Tag: john updike
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Updike’s last poems
Read more: Updike’s last poemsReading about Robin Williams’ death, I wanted to read what writers wrote in their last days, in their illness or old age, when they knew they were about to die. That is how I came across these poems by my favourite writer, John Updike.
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John Updike: Middle-aged love in Rabbit Redux
Read more: John Updike: Middle-aged love in Rabbit ReduxToday is the birthday of one of my favourite writers, John Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009). Like PG Wodehouse, he is irreplaceable. No one can take his place. Lawrence Durrell and Jan Morris are the only writers I know with prose as lush and sensuous as his. And few have written of…
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Updike: Music from Rabbit at Rest
Read more: Updike: Music from Rabbit at RestToday is the birthday of one of my favourite writers, John Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009). Few have written so sensuously of love and sex – or anything else under the sun. Here is Updike writing about one of my greatest loves – pop music from the Fifties and Sixties. This is…
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Remembering Updike on his birthday
Read more: Remembering Updike on his birthdayHas anyone written better than John Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009)? Today is his birthday. He was a wonderful writer to the end of his days. I loved The Widows of Eastwick .He could make even adultery lyrical, as in Marry Me . And here is the beginning of Rabbit, Redux, the…
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Good old writers
Read more: Good old writersWho says old geezers can’t write? Some of them die with the sharpest minds. That’s certainly true of the literary critic Frank Kermode, who has just died at the age of 90. Reading about his death yesterday, I turned to his essays published in the London Review of Books. You can’t tell his age from…
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Marry Me: Bittersweet Updike
Read more: Marry Me: Bittersweet UpdikeCan anyone write like John Updike? He could make even adultery lyrical. He does not turn a blind eye to the toll it takes. The lovers are exposed for what they are — cheating on their spouses and neglecting their little children. But Updike’s powerful prose captures the irresistible magnetism that drives two married people…
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The Widows of Eastwick
Read more: The Widows of EastwickThe Widows of Eastwick is a reminder of the extraordinary talent of John Updike. He died last month of cancer at the age of 76. This is his last book, published last year. But this doesn’t read like the work of an old man. It has all the zest for life and interest in sex…
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Updike’s Terrorist and adulterers
Read more: Updike’s Terrorist and adulterersThe Terrorist by John Updike India, not Iran, was the first to ban Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses shortly after it came out in September 1988, reminds the Observer. The then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress government banned the book under pressure from the opposition Janata Party. Both wanted the Muslim vote. It was only…
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Rabbit, rest in peace
Read more: Rabbit, rest in peaceRabbit at Rest by John Updike John Updike is a perfectionist — not a flamboyant writer. He can make even the shocking seem almost natural. In Rabbit At Rest, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom ends up in bed with his daughter-in-law, Pru. Imagine how the scene would have played in a Greek tragedy. But here it becomes…
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