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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating look at Fowles in his own words,
By
This review is from: The Journals: Volume 1: 1949-1965 (Paperback)
I would guess that you would need to be a real fan of John Fowles to enjoy these books (volume 1 or 2) but, as someone who greatly admires his writing? I loved them.
An interest in nature and botany would be good as well, since he spends a lot of time in his journals talking about these great interests of his. Much of the book is slow and plodding, and at times I found myself trying to skip ahead, or checking the index for references to some of his novels so I could get a glimpse into his creative processes. He certainly doesn't hand it to you here, but if you look at publication dates or what he was working on at certain times, you can get a few glimpses into the author. These journals are much more about glimpses into the man. He talks a lot about certain friendships, his love of the sea and wild places, his wife, Greece, his academic career, and his love and frustrations with his own poetry. I love, for example, that he named Austen as one of the best writers of any time. I love that you get a real glimpse into who this guy was, and the impact of a hit novel on a struggling professor's life. As stated, this volume chronicles the period up to 1965, as he is slogging through trying to finish the film treatment for The Magus. His fame has begun, and his life is, once again, changing. These journals, together with a fair biography, A LIFE IN TWO WORLDS by Warburton, give you a pretty good idea who the real John Fowles was. This book took a while to get through. You might want to read Warburton's book first for a bit more context, but if you love the guy? Reading these is a must. Just give yourself some time, they are not page-turners, except in spots.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The locker room of ambition,
By technoguy "jack" (Rugby) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Journals: Volume 1: 1949-1965 (Paperback)
John Fowles life is laid out truthfully in his journals.He literally mined his life for his great novels.He is an existentialist,his perceptions are primed up with the rhythm of his daily ruminations and deepest impulses. His love of nature makes him an honest observer with feeling:plants,flowers,geology,the skies,gardening,the sea, travel.He has a dark night of the soul in his relationships with Elizabeth,his first wife, due to her first husband's manipulation of the situation,using their child Anna,as a lure to get her back.Roy Christie was his biggest rival and similar to him in many ways:wanting to go to Spetsai,the Greek island( made famous as the inspiration for The Magus),to get inspiration to write himself.What other people don't acknowledge in their critiques-is Fowles very great determination to write,the long struggle,the poverty the couple had to undergo in the lean early years.He's honest about the reason he couldn't take Anna on as his child for adoption.But he assists Liz later to help her get treatment so they can have a child of their own.This doesn't work out,hence Liz's digging her heels in, becoming embittered and depressed as time goes on,having lost the early contact with Anna,making her guilty.Liz was the great axle of his world,his Astarte.She had great intelligence and intuition without the need to talk.
Fowles had a genuinely idiosyncratic perspective on his times through the narrow lens of his fiction.It was a burning glass through which he powerfully focussed his tremendous imagination with a charismatic intensity.No other novelist followed a 1st controversial world-wide best seller with a book of philosophical musings, Aristos. He follows another existentialist,Camus,in this,who wrote The Myth of Sisythus.Fowles said he should have been born French.Fowles did hate the pettiness of the English mentality,castigating Lucky Jim and Room at the Top as literature,but inspired by Osborne's Look Back in Anger and its disgust with its times.Like no other writer of his time,Fowles,has a great insight into the female psyche,through his teaching of female students.After Oxford he taught in France.After Greece he taught in Ehgland.As an atheist,he is always intellectually passionate about books,ideas,art,discussing them throughout the Journals.His greatest love affair is with Monique,whom he met on his travels with groups of foreign students,she is `too ideal..too perfect'.She is unreachable,platonic only. Fowles real sources of literary inspiration,Le Grand Meaulnes, Bevis,Greece,existentialism(Camus/Sartre/Beauvoir), travel( to France,Spain,Greece) was an escape from his own lower middle class, Leigh-on-Sea origins and his mother.The conquest of absurdity was through active choices about who he was,what he believed,in order to engage fully with the mystery of being. Fowles gambled with his life,giving everything to his writing once he'd been able to give up teaching for good.His commentaries on art and the great auteur film-makers like Truffaut,Godard,Bergman,Antonionni,the Roman satirists, fellow writers like Greene and Golding(who he thought was best writer),are sharp and stimulating.He's surprisingly a fan of Jane Austen and loves Thomas Hardy.His cultivation of a few solid friends,his bizarre dealings with the film world in the making of his novels into films,perhaps in a Faustian pact that propelled him into big bucks success,but also a cantankerousness of spirit,which drove him to the move to Lyme Regis, where he felt most at home away from all the literary coteries,urban shallowness.John is shown early on literally climbing Mount Parnassus, and then fulfilling it in his imagination through setting exacting standards as a writer.His shyness and his solitary nature show emotional vulnerability but give to his musings a solar humanism and poetic vision.He wrote from the heart,with the novel conveying `feeling truths'as John withdrew within himself behind a series of masks, leaving his self for all to see.Swimming against the currents of his time.His greatest inspiration was his wife, Elizabeth,who he relied on as his first reader,his muse,his mate,love and mainstay. He seems to have drawn his best work from his life.His best novel,The Magus.
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