The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

Rating:
Summary: Maybe Barth's greatest novel
Review: "Somebody the Sailor" is the great work of Barth's later career, maybe his greatest story ever. The novel is full of feeling, above all; like all his best work since "End of the Road," it makes a profound and emotional feminist argument. It creates at least three splendid women characters, while exposing the cultures and systems that limit them. And it does this within a splendid, ever-ingenious plot -- straddling fantasy and relaism, utterly devoid of cliche or secondhand thinking -- that comes finally to the powerful subject of mortality, of coming to terms with our own demise. Brilliant, provocative, soulful, far-reaching, this book will outlast nine-tenths of Amazon's current stock.

Rating:
Summary: Like the tide, Barth's stories cleanse and refresh our life
Review:

I suppose it is inevitable that, as the post-war boomers approach the big six-zero over the next decade, we will see a tidal flood of tender, soul-searching narratives. Boomers want to understand rather than simply experience life, and most have been frustrated by life's refusal to obey our expectations.

John Barth seems to have made such soul searching his life work, and I seem to have followed him book for book, life experience by life experience over the years. A clever "academic" writer (read: "he writes like a dream but his wit sometimes overwhelms the story"), Barth has addressed boomer experience and frailty .

Seeming to be five to ten years ahead of boomers, his books have ranged from the tragedy resulting from a terribly botched abortion (long before we openly spoke of this horror), through the visionary and usually misguided quest of the idealist (Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goatboy), the terrible pain of realizing one is an adult (the clever but exhausting Letters), to more leisurely and accessible mid-life reassessment as protagonists take "voyages" on the emotional seascape of middle age (Sabbatical, Tidewater Tales, Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, Once upon a Time...).

Each five years or so, I eagerly await his newest offering, devour it, and then feel frustrated when his literary games seem to detract from his story.

But, then, each time I realize (as if for the first time), the essential nature of his writing. Like the age-old games from which his writings spring (the quest/redemption stories of the Iliad and Oddessy, the "doomed" prophet stories of the Old and New Testaments, the mistaken identity games of Shakespeare and thousands of authors since, and the metaphor of story as voyage and voyage as growth from Chaucer, 1001 Nights, etc), Barth plays his games to remind us that the act of story telling *is* the experience, it *is* the reason we read: the experience of hearing ghost stories around the camp fire remains with us long long after we have forgotten the actual story.

And then I remember that, as a reader, I have no more "right" to expect neatness and closure in a Barth story than I have the right to expect neatness and closure in my own life. Try as we might, our own work, our own story is always in progress. And like Barth's beloved Tidewater, the ebb and flow of our own story defies our attempt to capture to master it.

In the end, life and Barth's stories remain as delightfully cleansing as the tide itself.

KRH www.umeais.maine.edu/~hayward

Rating:
Summary: Truly enjoyed this, but can see the point made....
Review: I am maniacal about finishing books, but I couldn't bring myself to finish this one. I found it to be full of sexist male fantasies and macho expression. I do NOT think this book can be construed as feminist. The author's pretension and satisfaction with himself showed through brilliantly in his writing. I have found (and the other reviews support this) that mostly men like this book. All of the women I have talked to about it disliked it strongly, if they even finished it. I found it tedious, and too self-satisfied to tolerate.

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Summary: I'm a woman and this is one of my favorite books
Review: I don't think I need to repeat the praise that has already been given this book by, sadly, only men. But to sum up: the tale is ingeniously well crafted. Although it was not a mystery per se, I had no idea where it was going to wind up. And after I closed the book, I was sorry to see the characters go. I would have liked to start it again, but it was just so long! If I remember correctly, some other reviewers complain that it is all over the place. Yes, it is! But if you're able to keep track of several different story lines at once, you'll be fine. Although probably, like me, you will probably enjoy one of the story lines most and wish that there was more of it. But the book could not be what it is if the entire work itself were not different tales interwoven. No, it is not a straight story that leads from point A to point B. But I had no problem keeping them all straight, and I read it over a long period.

I am a 27-year-old woman and I did not realize that I was supposed to be bothered by the sexism and orientalism, etc. that other women who read this book were. I loved this book. I had no preconceived notions about it except that I remembered reading another Barth book years ago and enjoying it, so I picked this one up.

To be fair, it did take me a long time to get through it, but I kept coming back to it. Even though I would read other books in the middle, I definitely wanted to see it to the end. Perhaps I did not get offended by it because in the very first scene was a conversation with Death, so I realized that it was not going to be exactly, uh, based on reality.

Rating:
Summary: The Arabian night that never was
Review: I'm still not quite sure to think of this book, having now finished it. I enjoyed it but I don't know how I'm going to think of it six months from now, if at all. It's an interestingly told tale, using the voyages of Sinbad to frame the story of a middle aged man's life in the present day . . . and I liked the ruminations on growing up and getting older (and older) and the Arabian setting, accurate or not, was certainly entertaining at least. For all its length the book is actually very tightly written, the voyages and interludes remaining pretty close to the point and with very few actual digressions, the plot falls apart and comes together neatly (as neat as it gets) and unfolds at nearly the right pace. Still, this does feel a bit like the work of a craftsman and not the work of someone really pushing . . . the prose although well written doesn't leap out at me except at certain moments and the story very rarely engaged me emotionally, the main character Simon was fairly three dimensional and Sinbad is displayed warts and all but everyone else was basically there to move the plot forward . . . I guess I'm comparing this to the Tidewater Tales, which why that book was frustrating at times because it was all over the place and rambled every other page, there was a sense of exuberance to it that I found myself responding to. Here I watch all of Barth's literary tricks and don't find myself that moved at all. The early scenes are probably the best, showing Simon's young life and a time long gone and some of the later Arabian voyage scenes are fun and the whole story is well constructed as a piece, his mediations on growing old alternate between humor and resignation, it's populated with loads of interesting set pieces and never fails to be anything less than interesting . . . and yet there's something missing here that I can't put my finger on, a quality that I know is in the other books of his that I've read. What it is, I really couldn't tell you. Though I do think it's a telling sign that the most riveting sections are the sparsest (the beginning and the end, in particular). I do recommend this though even if new Barth fans should start elsewhere . . . veterans of the author will find much of what they like about him distilled into a dense but decently compact novel, the contents of which they may find both moving them and leaving them cold, sometimes on the same page. But it's a worthy read, at any rate.

Rating:
Summary: This tale about tales is a whopper!
Review: John Barth is one of America's greatest writers, a story teller on par with Twain and Steinbeck, Boyle and Bellow. As far as I can tell, however, none of them ever wrote a story about story telling, which is what Barth has done in this fantastical epic. Simon Behler (if that is, in fact, the name of the identity- and perspective-challenged narrator), for whom water has always played some central role in his life, appears to have swum through a rip in the time/space and reality/fantasy continuum, where he ultimately arrives at the doorstep of the fabled Sinbad The Sailor, and his captivating daughter Yasmin. Invited in, he and Sinbad swap tales of their respective, fantastic voyages in front of myriad household members and prospective investors for Sinbad's proposed seventh voyage, all of whom doubt the origins and suspect the motives of our narrator. Except, of course, for the delicious Yasmin, who, it turns out, has a mysterious and inexorable connection to Simon.

While this is a tale filled with mystery and adventure, love and sex, betrayal and death, and an endless supply of conflict, the underlying theme is the role that stories play in our lives, both as literal archives and moral instruction. Barth's trademark wordplay makes every passage worth a second and third reading, and his characters are impressively believable given their unbelievable context. Like his other masterpiece, "The Sot-Weed Factor," this is a sprawling and ribald epic, showcasing the enormous intellect and imagination of an American master in his prime.

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Summary: A polarizing, brilliant, pornographic, and worthwhile fight
Review: Six years ago my reading group read this book. More correctly, six years ago my reading group was SUPPOSED to read this book. I am the only one who made it all the way through.

This book was so bad we named an award after it. The John Barth Award, bestowed upon those courageous enough to finish a terrible book that everyone else has cast aside. I still hold the award, as we have never come across another book as terrible as this one.

It has been many years, and due to the trauma I have blocked most of the details out of my mind. However, I do remember that it is a boring, confused muddle of pretension and male chauvinism.

If you see this book in the store, do not touch it, don't look at it - run in the opposite direction as quickly as you can.

I gave this book one star because I had to, frankly I want to give it an infinite number of negative stars. This book was worse than the Bridges of Madison County, and I didn't think that that was possible.

AVOID AT ALL COSTS!!

Rating:
Summary: The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor
Review: Very simply put - My favorite author's best story ever! Without even putting this book down I turned from the last page to the first to reread it. I have read it aloud to more than one lover. Truly a story to be shared. As a devotee and companion of Barth for thirty years I often been drawn into his layered approach to story telling, but this story of stories within stories is definitely the most readable; jumping seamlessly from one era and character set to another.

Rating:
Summary: The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor
Review: Very simply put - My favorite author's best story ever! Without even putting this book down I turned from the last page to the first to reread it. I have read it aloud to more than one lover. Truly a story to be shared. As a devotee and companion of Barth for thirty years I often been drawn into his layered approach to story telling, but this story of stories within stories is definitely the most readable; jumping seamlessly from one era and character set to another.

Rating:
Summary: Just one more tale before I die, even if it's this one
Review: While heading for Sri Lanka with his girl friend, Simon William Behler, becomes stranded, not only in place, but more importantly in time. A man of the first half of the 20th century, Simon finds himself suddenly in medieval Iraq. Simon is saved by men employed by none other than Sinbad the Sailor. Sinbad and Simon, respectively, trade tales of adventure and the adventure of growing up in a tidewater town in Baltimore. Sinbad's voyages are packed with legends and myths, right out of "1001 Arabian Nights." While Sinbad's recounting of these voyages have moments of excitement, they are poor substitutes for Simon's routine stories of growing up. I have read about similar things many times before: the first kiss, the loss of one's virginity to an older girl considered crazy by the other boys in the town. Barth presents Simon's ultimate "rite of passage" with much fanfare. I could not help but compare that to the need for Yasmin, Sinbad's daughter, to protect her virginity at all costs, with the unwanted assistance of those too eager to examine Yasmin, lest she prove herself unfit for marriage. Barth consistently pounds away at the virginity issue with the subtlety of a sledge hammer.

Despite its occasional bright spots, most noteworthy the nature of Simon's birth and his strange "relationship" with his twin sister, _The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor_ is a huge disappointment. I expect more originality and humor from the author of _Tidewater Tales_ and _Giles Goat Boy_. In those two books Barth is a master in combining Greek mythology and other fantasy with great plots, lots of imagination, and a raucously witty writing style. In _The Last Voyage_ Barth too often falls into cliche and misses his usual standard considerably.