The Complete Henry Bech

Oct 27, 2024 12:39 AM

Author:John Updike

From his birth in 1923 to his belated paternity and public apotheosis as a spry septuagenarian in 1999, Bech plugs away, globetrotting in the company of foreign dignitaries one day and schlepping in tattered tweeds on the college lecture circuit the next. By turns cynical and naïve, wry and avuncular, and always amorous, he is Updike's most endearing confection-a Lothario, a curmudgeon, and a winsome literary icon all in one. A perfect forum for Updike's limber prose, The Complete Henry Bech is an arch portrait of the literary life in America from an incomparable American writer.

Since tales of his exploits began appearing in The New Yorker more than thirty years ago, Henry Bech, John Updike's playfully irreverent alter-ego, has charmed readers with his aesthetic dithering and his seemingly inexhaustible libido.

Reviews

A deft poke at what it means to be a writer in America.

—— New York Times

In his extraordinarily productive career, John Updike has given us a multitude of memorable characters, but none more lovable than the high-minded, mild-mannered, rather hapless writer Henry Bech.

—— Chicago Tribune

As imaginative territory, literary Manhattan has proved irresistible to Updike the satirist, and he has done it full justice and then some in his volumes of stories concerning the doings of New York novelist Henry Bech.

—— The New Criterion

A mordantly comic look at literary life.

—— Time

Much to admire and enjoy

—— Sunday Times

A rich insight in to Dublin

—— Lonely Planet Traveller

Keret's surreal conceits are couched in a wry, downbeat language...The effect is something like a sorrowful hybrid of Kafka and Donald Barthelme: deadpan on the surface, with a bassnote of discomfort and emotional alienation that makes even the briefest tales snag in the mind...Each piece is at once universal and particular...world-class gems. The translation is brilliant, too

—— Tim Martin , Daily Telegraph

Etgar Keret is the voice of young Israel

—— Independent

One of the greatest short story writers alive

—— Ben Rice

One of the most important writers alive... enchantingly witty

—— Clive James

Etgar Keret's extraordinary imagination sets the reader free from slogans and headlines

—— Linda Grant

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