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Hola! Acá pueden comentar (sin spoilers) cómo va el libro, compartir material sobre el autor o cualquier cosa relacionada que pueda ser relevante :)

Les contamos que la junta del mes de Junio será virtual, el día Sábado 13 de Junio a las 16:00 vía JitsiMeet. El libro del mes es Stoner, de John Williams.
La única condición para unirse el día de la junta es haber leído el libro completo. Para asistir, deben inscribirse en un formulario, que deberían haber recibido por mail (si se inscribieron en el link que está en nuestro perfil).
Una vez inscritos, el día de la junta se les enviará un mail con el link de acceso. Si tienen problemas para rellenar el formulario o si no recibieron el mail con el formulario, pueden contactarse con nosotros directamente por mail a [email protected] .
Ojalá disfruten el libro!

Les copio y pego un ensayo sobre Stoner que escribieron en el NYT, para que no usen sus preciadas visitas gratis >.> va a quedar como "spoiler" para que no se vea gigante.
(view spoiler)[ The Inner Lives of Men
By Morris Dickstein
Since academic novels usually focus on the nasty rivalries and inflated egos of their characters, they have served as vehicles for broad satire, not serious themes. One great exception is Willa Cather’s 1925 novel, “The Professor’s House.�� Cather used the traditional calling of a scholar and the atrophy of his marriage to convey her own growing alienation from the modern world. Her novel has only one successor, another book that invokes the life of learning as a rebuke to the wasteful wars and cheap compromises of the wider world. John Williams’s “Stoner�� is something rarer than a great novel �� it is a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, that it takes your breath away. Ignored on publication in 1965, a clamorous year, it has been kept alive by enthusiasts who go into print every decade to rediscover it, including Irving Howe in The New Republic in 1966, C. P. Snow in The Financial Times in 1973, Dan Wakefield in Ploughshares in 1981 and Steve Almond in Tin House in 2003. They invariably wonder why no one has heard of the book. “Why isn’t this book famous?�� Snow kept asking. Now, along with Williams’s earlier novel, “Butcher’s Crossing�� (1960), “Stoner�� is available in a handsome reprint by New York Review Books. Both books deserve to be widely read, but their dark, comfortless vision raises the question of whether this can be expected.
Williams, not to be confused with the prolific African-American novelist John A. Williams (the author of “The Man Who Cried I Am��), was born in East Texas in 1922 and fell in love with literature in high school. His grandparents had been farmers, and his stepfather worked as a janitor in the local post office. Williams worked at odd jobs after flunking out of junior college, then served in India and Burma in the Army Air Corps during World War II, where he wrote an apprentice novel in his spare time. The G.I. Bill enabled him to go to college in Denver and take a Ph.D. at the University of Missouri, where “Stoner�� is set a generation earlier. A scholar and a poet as well as a novelist, Williams went on to found the writing program at the University of Denver, where he taught for more than three decades. He retired in 1985 and died in 1994.
Though strikingly different in subject, Williams’s novels share a simple, resonant, sculptured style, eloquent in its restraint. He enjoyed a blip of fame when “Augustus,�� a brilliant epistolary novel about Octavius Caesar and ancient Rome, shared the National Book Award in 1973. It makes delicious reading for anyone who loved HBO’s recent series “Rome,�� but it demands some effort to relate the book to the frontier world of “Butcher’s Crossing�� or the academic setting of “Stoner.�� Yet all three novels show a similar narrative arc: a young man’s initiation, vicious male rivalries, subtler tensions between men and women, fathers and daughters, and finally a bleak sense of disappointment, even futility.
In “Butcher’s Crossing�� a young man, inspired by Emerson to strike out on his own, drops out of Harvard and uses a small legacy to bankroll the last buffalo hunt in the West. But the expedition, to a pristine valley in the Colorado Rockies, turns into an orgy of pointless slaughter, driven by the obsessions of an Ahab-like leader whose men are stranded in the mountains through a fierce and desperate winter. Though given up for dead, they return in the spring to the aptly named Kansas town of Butcher’s Crossing �� think “Deadwood�� �� to discover that fashions have changed; their dearly purchased buffalo hides are worthless. One of their party died along the way, another has lost his mind. The young man’s only profit is experience, but on his return he’s ready for his first love affair, the other face of his entry into manhood. For everyone else, including the reader, the failed venture exposes the hollow beauty, the vast loneliness of the West and the blood-soaked brutality with which our people subdued it. Harsh and relentless yet muted in tone, “Butcher’s Crossing�� paved the way for Cormac McCarthy. It was perhaps the first and best revisionist western.


“Stoner�� is a western in a more poignant sense. Its hero, the son of hard-working, dirt-poor farmers, inherits their taciturn stoicism, born of sheer adversity �� their hardened accommodation to the whims of fate. William Stoner enters the state university in 1910 to study agriculture, but his life changes irrevocably when he comes upon literature in a sophomore survey course. His future mentor humiliates him by asking him to explain Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, a poem about love and loss that foreshadows Stoner’s own future. Shakespeare’s aging speaker compares himself to “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang,�� and adds: “In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire, / That on the ashes of his youth doth lie.�� Following Stoner through two world wars, the novel captures both the fire of his inarticulate passion and the glowing embers it leaves behind.
Only two passions matter in Stoner’s life, love and learning, and in a sense he fails at both. His wife, his first love, turns cold and repellent almost from the moment he meets her. Their honeymoon, in which she submits to him with distaste, must be one of the grimmest ever recorded in fiction. Soon we learn, with a clang of inevitability, that “within a month he knew that his marriage was a failure; within a year he stopped hoping that it would improve. He learned silence and did not insist upon his love.�� Stoner’s deeply ingrained reticence is a keystone of the novel. This is the story of an ordinary man, seemingly thwarted at every turn, but also of the knotty integrity he preserves, the deep inner life behind the impassive facade.
The man’s professional career could also be seen as a failure, though it gives him quiet satisfaction. He is neither a great teacher nor a noted scholar but applies himself to both with an intensity born of love. In literature he senses a depth of human understanding beyond his power to express, “an epiphany of knowing something through words that could not be put in words.�� Williams writes about this with an almost Roman gravity. “It was a knowledge of which he could not speak, but one which changed him, once he had it, so that no one could mistake its presence.�� This separates him painfully from his parents, his former life. A gifted but bitter colleague, touched by the same knowledge, turns against him in one of those toxic departmental feuds that bedevils the rest of his career. The one book Stoner produces is soon forgotten. His distrust of glib brilliance, his concern with ancient theories of grammar and rhetoric, make him look pedantic. Stoner’s cast of mind is monastic, unworldly. He is reduced to teaching menial courses to students who only dimly sense the warmth and conviction he brings to them.
The same quiet depth of feeling redeems his love life. Caught in an empty shell of a marriage, though too stoical to end it, he bonds deeply with his young daughter. But his resentful wife evicts him from his daughter’s life, as she evicts them both from the book-lined study where they often take refuge. Stoner responds with a helpless sense of resignation. But in his 40s he begins an affair with a talented scholar half his age, which leads to a precious interlude of unlooked-for happiness. Like his discovery of literature, this intimacy becomes an awakening to the possibilities of life. Their deep attraction, luminously described, combines love and learning as forms of passionate knowing �� the true North Star of Williams’s fiction. “Day by day, the layers of reserve that protected them dropped away. ... They made love, and talked, and made love again, like children who did not think of tiring at their play.�� Though their affair is broken up by Stoner’s academic nemesis, who threatens scandal, it offers a hint of paradise that hovers dreamily over the rest of the novel.
Stoner’s physical decline is premature but inexorable, his death almost anonymous. Yet few stories this sad could be so secretly triumphant, or so exhilarating. Williams brings to Stoner’s fate a quality of attention, a rare empathy, that shows us why this unassuming life was worth living. (hide spoiler)]

Y acá algo que escribieron en el New Yorker sobre Stoner, tiene varios spoilers (supongo que leves? llevo como 5% del libro jajaj) . Marcado como spoiler tb para que no quede enorme.


(view spoiler)[The Greatest American Novel You’ve Never Heard Of

In one of those few gratifying instances of belated artistic justice, John Williams’s “Stoner�� has become an unexpected bestseller in Europe after being translated and championed by the French writer Anna Gavalda. Once every decade or so, someone like me tries to do the same service for it in the U.S., writing an essay arguing that “Stoner�� is a great, chronically underappreciated American novel. (The latest of these, which also lists several previous such essays, is Morris Dickstein’s for the Times.) And yet it goes on being largely undiscovered in its own country, passed around and praised only among a bookish cognoscenti, and its author, John Williams, consigned to that unenviable category inhabited by such august company as Richard Yates and James Salter: the writer’s writer.
“Stoner�� is undeniably a great book, but I can also understand why it isn’t a sentimental favorite in its native land. You could almost describe it as an anti-“Gatsby.�� I suspect one reason “Gatsby�� is a classic is that, despite his delusions and his bad end, we all secretly think Gatsby’s pretty cool. Americans don’t really see him as an anti-hero or a tragic figure—not any more than they see the current breed of charismatic criminals on cable as villains. Gatsby’s a success story: he makes a ton of money, looks like a million bucks, owns a mansion, throws great parties, and even gets his dream girl, for a little while, at least. “Stoner�� ’s protagonist is an unglamorous, hardworking academic who marries badly, is estranged from his child, drudges away in a dead-end career, dies, and is forgotten: a failure. The book is set not in the city of dreams but back in the dusty heartland. It’s ostensibly an academic novel, a genre historically of interest exclusively to academics. Its values seem old-fashioned, prewar (which may be one reason it’s set a generation before it was written), holding up conscientious slogging as life’s greatest virtue and reward. And its prose, compared to Fitzgerald’s ecstatic art-nouveau lyricism, is austere, restrained, and precise; its polish is the less flashy, more enduring glow of burnished hardwood; its construction is invisibly flawless, like the kind of house they don’t know how to build anymore.
“Stoner�� opens with a short prologue, describing, in terse, obit-like prose, the life and death of an unbeloved assistant professor of English at a provincial university. It mentions that the only evidence of his existence is a medieval manuscript donated to the library by his colleagues in his name. It concludes:
An occasional student who comes across the name may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.
This is, no getting around it, a bummer. It’s also, in its unassuming way, an audacious beginning; by preëmpting the usual suspense of narrative, denying us even the promise of some cathartic tragedy, Williams forces us to wonder: What will this book be about? Its ambition is evident in the apparent humility of its subject: like Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, it’s to be nothing more or less than the story of a life. And there is something in even those first paragraphs, an un-show-off-y assurance in the prose, like the soft opening notes of a virtuoso or the first casual gestures of a master artist, that tells us we are in the presence not just of a great writer but of something more—someone who knows life, who maybe even understands it. It’s the same thing I sense in reading James Salter: the presence of wisdom. And wisdom is, of course, perennially out of style.
Despite its pellucid prose, “Stoner�� isn’t an easy book to read—not because it’s dense or abstruse but because it’s so painful. I had to stop reading it for a year or two, near the middle of the book, when Stoner’s wife, Edith, undertakes a deliberate but unselfconscious campaign to estrange him from his daughter, the one person he truly loves. Later on, after his daughter has been lost to him, Stoner finds real love again with a young student, his intellectual equal—and once again an enemy, seeing his happiness, sets out to take it from him. Williams contrives to forcibly deprive his hero of happiness in his marriage, his daughter, his lover, even his vocation. It all feels grindingly inevitable, like the annihilating whim of the gods in Euripides.
The book’s antagonists are its most problematic aspect; they’re essentially instruments used by the world to crush and smother anything that William Stoner loves. Two of them are even disfigured—one, Hollis Lomax, Stoner’s colleague and enemy, is a hunchback, and the other, Charles Walker, Lomax’s protégé, has a crippled arm and leg. This marking of evil with deformity strikes a twenty-first century reader as heavy-handed, not to mention un-p.c., like something out of fairy tales or “Dick Tracy.�� But, unlike the villains of melodrama, these characters truly live. Stoner’s wife, Edith, isn’t a 2-D caricature; she’s been raised in an emotional vacuum, taught only useless ornamental skills, sheltered as wholly as possible from reality, and “her moral training �� was negative in nature, prohibitive in intent, and almost entirely sexual”—effectively cultivated to become a brittle, conniving hysteric. Her cruelty is all the more hateful because she keeps herself unaware of it—she isn’t even a plain-dealing villain. And Lomax, Stoner’s great adversary in the arena of career, is a sensitive, wounded soul not unlike Stoner himself, who honestly believes it’s Stoner who’s blindly malign, bigoted against himself and his disabled favorite student.
The same revelation led Lomax and Stoner to their vocations: “the epiphany of knowing something through words that could not be put in words.�� (This is, by the way, a trick the novel itself pulls off again and again, in quiet, transcendent moments that make the hair on your arms stand up for reasons you can’t name, giving you glimpses of eternity through the darkening view out an office window on a winter night.) At the end of a long evening of drinking at the Stoners�� house, spent talking mostly about Lomax’s early life and love of books, Lomax, in leaving, kisses Edith chastely on the lips—an oddly charged gesture that seems to have less to do with any attraction to his colleague’s wife than with their shared first love. It’s possible “Stoner�� is doomed to be forever beloved mostly among critics, academics, and authors, because at its heart is the ineffable fetish that afflicts them all: “the love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print.�� (hide spoiler)]

Hola! Habiendo terminado el libro hace una semana, sólo debo decir, para los que no lo han leído, que no pierdan más tiempo y lo hagan. Stoner me encantó demasiado.
Es increíble como una prosa tan triste es al mismo tiempo tan esperanzadora. Creo que lloré mucho con este libro, el único momento "feliz" fue realmente el peor y más angustiante, ya que siempre tuve consciente que iba a terminar.
Fue una gradable sorpresa la historia, la verdad. Es muy sencilla y su prosa casi sin diálogos, en vez de cansar, motivaba a seguir leyendo y me dejaba pegado.

Lo terminé ayer, un poquito tarde pero más vale tarde que nunca. Me sumo a los comentarios de más arriba, el libro es sencillo pero hermoso. Increíble como una vida tan ordinaria puede dar paso una gran historia, por la forma en que se relata.

Seguiré con este autor porque la verdad es que me gustó un montón.

Luis wrote: "Lo terminé ayer, un poquito tarde pero más vale tarde que nunca. Me sumo a los comentarios de más arriba, el libro es sencillo pero hermoso. Increíble como una vida tan ordinaria puede dar paso una..."

Leí Butcher's Crossing y es muy bueno. Augustus también tiene muy buenas reseñas pero Not By The Night (que es su primera novela) no tiene tan buena crítica.