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Until I Find You - John Irving

Description: ISBN 0552773123 / Author: John Irving / Genre: Fiction / Until I Find You is the story of the actor Jack Burns. His mother, Alice, is a ... more

Until I Find You - John Irving ... Toronto tattoo artist. His father, William, is an Edinburgh organist who is addicted to being tattooed. When Jack is four, he travels with Alice to several North Sea ports - Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, and Amsterdam, in search of his father, who is missing. But Alice is a mystery, and William can't be found. Even Jack's memories are subject to doubt. Jack Burns goes to schools in Canada and New England, but what shapes him are his relationships with older women. Mr Irving renders Jack's life as an actor in Hollywood with the same richness of detail and range of emotions he uses to describe the tattoo parlours in those North Sea ports and the reverberating music Jack heard as a child in European churches.

Newest Review: ... that for years he had been searching for his absent father to step out of the shadows, particularly after the success of The ... more

... World According to Garp. In fact, Until I Find You was such a personal writing experience that at first it was written in the first person. At the realisation that this was too close to home, Irving yanked it from the publishers’ hands at the last minute, and rewrote it all in the third person. Is this relevant? Yes and no. It helps to explain why there seems to be a stronger element of emotional clarity than ever in Irving’s writing. It also helps to explain, perhaps, why the comedy elements seem more rout...more

Read Reviews for Until I Find You - John Irving

Until I Find You - John Irving: Lost and Found (1125 words)
by - written on 03/12/05 (Very useful, 213 readings)
Rating:

As a committed John Irving fan, it’s hard for me to write something that could be considered critical of the man, especially in regard to his most personal and autobiographical release to date. Easy to be flippant about The Fourth Hand (which reads a little too much like a draft of an interesting idea), it’s harder to be truly fair to Until I Find You, especially since I think it makes an enormous difference if you have read much Irving before. Until I Find You is the story of actor Jack Burns, whose unnervingly steely tattoo-artist mother Alice takes him on a northern European odyssey on the heels of his absent father, tattoo-obsessed organist William. Jack, ... Read the complete review