildered and freezing in Sefton Park, spent the evening trying to find his house for him and was later arrested for attempted abduction and mugging. Richard Novak is called a freak and attention-seeker, but still keeps on. Homes is brilliant on what the attraction is. She captures the enchantment of generosity - that sense of adventure you get when you step out of your own circle of need into someone else's, and the weird feeling of invulnerability it gives you (at one point Richard ends up in a high-speed car chase with some kidnappers).