Oh What a Paradise It Seems (Novel) (1982) by John Cheever (The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), Bullet Park (1969, Falconer (1977), The Stories of John Cheever (1978)) This slim novel, more of a novella, in fact, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning John Cheever‘s last work, though published nearly 30 years ago, deals with many themes unfortunately very much of today: Pollution, forced migration, terrorism, corruption, old age, and, above all, a rootlessness tinged with an almost genetic memory of “how it used to be”, almost “Walden Pond-esque”, marching to a different drummer, all with a contemporary sense of ambiguity. Oh What a Paradise It Seems is not perfect; it is even, at times, a bit fragmented, but Cheever’s sense of word and phrase, of tenderness and irony, makes it a novel that one simply must read. (PR) “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life..” (Henry David Thoreau, Walden (originally published as “Walden; or, Life in the Woods”), (1854))
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