The Journals
Volume 2
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
The first volume of John Fowles's Journals ended with him achieving international literary renown after the publication of The Collector and The Magus, and leaving London behind to live in a remote house near Lyme Regis. This final volume charts the rewards and struggles of his continuing literary career, but at the same time reveals the often reluctant celebrity behind the outward success.
Enjoying a reputation as one of the world's leading novelists, Fowles wins enormous wealth, kudos and attention, has the satisfaction of seeing The French Lieutenant's Woman turned into a highly acclaimed Hollywood film, but none the less comes to regard his fame with deep ambivalence.
It cannot repair the growing strains between himself and his wife Elizabeth, who does not share his taste for rural isolation, nor can it cure the disenchantment he feels for an increasingly materialist society.
This concluding volume of the Journals marks a writer's continuing quest for wisdom and self-understanding.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The author of The French Lieutenant's Woman had a conventional upper-middle-class English background and Oxford education. This volume of Fowles's (b. 1926) journals opens as he finishes his last year at college with few plans for his vocation as a writer but a great sense of himself. The journals are, in many respects, more about the latter than the former. Fowles's intense examination of his own character, moods and thoughts gets punctured only by new places and exceptional people. His time as a schoolteacher in France and later Greece brings out the best in his entries. On the isle of Spetsai, which later inspired the bestseller The Magus, Fowles is enthralled by its landscape and inhabitants, and becomes entangled in a love triangle with Elizabeth Christy, the wife of a fellow teacher. Returning to London, he elopes with her, finds a position teaching at a secretarial college and labors on various literary projects. The success of his first novel, The Collector (1963), makes little private difference to Fowles; his collaboration with Hollywood on movie adaptations and socializing with literary lions like John Bayley and Iris Murdoch prove less important to him than being able to escape London and move to Lyme Regis, where he would write his most famous novel and continue his voluminous, meticulous journals. 16 pages of b&w photos.
