Stoner -- Take 2

Again, apologies for the delay on two counts: (1) time between posts and (2) time spent reading Stoner. By way of explanation:
(1) I'm skiing, and was enjoying my vacation rather than posting on my blog.
(2) I can't say for sure whether the book was slow going, or whether it was just that I didn't put enough time into it, but I think it was the latter.

Having said that, though, I very much enjoyed the book. The prose was plain and simple, which, as a general rule, I like as a writing style. Despite that, the author successfully conveyed the immense emotions felt by William Stoner. That emotion was mostly sadness, but never despair. Stoner, time after time, plods forward in reluctant acceptance of his situation, however different it is from what he had hoped.

A couple of my favorite passages:

"So Stoner began [his career as a professor] where he had started, a tall, thin, stooped man in the same room in which he had sat as a tall, thin, stooped boy listening to the words that had led him to where he had come. He never went into that room that he did not glance at the seat he had once occupied, and he was always slightly surprised to discover that he was not there."

"He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter."

There are uplifting moments in the book, where Stoner realizes his talents or finds love, but those moments are not to last. It is not a particularly happy book, but it is the story of a life, and it is surely worth a read.