Book Review – Stoner by John Williams

Stoner invites you to read slow because life moves quick. You savor this book and it distorts your feeling of time. A friend recently said the older she gets the more her life accelerates. My intuition when time flies is to respond with active change but our farmboy stays in university his whole life. He teaches literature till the bitter end after a Shakespeare induced epiphany in his youth. But his end is bitter sweet. Never have I read such a beautiful description of fading life as by John Williams. He dies of a tumor and disconnected of the people he loves but he dies with his books which are truth to him. I have never understood Shakespear but I know that literature can wake you up and console your loneliness.

We meet stoner as a kid and he is very much not awake as are his silent numb parents. He learns to work hard early and dig with pure willpower and dirty hands thru the hard mud which has lost its richness. He learns to accept reality early He joins university out of necessity and never returns to the sacrifice the land asks from him. He stubbornly puts his pure awkward farmers heart into everything he does so neither malicious colleagues nor his nauseatingly toxic wife can hurt his calm perseverance.

This fire for teaching literature most of the time is perceived as a lukewarm passion by his students. In rare moments he bridges his real world self with his real self which we love from the intimate narration of his thoughts. His love Affair shows him what it means to know another being in absolute unity but then Katherine is ripped away because the world creeps up on them. He brings up his daughter in beautiful responsability while his wife is in a silent eternal midlife crisis. He seems imprisoned by the events of his life and its simultaneously nauseating and admirable how stoically he manages the unavoidable setbacks.

We participate in the world of an academic monk who becomes a mystical man one time in his life when his wife is gone and he gets lost in the rapture of his teaching. This book gives space for a big sadness but its the big sadness of a good heartbreaking goodbye when you travel and move on. Its not a curated happy End Hollywood life that Stoner is living but its a Fabel of looking courageously at how life really is. Very nourishing, I can highly recommend to read this delicate novel slowly. Thank you Julian for sharing your all time favourite with me!