[bksvol-discuss] WIsh List

Hi List,
Just submitted Until I Find You by John Irving. This 835 page  book is on the 
Wish List. Should be an easy validation. 

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"According to his mother, Jack Burns was an actor before he was an actor, but 
Jack's most vivid memories of childhood were those moments when he felt 
compelled to hold his mother's hand. He wasn't acting then."

So begins John Irving's eleventh novel, Until I Find You — the story of the 
actor Jack Burns. His mother, Alice, is a Toronto tattoo artist. When Jack is 
four, he travels with Alice to several North Sea ports; they are trying to find 
Jack's missing father, William, a church organist who is addicted to being 
tattooed. But Alice is a mystery, and William can't be found. Even Jack's 
memories are subject to doubt.

Jack Burns goes to schools in Canada and New England, but what shapes him are 
his relationships with older women. John Irving renders Jack's life as an actor 
in Hollywood with the same richness of detail and range of emotions he uses to 
describe the tattoo parlors in those North Sea ports and the reverberating 
music Jack heard as a child in European churches.

The author's tone — indeed, the narrative voice of this novel — is melancholic. 
("In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us — not 
always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which 
add up to the same loss.") Until I Find You is suffused with overwhelming 
sadness and deception; it is also a robust and comic novel, certain to be 
compared to John Irving's most ambitious and moving work.

Jim B

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