It started so well. The main character Wils is 19 years old, a sIt has been many years since I have read a novel of this greatness. But my larger problem was that the first half of the book felt like it was populated with male “types”--the taciturn father, the salty guys in the newsroom, etc.I was slow getting into this, in part because of style. But I couldn't help thinking over and over that I've read this type of Eh. After that I was engrossed. Ward Just is a favorite writer of mine and, like Julian Barnes, I trust him to tell me how the world works. Ward Just could be compared to some of the greatest...F.Scott Fitzgerald, D. H. Lawrence, Graham Green, just to name a few. Also, the author doesn’t set off dialogue with quotation marks, so it can be an effort to differentiate it from other text. A 60-year-old narrator in the early 1990s recalls a summer in the 1950s in a voice that sounds like F. Scott Fitzgerald memorializing the 1920s. by Mariner Books Just is a fine author but he is slow for me. Todos los departamentos .
A paragraph can last a couple pages (in one case, a chapter’s length); at times I found myself drifting into Editorial Mind, imagining where I would break it. Check out the new look and enjoy easier access to your favorite features"The winter of the year my father carried a gun for his own protection was the coldest on record in Chicago." This book feels like a period piece that could have been written 80 years ago by Fitzgerald, except that it would have been 10 times better. Unfortunate, really, because apart from the faux Nick Adams tone some of the writing is nice.I would have to say this book was a 3 and one half stars for me. The Unfinished Season gives you a masterful look at what deb parties and the high society looks like in the early 1900's Chicago. Just seems to remind us of how precious our relationships are and how fleeding they can be. Ward Just is a favorite writer of mine and, like Julian Barnes, I trust him to tell me how the world works. And he falls in love, with an interesting young woman who lives with her father. A man who is entering old age recalls a love affair that taught him how the world works. Themes that can relate to modern day.Kind of expected more. A nineteen year old boy discovers love, sex, and death. But I do think that we accept the manner in which authors write if the overall experience is enriching and, for me, that is certainly the case here.Having just finished reading two overly wordy, overly descriptive, somewhat self-important books, it is a pleasure to read a Ward Just book for the first time in a long time. I'll read this while I'm waiting for my Jack Vance I.L.L. I can it recommend it. The story of nineteen-year-old Wils Ravan hits the ground running with a unique style and a plot and setting interwoven so as to suggest a richly nuanced story. American Romantic was one of these cases and An Unfinished Season is another one.“An Unfinished Season” is the third of what Just calls his “Illinois cycle” of novels. Other times instead, he loses it, the plot departs for tangents taking it to very different places from where it started off and then it keeps rambling on. Then, when - on top of all that - Just manages to hold his plot together, as it happens in the best of his books I read, Echo House and A Dangerous Friend, the result is outstanding. Have never read anything by this author before so maybe this is his style? It was the epitome of 'okay.' Published in 2004, it was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize.Ward Just's AN UNFINISHED SEASON is not at all what I'd expected. The unfinished season… March 25, 2020 John Peters II Community, Education, News 0. An unfinished season by Just, Ward S. Publication date 2005 Topics Cultural Literacy and Humanities, Reading Level-Adult Publisher Boston, N.Y. : Mariner Books Collection inlibrary; printdisabled; internetarchivebooks; china Digitizing sponsor Internet Archive Contributor Internet Archive Language English. Much is supposed to be gleaned from very little plot, so the whole thing feLet's see... nothing happens until around p. 116, and then nothing much happens after that, either. The main character Wils is 19 years old, a senior and a college bound kid. I'll read this while I'm waiting for my Jack Vance I.L.L. Just and his wife, Sarah Catchpole, divide their time between Martha's Vineyard and Paris. Also, Just does not use Quotation marks around dialogue and I found it confusing to determine what words were spoken or not.Extraordinary writing.
to arrive.I bought this book at the local library's book sale last summer w/o realizing that it was already on my to-read list. Later, however, when the narrator meets his girlfriend and her father, the story felt suddenly alive and engaged with larger themes. Just is extraordinary at capturing a vocabulary that takes you into his story where you feel intimately involved with his characters. We’d love your help.
Until that time you lived quietly in your father's house. Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Not recommended.I was slow getting into this, in part because of style. So begins Ward Just's An Unfinished Season, the winter in question a postwar moment of the 1950s when the modern world lay just over the horizon, a time of rabid anticommunism, worker unrest, and government corruption. Yawn. As the summer goes by, the young man gets closer to his father while the mother is gone. The book is rich with lines that describe how Wils life is shape by his parent yet you feel his pulling away and his need for independence like every newcomer to College. It is the tension between public duty and private conscience that animates much of his fiction, including Forgetfulness.