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Summary: A book so remarkable......
Review: you want to thank the author for writing it!!I love this book. I've read it many times and given copies to friends (they certainly aren't going to get my copy!). The two things I most admire about the book: its originality and its hopefulness. Living fully takes courage, humor, humanity. This book has those qualities in abundance.
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Summary: Anne Tyler: Mistress of Quirk
Review: I've read all her books, and this is one of my favorites. It begins with Macon and his wife separating after tragedy drives them apart. Macon moves 'back home' with his 3 hopelessly out-of-touch-with-reality siblings, the oddest of which is his spinster sister, Rose. Enter: Muriel, an eccentric dog trainer, who gets right to work training Macon for re-entry into life.
Every nuance is in place in this quirky book full of odd characters who have trouble finding their niche till Tyler discovers them and sets them again on their crooked path.
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Summary: Relevant, delightful, humorous.
Review: This was a re-read that I enjoyed even more this time around. Accidental Tourist is an exploration of love between "poorly matched" people. While not in that situation, I found it very relevant in its focus on perceptions and personality: your lover's perceptions of you, and your personality as it responds to those perceptions and your lover's personality. Some of the other things which make this one of my favorite Tylers: several well developed characters, including one who is totally delightful despite her flaws; the concept of the accidental tourist, which is not only humorous, but will resonate with anyone who is not unambivalently adventurous; a masterful scene in which the protagonist is being dumped on; more than its share of other great scenes; enjoyable minor characters. As always, Tyler celebrates human relationships with humor, nuance, objectivity.
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Summary: Macon Leary - The Accidental Tourist
Review: I thought "The Accidental Tourist" was the best book I have read in a very long time, I absolutely loved it! By the end of the second chapter, I was drawn to this book! I could not put it down.
Macon Leary isn't a man that had everything going for him,he
divorced his wife, his son was killed a year before that, and he had many trust issues. Macon had trouble showing emotion, and second-guessed any emotion that people showed him.
After Macon met Muriel, the dog trainer, his life changed, but it wasn't an overnight thing! Muriel tried for a very long time to convince Macon that they needed eachother. Macon and Muriel ended up together, which I was very happy about! They did need eachother, and he knew finally figured it out!
I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a great read!
Like The Washington Post says on the front of the book, it's "incandescent, heartbreaking, exhilarating...One cannot reasonably expect fiction to be much better than this."
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Summary: How to Explain?
Review: I have never read anything which so effectively spoke to me (at the same time) of the beauty and loneliness of life. Somewhere on this earth right now, lives a person (Anne Tyler) who possesses an amazing ability to see/sense/perceive an extraordinary range of the human experience. A million people could look at the same thing and not really know what it means. But Anne Tyler might understand. Such breadth of awareness.
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Summary: A Tyler Gem
Review: I had seen the movie "The Accidental Tourist" so many times that I never realized that I had not read the book! What a treat to find a Tyler book that I had not read. As usual, Tyler pulls us into the world of her characters and makes us part of their lives. How she does this, time after time, astounds me. The characters who populate her books are eccentric but nevertheless are endearing--and are always original. Here we have Macon Leary (which could have been spelled leery) a travel writer who really hates to leave home. He writes books for people who are just like him, who really just want all the comforts of their familiar home no matter where they are. They have no interest in exploring or seeing the sights of a new place. Macon is a man who is uncomfortable with his life, his surroundings, his work, his associates, and even his dog, Edward. Social interaction is not his forte, nor his family's, most of whom are as socially inept as he is. He dislikes any kind of change, is compulsive, and is stodgily set in his ways. The systems he devises to make life easier are hilarious, such as agitating his clothes underfoot while he takes a shower! But his usually sedate life takes many twists and turns in the course of this novel, during the year or two after his son's brutal murder. He is forced to examine his marriage and his relationship with the eccentric Muriel, the likes of whom he has never encountered--she is impulsive, messy, pushy, and talks his ear off. Muriel presents Macon with a very different way of living and he needs to decide if he can handle this. Tyler presents his struggle in the most charming way and makes these characters so real to the reader. Another Tyler gem!
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Summary: The Courage of Living
Review: Anne Tyler's strongest novel. Macon Leary, an emotionally battered man, has always been insular, introverted, and a loner. But even his shell of a normal existence is destroyed when his son is murdered and his distant wife asks for a divorce. His blood family only draws him farther away from the outside world of human social interaction. Then, arriving to train the dog he does not want, a woman with an extremely painful past of her own comes to draw Macon out of himself, and teaches him that living takes courage. One of the late twentieth-century's best reads.
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Summary: All the Lonely People
Review: There's a great passage about halfway through this novel. Macon, the protagonist, is flying and he looks out the window to see the roofs of houses. All of a sudden "It came to him very suddenly that every little roof concealed actual lives. Well, of course he'd known that, but all at once it took his breath away. He saw how real those lives were to the people who lived them-how intense and private and absorbing." That passage almost sums up the writing of Anne Tyler. She is fascinated by the "small" lives of normal people. Here, Tyler examines Macon. He and his wife's son was murdered senselessly about and year before, and the loss has torn apart their lives. When Macon's wife Sarah leaves him, he scrambles to put some order into his life. He stumbles into a relationship with the eccentric Muriel, a single mother from a totally different world as Macon. Eventually, his wife comes back into the picture. Macon is forced to totally examine these relationships and to squeeze insight out of them to determine where he should go with his life. Really, that is an extremely elementary summary of the book. The relationships and characterizations are so complex. The Accidental Tourist is a wonderfully written novel. The insights Tyler gives about the character are so apt. It is such a finely crafted novel. It is so fun to see how a paragraph about a cat at the beginning of the novel or how the marriage between to minor characters (Julian and Rose) can totally enlighten the situation between Macon and Sarah/Muriel. This is a wonderful novel, and I can't wait to experience Anne Tyler's other works.
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Summary: Life is always an unfinished activity
Review: The book speaks to that lonely place inside of us that no matter how many persons we have around or how many activities me immerse ourselves into, always remains in a vacuum. But that does not mean that we are empty and unable to contact other persons no matter how weird they might seem. Is just that once we realize that no one has a calling to become our missing part of the puzzle, any quest in life somehow becomes more easy. Read it if you a want some balsam for those moments in which what you do feels sort of useless.
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Summary: A book of contrasts
Review: The story dipicts contrasts in our world behind closed doors. It is a great read that takes you on a ride with a very unusual man. It deals sensitively with personal relationships, class issues and families.
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