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    The World According to Garp
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    The World According to Garp
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    The World According to Garp
    Audiobook20 hours

    The World According to Garp

    Written by John Irving

    Narrated by Michael Prichard

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The World According to Garp is a comic and compassionate coming-of-age novel that established John Irving as one of the most imaginative writers of his generation. A worldwide bestseller since its publication in 1978, Irving’s classic is filled with stories inside stories about the life and times of T. S. Garp, novelist and bastard son of Jenny Fields–a feminist leader ahead of her time. Beyond that, The World According to Garp virtually defies synopsis.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJul 12, 2005
    ISBN9780739320907
    Unavailable
    The World According to Garp
    Author

    John Irving

    John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, was published in 1968, when he was twenty-six. He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, and coached wrestling until he was forty-seven. He is a member of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In 1980, Mr. Irving won a National Book Award for his novel The World According to Garp. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules. In 2013, he won a Lambda Literary Award for his novel In One Person. Internationally renowned, his novels have been translated into almost forty languages. His all-time bestselling novel, in every language, is A Prayer for Owen Meany. A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, John Irving lives in Toronto.

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    Reviews for The World According to Garp

    4/5

    4,149 ratings93 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Jenny Fields, la madre de T.S. Garp, era una mujer intolerante al comportamiento de los hombres pero quería tener un hijo. Extraña forma de concebirlo. Fields se convirtió en la cabeza principal del movimiento feminista.
    • 5/5
      Equal parts funny and sad. This is a novel that in my younger days I would have dismissed as the anxieties of a privilaged, middle-aged white guy; however, as tastes change and I become interest in other genres of fiction--I really appreciated Irving's comic struggle with sexual desire, sexual identity, sexual frustration and general fear and paranoia about our life. It's a novel that seems to look back at youth, young adulthood, and the beginning of self-awareness with some clarity--It sees and laughs at those moments that at one point were so important to us as the ridiculous absurdity of figuring out who we are. It's a pretentious novel about being a novelist, yet it's so brazen it somehow works. I'll be buying more of his work as a result of The World According to Garp.
    • 4/5
      Yoicks. Unlikable characters, disagreeable plot happenings, and writing that didn't stand out as spectacular in any way for me. So this one just isn't up my street, I think.
    • 4/5
      Very funny indeed, tragic, but funny :-)
    • 4/5
      Do you know garp doesn't believe in religion? When he thinks of his own death he says something like so there is no life after death... so what? Rejoice in the good moments spent on this earth with your loved ones. I wonder why he wore the publisher friend's ill fitting suits. Maybe to show how down to earth a person he was to whom riches could not bring false values. Loved the book though I hate to start a book fatter than300 pages just because I get bored of being in its world so that long specially if its a dry and serious book. But This was a fun read.
    • 5/5
      This book just charms my socks off. Much more fun than the movie. I read it in high school and loved it, then read it again a few years ago and loved it again. Twisted, straightforward, and engrossing.
    • 4/5
      I love John Irving's novels, and I'm thrilled I finally got to read the one that made him a star. Gotta say, though: I have never wanted to strangle a fictional character so much as I wanted to strangle T. S. Garp. I mean, John Wheelwright (A Prayer for Owen Meany) was annoying in his own way, but Garp...whew.
    • 4/5
      Garp is a difficult book at times. I struggled with just not liking the main character very much through most of the book. But I suppose that was part of the point. Garp's character evolves and the reader has to stick with him to get the payoff. So much of the book seems far-fetched at first glance, but the longer I live and the more I know of people, the more realistic it becomes. Because people are weird and flawed and tragic and surprising. It is a very human novel.
    • 4/5
      3.75 starsJenny Fields is independent; she's a nurse, doesn't want a husband (or any kind of relationship with anyone, really) - and this is particularly unusual for a woman in the early 1940s - but she does want a child, so she gets pregnant and has Garp. Garp grows up at an all-boys school where Jenny is the nurse. He later becomes an author, marries and has kids, but he strays a couple of times, as does his wife. In the meantime, Jenny has written an autobiography and she is revered as a feminist; women who need help come to her.I think this is my favourite book by Irving that I've read so far. Irving's books do have some odd characters, so of course, this one does, too, but I've seen the movie a few times years ago, so at least I knew what to expect., and this may be why I liked it better than the others I've read by him. I could have done without the extra writings in the book, written by Garp, but I also liked that there was so much more detail than the movie (as there usually is). I was surprised at how quickly I was able to read this, given how long the book is. Overall, I really enjoyed it.
    • 3/5
      I think I read this maybe about 2005, but I honestly can't remember anything about it. But I remember the cover. I think it was a summer read. I guess that's a sad commentary - it had no effect on me.
    • 5/5
      “You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life"Jenny Fields becomes a nurse and because she doesn't particularly like men decides to use one for the sole purpose of getting impregnated by one.She decides that accidentally lobotomised war patient, Technical Sergeant Garp, is just the man she needs. Motherhood with no strings attached. Thus she gives birth to a son she christens T S Garp in recognition of his father. Jenny gets herself a job at the Steering prep school as a school nurse and it is here that Garp is brought up and educated. However, when Garp reaches college age Jenny whips him off to live in Austria so he can have a richer life than college can offer him. Whilst at Steering Garp had met Helen Holm, the daughter of the school's wrestling coach and avid book reader, and in an attempt to impress her decides to become an author. However, Jenny writes and gets published, a memoir (entitled "A Sexual Suspect") that quickly becomes a feminist bible. On their return to the US Garp finds that his mother has become famous or infamous depending on your gender and sets up a kind of refuge for women. Garp himself manages to get a book published but not to the same critical acclaim or financially successful, he marries bookish Helen with whom he has two young sons and becomes a house husband. Years later a horrific accident involving the entire family leaves one dead and the remainder horribly injured. Years later Jenny Fields is assassinated.I won't give any more of the plot away but will state that included within the novel are excerpts from Garp's own published works. The subjects that are covered are wide ranging taking in death, feminism, friendship, infidelity, loss, parenthood, rape to name but a few but the over-riding theme is lust. There are several horrific incidents and certainly rape and murder are not particularly funny yet despite their horror you still end up laughing out loud which says much for Irving's writing style. Now I loved this book (in particular the book excerpts which I found really enjoyable and shows great imagination) however, I must say that I was a little disappointed with the final chapter which is written as a kind of epilogue. Personally I did not feel that it was at all necessary to try and tidy up all the loose ends but this is only a minor complaint and do not feel that it really detracted from the overall.
    • 4/5
      After I saw the movie I had to read this. Impressive. A bit high on the yuck factor, a bit too much whining and neuroticism from some characters, and some stuff I didn't really understand, but I liked this well enough to keep going with Irving for a little while.

      (I liked/understood A Prayer for Owen Meany almost as much, was frustrated by Hotel New Hampshire, and gave up on Cider House Rules.)
    • 4/5
      I had just finished reading A Confederacy of Dunces and I was looking for another classic to read, but my to-read list is longer than my lifespan. I needed help narrowing down my options, so I asked a librarian friend for recommendations because I knew he had read a lot of classics. This was one of the books he recommended and it turned out to be a great read!

      This book has everything — a great story, wonderful writing and storytelling, and characters that you care about. Sometimes John Irving had these beautiful, complex sentences with coordinating or subordinating clauses. I love it when an author focuses on the art of writing instead of focusing on the art of writing crappy bestsellers. The World According to Garp also has sexual content and violence (war injuries, rape, car accidents, etc.) if you like that sort of thing.

      Garp is a writer (as well as his mother Jenny Fields), so John Irving included a lot of Garp's own writing. It's interesting to see how Irving develops Garp's distinct writing style, so it's a writing style within a writing style.

      By the way, I think it's sick how Jenny Fields conceives Garp.

      What I also loved about this book was all of the references to other classics such as books from Homer, Woolf, Conrad, Twain, Melville, Dickens, Hemingway and Dostoyevsky. I especially enjoyed Garp's discussion with Mrs. Ralph about Dostoyevsky's The Eternal Husband. I've never read it, but after reading their discussion about it, I'm intrigued. Garp described the book as "a wonderful story," "neatly complicated," with "complex characters." Mrs. Ralph described it as "a sick story" and "His women are less than objects. They don't even have a shape. They're just ideas that men talk about and play with." Now I want to find out who is correct.

      I highly recommend this to anyone looking for a great classic.
    • 5/5
      One of my favorite books by my favorite author. John Irving is a wonderful storyteller.
    • 3/5
      Rating is more like 3.5 stars. For me, the first half of the novel was pretty close to 5 stars, the middle parts concerning his marriage (and the swinging 70's---a particularly annoying era in literature as far as I'm concerned and probably the sole reason why I didn't rate this novel 4 stars) were closer 2 stars, and the end picked up a little. Basically the novel was all over the map for me and, as seems to be the case with the other two Irving novels I've read, I became irritated with Irving's verbosity and scattered narratives.

      With that said, this is a novel that I can see myself picking up again one day, giving it another try in the interest of "second reading insights" and recognizing the fact that 1970's literature (explicitly, 1970's literature dealing with contemporary sexual mores---blech) turns me off and may have biased me against the rest of the book.
    • 4/5
      This was a very interesting book. I haven't read a book like this before and definitely the first novel written by John Irving. I was actually quite impressed and very much enjoyed this book. Definitely a reader for anyone! Instead of getting rid of this book I decided its a keeper!
    • 4/5
      the movie changed my world. i was a teenager when it came out and it blew my mind. i’d never experienced a story like that, frank yet humorous and also gut-wrenchingly sad. all the quirky characters to whom unusual and intense things happen. for me, John Lithgow has always been defined by Roberta.

      anyway, the book.

      Irving’s prose was solid but didn’t quite mimic the richness of the screen version for me. nonetheless, the book was epic in scope and satisfying. i loved being able to see more into the lives of the people in Garp’s life, especially his mother. it felt like a life, a whole life, when i finished the book. like i had witnessed something special and real and meaningful even if it wasn’t profound.

      twists and turns throughout the novel gave it an interesting flavor that also served to keep it on the verge of tongue-in-cheek to the end. ironies and metaphors abound that reach out into greater philosophies but they only ask questions or make gentle assumptions. i’m not sure if Irving put a lot his own life into this (i’m fairly certain he did) but it seemed like he might have been writing a whimsical bit of fiction in which he could explore some of his own aspirations and write out or publish some of his own “lesser” works like the excerpts and short stories written by Garp.

      if Irving had scratched the surface a little deeper, i think something truly great and timeless would have emerged. the meandering story felt out-of-focus fuzzy or tilt-shifted where only foreground objects were sharp and the host context was an impressionist’s painting. still, this story will stay with me in ways that other, “deeper,” novels will not.
    • 5/5
      “Life is an X-rated soap opera” (p. 470 in the Ballantine Books, © 1978 edition).

      This theme is often repeated through the book, and I suspect that its repetition was no accident. John Irving is not one to waste words. And so, if he says a thing more than once, I take it he wants his readers to understand and appreciate the sentiment.

      The World According to Garp is a modern-day classic at the level — in their own time — of the works of such literary mainstays as Tolstoy, Balzac and Dickens. It contains its own kind of pathos, its own kind of humor, its own kind of grandiosity. In short, the novel is big in every respect.

      When I first saw the film 20 or 30 years ago, I loved it. At the time (or shortly before that time), my girlfriend in college had praised the book and told me I ought to read it. Snob that I was, I didn’t. At the time, I wouldn’t touch anything newer than Chaucer or — worst case — Fielding. My loss (as I’ve come to realize 20 or 30 years later). That, or I first needed to grow up.

      There are several “quotables” in Irving’s book. I’ve already spearheaded this review with one of them. But there are others….

      “Life,” Garp wrote, “is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead, an ending occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that’s left is memory. But a nihilist has a memory” (p. 582, ibid).

      There are, of course, others that simply wouldn’t make any sense (or strike a reader dumb) out of context. But in context, they’re gems.

      Irving is not a stylist in the truest sense of the word, but he is a story-teller almost sans pareille. The World According to Garp is over 600 pages in length — something almost unheard of in our day and celebration of Patience Little & Attention Spanless. But I, for one, haven’t been as captivated by a novel since — oh, I don’t know — Tom Jones; pretty much anything contained in La Comédie humaine; Great Expectations; Bleak House or David Copperfield.

      ‘Nough said. If you haven’t already read it, do yourself a favor: read the book, then watch the movie. Maybe you, too, will arrive at the same conclusion: viz., that John Irving and George Roy Hill (the Director of the film) are a pair of American classics almost on a par with Mark Twain.
    • 3/5
      There was a lot of interesting in this book when released. I think mostly because bizarre things happen in it you hope could never be true.
    • 4/5
      Enjoyed the characters very much. I regret not taking anything away, in terms of growth. I did, however, find this to be entertaining and fun. Worth reading.
    • 2/5
      This is the third book I've read by John Irving--the others were The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany (both of which I remeber very negatively)-- and I only read this book because it is on the Entertainment Weekly list of The 100 Best Novels Ever.which came out in July. Most of the book is crushingly boring, though I did find myself caught up by two minor sections of the book, thus accounting for the extra half star I am giving it. Garp is conceived by his mother in a bizarre way, and his life is filled with weird behavior, liberally narrated with pornographic incidents. I thought the book would never end, an epilogue going on and on with crushingly boring accounts of the characters and their progeny.
    • 2/5
      An unconventional story, funny at times, though it felt like dragging on and on without much point.
    • 3/5
      Starts off very funny with a lovable Garp. But about halfway I didn't find it funny anymore. Sex is a huge theme in this book and very often in a negative light (prostitution, rape, infidelity). And I didn't care anymore about the characters who seem shallow, no spiritual dimension at all. Also I think Mr. Irving could be accused of padding, filling pages with useless prose to up the page count. The narration was good, but the material he had to work wasn't so.
    • 5/5
      Was the 1st Irving book i read which has led me to continue reading his other novels; this story is so captivating that you can't help but be drawn into the lives of the characters; you fall in love with Garp and feel each tragedy personally; but it is a triumphant read that all fiction readers should read
    • 5/5
      Irving writes LONG books but fantastic LONG books. Spending the time to glide through the pages is worth every word.

      What is the book about? Really?!? Do I need to go into this? Read the blurb. Just know that the book is excellent and everyone should read it.

      How clever is "The Under Toad"? The cute back-story that gets mutilated by all the UNDER TOADS that happen throughout the book. I hope that doesn't give much away... but I'm pretty sure that it would be more confusing to someone than anything else.

      Irving has some amazing quotes in this novel too. One of my favorite quotes had to do with the feeling one gets when everything stops and the world goes monotone; "What Garp was savoring was the beginning of a writer’s long-sought trance, wherein the world falls under one embracing tone of voice." You don't have to BE a writer to have experienced that feeling, I believe it relates to any art.
    • 5/5
      The World According to Garp is a work of genius. The characters are bold, colorful, and outrageous. Every word of this voluminous yet entertaining book is important to the story. There are stories within stories that are easily woven together yet outstanding each in its own way. It frequently is laugh-out-loud funny. The relationship between Garp and his mom is wonderful because there are not too many good novels which extol a positive relationship between a son and his mother. This is a truly enjoyable read.
    • 3/5

      "Mind you, it's awfully well written", Wolf had said, "but it's still, somehow, soap opera; it's too much, somehow." Garp had sighed. "Life,"Garp had said, "is too much, somehow. Life is an X-rated soap opera, John," Garp had said.

      The world according to Garp is very much like a soap opera, full of situations and incidents that we don't usually see in real life. The world around Garp is full of craziness and absurdity. Many a times Irving stops just short of being unrealistic. While many of his stories are far from being plausible, they are still possible without breaking any rules of the universe. Even with all sorts of zaniness, Irving manages to keep the narrative under remarkable control. And despite everything, the novel still has a great semblance to real life. The fears and the concerns of the characters, the emotions which drive them, are same as our own. Irving takes one on a journey that ranges from boundless happiness to deep sorrow, from love to hatred and all that variety of emotions which real people feel in real lives. As a bonus to everything that this novel offers, it is quite some fun to read. It is an entertaining soap opera.
    • 4/5
      From his somewhat unusual conception through to the end of his life, we follow the life of the rather solitary, independent thinker who is T.S. Garp. From an early age he wants to be a writer, and quite soon is on his way to achieving his goal. In the meantime he marries and has a family, travels abroad, and suffers perhaps more than his fare share of drama and tragedy.As one would expect from John Irving this is a imaginative and unpredictable novel peopled with some most interesting characters. Many of Irving's familiar themes are here, New Hampshire and Vienna, bears, whores other freaks, and wrestling just to mention a few. And as with his other writings we get a complete story with no loose ends, we learn what becomes of all involved.A fascinating and captivating read, although I have enjoyed some of his other novels much more.
    • 5/5
      A well written book, that explores the humor in the grotesque but honest lives of Garp and those around him. At times, the dialogue seems a little too matter of fact and disconnected. I often had trouble connecting with the characters due to the lack of faith in their lives, yet the well written characters and situations always brought me back into the story. This is definitely a book I will consider reading again in the future, just because of it is so well written.
    • 3/5
      One of the strangest books I have ever read. Some parts I enjoyed, quite many I did not.