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3.58 AVERAGE
3.58 AVERAGE
mysterious
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Baseball mysticism in the midwest. Kinsella is the Tolkien of America's pastime.
challenging
emotional
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
I read this after my dad recommended I did, so being the casual cubs fan and big baseball fan I am, I went ahead and read it. what came was a load of emotions. the prose is magnificent and the message is very touching. read this if you like cool prose.
Meh. I initially thought I was reading a baseball story from the author who also wrote the book from which the movie "Field of Dreams" was produced. Then it turned into a story about a crazy father and son who chase make-believe stories a la Ben Gates in "National Treasure." And later, as if the book was not already random enough, out of nowhere, it becomes a time travel book, delivering the protagonist straight from his previous life in 1978 into the summer of 1908 in Iowa. There's a subplot with a 15-foot tall Indian that makes no sense, cameo appearances by Teddy Roosevelt, Bill Klem, Three Finger Brown, and other personalities of the era. Somewhere in the midst of all of the hoopla, the Chicago Cubs come to town to take on a minor league all-star team, and end up playing baseball for 2,614 innings over 40 days because the score remains tied at the end of every inning. I know this is fiction, but that was a little much for me. I persevered all the way through until the last page because of the baseball. Otherwise, it was a one-star book or DNF for me.
A game of 2000 innings and a Big Indian... Angels in the graveyard and an albino protagonist. This is magical surrealism at its most wonderful. "Shoeless Joe" was a wonderful magical and popular book. This will never be so popular, but it contains some of his finest writing.
I enjoyed this book fairly well through the first half of it - the baseball and mysticism themes intrigued me, and the premise was engaging. What a monotonous and tangled web this story became, though! By the middle of the book, Kinsella was throwing everything into the pot arbitrarily and trying to connect all of the disparate threads - ultimately without success. There is strong imagery in this novel and some good characterization, but the sheer volume of themes the author injected attempting to create a "deep and philosophical" air, coupled with some very goofy characters and plot devices, just derailed the whole thing for me - by the end of this book, I was actively disliking it. I found the novel unfocused at best, and cringeworthy at worst - the representation of Native Americans was especially off-putting, even considering it was written in the late 1970s. There was promising groundwork laid, but I wouldn't recommend this book - even to fans of Kinsella (I LOVE "Shoeless Joe") - despite having such a creative premise.
hopeful
lighthearted
mysterious
medium-paced
Tall tale fever dream
I really enjoy Kinsella's books. The mysticism is entertaining.
This is the first book of Kinsella's work I have read. Being that I am a big baseball fan, and that "Field of Dreams" (based on Kinsella's novel "Shoeless Joe") is one of my favorite movies, it's kind of sad that it took me so long to get around to this.
For a rundown on the book, I use the review from Publishers Weekly via Amazon.Com:
OK, so I didn’t remember all of the above description before reading it. I had bought the book over four years ago. The part I didn’t remember was Gideon and Stan going back in time. However, that didn’t spoil me on this book at all. As a matter of fact, I think this is a great book in general, let alone “baseball” book.
What makes this more then a baseball story is the characters and what they go through. There is love. There is despair. There is unbalanced relationships. There is close relationships. There is no real happy ending. But a very satisfying ending, at least to me. There are oddities of all sorts. And we are not just talking about the fantastical elements of the story.
The fantastical idea: the disappearance of an entire baseball league is not new to fiction. One of my favorite books, “The Great American Novel” by Philip Roth also deals with this. But it’s a conspiracy that erases the third major league. But this story is more then the league disappearing, it’s an entire game, an epic game, being erased. There is a monumental struggle of spiritual proportions that leads to the disappearances.
One of the things that I liked best was how it was all handled. Most fictional stories, and movies for that matter, that tackle sports (no pun intended) usually have some element that you really wouldn’t see happen in the real world. What makes this story so well written and plotted is the idea to go beyond that. Kinsella not only did something that you wouldn’t see happen, but he exploded the idea to make the whole thing seem absurd. Not only did the strange happen, the impossible did, too. How he wrote it though made it magical, much like what happens to Gideon and Stan, the Iowa Baseball Confederacy All-Stars, the Chicago Cubs, and the rest of the city of Big Inning, Iowa. It is well beyond what could happen, yet is worked so incredibly well.
Great characters sometimes do strange things, not being able to cope with the outcome of events, maybe even just sit back and take it in, and do things that aren’t going to make them a hero. It seemed to me that this book was filled with those kind of characters. Many might disagree with me, but it was that magic again that made them all endearing. There was something that was real about them, even if I don’t think that Frank Chance would really yell as much as he did in the book. Even Teddy Roosevelt was wonderfully done by Kinsella (this now being the THIRD book of fiction I have read where Teddy’s a character, even if really, really minor in this book, only present for three pages).
I think some of my love for the book comes for my love of the game of baseball. I really enjoy stories of baseball, and especially those from those eras that were well before I was born. Even with it’s fantastical moments that would be unbelievable, this story still captured my heart. And more importantly, I think it captured the soul of the game. That’s really saying something since the story captures a lot more then just the game.
For a rundown on the book, I use the review from Publishers Weekly via Amazon.Com:
On the day he met his true love, a carnival performer named Darling Maudie, Matthew Clarke was literally struck by lightning and magically imbued with the knowledge that in 1908 the Chicago Cubs had traveled to Onamata, Iowa, to play a seemingly endless game against an all-star amateur team, the Iowa Baseball Confederacy. He spends the rest of his life trying to prove this fact to the world, even writing a dissertation on it, but no one else remembers the Confederacy or the game. When Matthew commits an imaginative suicide (by allowing himself to be hit by a stray line drive), his son Gideon, the hero of this tale, inherits his father’s obsession. With the help of an old family friend who has a glimmer of memory of the game, Gideon and a friend, Stan, travel back through time to 1908, to witness the event and to learn about the mysterious forces that caused a memory lapse in those who witnessed it.
OK, so I didn’t remember all of the above description before reading it. I had bought the book over four years ago. The part I didn’t remember was Gideon and Stan going back in time. However, that didn’t spoil me on this book at all. As a matter of fact, I think this is a great book in general, let alone “baseball” book.
What makes this more then a baseball story is the characters and what they go through. There is love. There is despair. There is unbalanced relationships. There is close relationships. There is no real happy ending. But a very satisfying ending, at least to me. There are oddities of all sorts. And we are not just talking about the fantastical elements of the story.
The fantastical idea: the disappearance of an entire baseball league is not new to fiction. One of my favorite books, “The Great American Novel” by Philip Roth also deals with this. But it’s a conspiracy that erases the third major league. But this story is more then the league disappearing, it’s an entire game, an epic game, being erased. There is a monumental struggle of spiritual proportions that leads to the disappearances.
One of the things that I liked best was how it was all handled. Most fictional stories, and movies for that matter, that tackle sports (no pun intended) usually have some element that you really wouldn’t see happen in the real world. What makes this story so well written and plotted is the idea to go beyond that. Kinsella not only did something that you wouldn’t see happen, but he exploded the idea to make the whole thing seem absurd. Not only did the strange happen, the impossible did, too. How he wrote it though made it magical, much like what happens to Gideon and Stan, the Iowa Baseball Confederacy All-Stars, the Chicago Cubs, and the rest of the city of Big Inning, Iowa. It is well beyond what could happen, yet is worked so incredibly well.
Great characters sometimes do strange things, not being able to cope with the outcome of events, maybe even just sit back and take it in, and do things that aren’t going to make them a hero. It seemed to me that this book was filled with those kind of characters. Many might disagree with me, but it was that magic again that made them all endearing. There was something that was real about them, even if I don’t think that Frank Chance would really yell as much as he did in the book. Even Teddy Roosevelt was wonderfully done by Kinsella (this now being the THIRD book of fiction I have read where Teddy’s a character, even if really, really minor in this book, only present for three pages).
I think some of my love for the book comes for my love of the game of baseball. I really enjoy stories of baseball, and especially those from those eras that were well before I was born. Even with it’s fantastical moments that would be unbelievable, this story still captured my heart. And more importantly, I think it captured the soul of the game. That’s really saying something since the story captures a lot more then just the game.