The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

Rating:
Summary: Classically Done
Review: A friend bought this book for me, and told me that it was one of her all time favorites. What a great gift because this book rocks. The stories found in this collection are striking and angry. Originally published in 1959, Mr. Sillitoe gives his protaganists a gritty disregard for rules and regulations. The title story is the best known of the lot, but the rest of the book introduces you to the poverty of the English working class, slugging it out for every penny, every crown. Many of the characters rob and steal their way to their next meal. Others will not sell themselves out to the law or the man. This for example is found in the story, Noah's Arc, where the two youth sneak their way onto a carnaval ride, only to get caught, and then manage to escape. A recurring theme is one where the characters are book owners or book readers. Sillitoe makes the point of the deepness of reading. He also makes the point that reading can be a solitary, non-social event. Arguments occur, newspapers are burned, bookcases are judged---bueno! As a person that likes realistic fiction, bordering on the ugly, struggling working class, I can say that this is a wonderful and currently underated selection.

Rating:
Summary: Classically Done
Review: A friend bought this book for me, and told me that it was one of her all time favorites. What a great gift because this book rocks. The stories found in this collection are striking and angry. Originally published in 1959, Mr. Sillitoe gives his protaganists a gritty disregard for rules and regulations. The title story is the best known of the lot, but the rest of the book introduces you to the poverty of the English working class, slugging it out for every penny, every crown. Many of the characters rob and steal their way to their next meal. Others will not sell themselves out to the law or the man. This for example is found in the story, Noah's Arc, where the two youth sneak their way onto a carnaval ride, only to get caught, and then manage to escape. A recurring theme is one where the characters are book owners or book readers. Sillitoe makes the point of the deepness of reading. He also makes the point that reading can be a solitary, non-social event. Arguments occur, newspapers are burned, bookcases are judged---bueno! As a person that likes realistic fiction, bordering on the ugly, struggling working class, I can say that this is a wonderful and currently underated selection.

Rating:
Summary: English Honors Class Review
Review: Confusing yet interesting, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner written by Allan Sillitoe is an incredible book made up of short fiction stories. Each story has a moral to it. Such as "The Lonelines...", it teaches strongness of the mind and soul. The German boy was an excellent runner but was also a great thief. When living in Borstal, he was asked by the governor to run a 32-mile race. To show the governor that he was not to be used or bought, he lost the race on purpose, although he would have won it. To hope that the governor were to find out about his trick in case he was made to be a prisoner, the boy wrote this story. In the story, UNCLE ERNEST, a kind considerate man was mistaken for a perverted,using man. When "Uncle Ernest" met two young girls in need of food, he offered to feed them dinner everyday. Later when people started to notice the girls were using the poor man, the people at the restuarant called the cops on the girls but when the police arrived, the man was made to look like the bad guy. Overall, the book shows how life can sometimes be good to you but sometimes deceive you in the worst possible way.

Rating:
Summary: Review from Holland
Review: Hi, I'm from holland, and I think that this book is very boring, That because we listened to a cassette and that was very monotonous. I was almost going to sleep under the story, I think it is the worst book I have ever seen.
Thaty's my opinion about it, so you have to do with it whatever you want.
I wish you all a good 2004 and a further live.

Domin

Rating:
Summary: Integrity of the British Holden Caulfeld
Review: My review of this book is based on my memory of the movie made of ' The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner' and upon a certain knowledge I have of the work of Alan Sillitoe. This work is a kind of realistic look at working class or lower -middle class post-war British life. In the title story of the collection the boy selected to run deliberately loses the race in order to preserve his own independance and integrity. His gesture is the gesture of the lone individual in defiance of the suppresive system, and bears a resemblance to that of Salinger's Holden Caulfeld. The image of the long - distance runner whose task requires will and courage and ability to resist and overcome pain going on his own way and refusing the glory of public victory says much about our own inner evaluation of ourselves and our dignity. It reminds too of the liberation which Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Denisovich finds within himself despite being in prison. The loneliness of the long distance runner is the loneliness of one whose only liberation is from within.

Rating:
Summary: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
Review: This book is worth reading!!
It was the first time I read a book by Alan Sillitoe
and I enjoyed it. Sillitoe describes well how poor people
become criminal and how hard it is to get out of the vicious
circle of poverty ... if you want to get out of it.
Sometimes the book is a little bit tedious but all in all I recommend
reading the book.

Rating:
Summary: Several standouts
Review: This is Sillitoe's best-known work, a collection of stories presumably drawn in large part from his working class life in Great Britain. The book's emphasis on gritty realism will not be everyone's cup of tea -- no pun intended -- but I found his prose clean, powerful and nearly free of sentimentality.

Sillitoe's sympathy for the working class is best demonstrated in the title story, narrated by a teen resident of a reform school whose voice vibrates with rebellion. The youth shows a keen awareness of his position within England's rigid class structure and has made a conscious decision to resist those whom he says have "the whip hand" over him. Sillitoe reveals the motivation for his protagonist's attitude in an understated but memorable scene in which the youth remembers finding his laborer father dead, blood spilled out of his consumptive body. The reader sees the boy's perception that his father's life has been used up by the system. In the story's surprising final turn, the youth -- who has become a champion runner for his school -- attempts in his own way to turn the tables on that system.

The book contains several other strong stories. "The Fishing-Boat Picture" is the bittersweet memoir of a failed marriage; it effectively dramatizes the sense of lost opportunity we feel when our most important human connections are broken. "Mr Raynor the School-Teacher" brings to life the stultifying atmosphere of a London public school classroom presided over by a jaded teacher whose only ambition is to keep his rebellious charges at bay so that he can drift in reverie. "The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller" has the feeling of a memoir. The narrator describes his hardscrabble youth and subsequent escape from his environment. Frankie Buller is the symbol of the ruined youth he left behind: a boy who was once a giant among his playmates who has grown older without ever progressing spiritually or creatively. The narrator would never wish to be a Frankie Buller, but his words are permeated with the guilty tone of the survivor.

Not all of the stories succeed as admirably as these. Still, at his best, Sillitoe crafts the claustrophobic environments of his stories, often in the service of social criticism. His characters may long to escape the grays and blacks of their worlds, but the stories themselves offer no such escape for the reader.

Rating:
Summary: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Review: Up to 1945 the working class in Great Britain was expected to kow-tow to the 'educated' ruling classes. After 1945 social change blurred the divisions between the classes and one of the people who gained most from this change was Alan Sillitoe. He came from a working class background but was allowed to fulfil his ambitions to be a writer that up to WW2 was the province of the wealthy. Sillitoe wrote about what he knew i.e. the working class in a Midlands town in a period of social change from the end of WW2 up to (in this particular collection of short stories) the mid to late 1950's. He does not attempt to moralise and , I believe, does not attempt to romanticise what it was really like to live in Britain in the aftermath of WW2. He does attempt to paint a picture of a class of people that may appear to be alien to people who have been influenced the Pathe News Reels of the 1940's and 1950's. This book describes better than most academic text books what life was really like for the majority of the British people after WW2.