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Title: Believers by Charles Baxter ISBN: 0679776532 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: October, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.23
Rating: 5
Summary: Luminous and funny -- this is fiction at its finest!
Comment: Having read A Feast of Love, I was compelled to read another Charles Baxter book. This book is quite funny and touching -- Baxter has the ability to move people's hearts with his unique language and precise coming timing. The short stories are great; my favorites are "Reincarnation," "The Next Building I Plan to Bomb" and "The Cures for Love." These stories are extremely funny and thought provoking at the same time.
Believers, like The Feast of Love, has a timeless quality that establishes Baxter as one of our most gifted fiction writers of today. I strongly recommend this book.
Rating: 5
Summary: An American Master Outdoes Himself
Comment: What makes Charles Baxter's stories beautiful, beyond the understated brilliance of the words he finds to tell them, is the deep respect and sympathy he obviously feels for his characters. Reading, you enter the minds of the most random people--a small-town English teacher, a middle-aged housewife with growing doubts about her husband's secrets, a man who owes his life to the failure of his father, a priest, to keep his vow of chastity. Each character is revealed in all his or her complexity and humanity, with absolute fidelity: there is no patronizing moral judgment or reducing people to "types," just an understanding sadness at people's failings and a quiet admiration where admiration is due. One of the most unexpected and satisfying things about his writing is how funny his stories can be--they've made me laugh out loud, but even Baxter's highly developed sense of the absurd never overwhelms the underlying feeling of a story.
I love Charles Baxter's writing, and for me, Believers is the best he's done so far.
Rating: 3
Summary: Great prose but missing heart
Comment: This book of seven short stories and one novella by Charles Baxter was difficult to rate because on one side the prose is so exceptional as to merit a 5 but as another reviewer noted, it is difficult to care about the lifeless characters that he has created and what appears to be a lack of some type of conclusion or redemption. As an example of his writing skill, from the novella Believers, the narator characterizes his father as follows.
"...his moods were almost weightless, and the shifts in his emotions were often so quick that watching him was like being stationed in a field over which clouds were rapidly passing, creating patterned successions of shadow and light.
I was the child in that field, over which the clouds passed."
Is there a better picture that could be painted describing the effect of the father's moods on his son!
The reader should bear in mind that the title is not meant to just echo the name of the novella, but applies to every story in the book. In most of the short stories an incident occurs which triggers a change from a comfortable existence to one of questioning of beliefs. Every story is really about a loss of belief. We've all lost belief in something sometime in our life and Baxter is exploring this concept with his different stories. Overall, the novella, Believers, is the best of the book. The story, told from the perspective of the son of a former priest, discusses the downfall of his father caused by his association with a rich and devious couple. We follow the son's descriptions of the events leading to his father's downfall and his attempt to learn more. Of the short stories I enjoyed Flood Show the most and on the other side could find little value to Reincarnation.
In summary, I enjoyed his prose but was wishing for more from the story. However, I will still try another of his books.
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Title: The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter ISBN: 037570910X Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: 01 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: First Light (Contemporary American Fiction) by Charles Baxter ISBN: 0140100911 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 1995 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Through the Safety Net: Stories by Charles Baxter ISBN: 0679776494 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: October, 1998 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Harmony of the World: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries) by Charles Baxter ISBN: 0679776516 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: March, 1997 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Saul and Patsy by Charles Baxter ISBN: 0375410295 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 09 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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