You, too, are cut out for failure; not that you’d fight the world. You’d let it chew you up and spit you out, and you’d lie there wondering what was wrong. Because you’d always expect the world to be something it wasn’t, something it had no wish to be.
After finishing Olive Kitteridge, which was a great slice of life book, I picked up Stoner. It tells the story of an average person, yet there is beauty in it that makes it an exceptional read.
Looking at the relationships—first, the parents are just like the ones many of us have—undemanding and doing what is best for you type—whose life and death were both owned by the earth they worked for all their life.
The wife is another character, devoid of feelings due to teachings and society both. Even if we try to look and sympathize from her perspective, it is very hard to justify her behavior and it requires a character study. Although her personality is not an exception and seems to be quite common due to that era’s restrictions, teachings and other factors.
The love for university and its romanticization by Dave Masters as a sanctuary is lovely and something that feels close to the heart (especially if you are a misfit of some kind)—a place that has a completely different purpose to you than it does to outsiders. The institution and the friendship born out of it between Stoner, Dave and Finch was remarkable.
Stoner’s daughter’s early years with him are dear to him as a father. However, the ending was sad yet okay.
Discovering love at 43 became the book’s most striking moment for me. Stoner’s relationship with Katherine, their “lust and learning” phase, was brief yet pivotal in Stoner’s life. When she dedicates her work to “To W.S.” , I cried. Their eventual separation, amplified by a society that resented their union, echoes the sorrowful love story and reminds me of another sad love story—Orwell’s 1984 (for me, 1984 will always be a sad love story before the dystopia).
The person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.
Their decision to separate made me think, “Is memory enough to carry you all your life?” and “Why not choose love forever instead of memory?” Isn’t changing yourself better than losing someone who could have been forever yours—or would it change your essence, as Stoner and Katherine discussed ? Although I would like to agree with their decision, the losing part is quite a big step, and I would never choose it voluntarily.
The story also tells us that being unremarkable and average is all right. Stoner became a professor—at that time, it was a lot more than a farm boy would have imagined. The friendship between Finch and Stoner throughout the Stoner’s life was lovely.
From various perspectives, his life was successful, yet limiting—just as all of our lives are.
It was herself he saw in what he read, he realized; and he marveled at how truly he could see her even now. Suddenly it was as if she were in the next room, and he had only moments before left her; his hands tingled, as if they had touched her. And the sense of his loss, that he had for so long dammed within him, flooded out, engulfed him, and he let himself be carried outward, beyond the control of his will; he did not wish to save himself. Then he smiled fondly, as if at a memory; it occurred to him that he was nearly sixty years old and that he ought to be beyond the force of such passion, of such love.
But he was not beyond it, he knew, and would never be. Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was there, intense and steady; it had always been there. In his youth he had given it freely, without thought; he had given it to the knowledge that had been revealed to him—how many years ago? — by Archer Sloane; he had given it to Edith, in those first blind foolish days of his courtship and marriage; and he had given it to Katherine, as if it had never been given before. He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.
To close the review, I loved this book and it is very personal to me; Love and work are the primary themes. Nostalgia and what‑ifs and memories that make you cry. I finished this book at 5 a.m. in the morning while crying through multiple sections.
I think this is going to be my Seinfeld of books, one that I will return to frequently.
Black as My Coffee 