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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor John Barth 9780316082518 Books

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor John Barth 9780316082518 Books

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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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor John Barth 9780316082518 Books Reviews

I don't know if Barth has ever been in Iraq, but he reproduces its flavor vividly in THE LAST VOYAGE OF SOMEBODY THE SAILOR, a meditation on difference and the idea of "the other." For as long as people have had imaginations, the concept of the fish out of water has been a source of both comfort and amusement. Take Twain's Connecticut Yankee--a bold storyline that reinforced Gilded Age stereotypes while ostensibly criticizing them as being inferior to the medieval faith that gave King Arthur's Court its reason for being. Barth takes Twain's message and stands it on his head. His protagonist, Simon Behler, approaches Sri Lanka but, like the man in the old joke, the closer he gets to it the further away it seems, and instead he winds up stuck in what appears to be his own "Orientalist" fantasy of Baghdad and its environs six hundred years ago, when Sinbad and the other so-called Arabian Nights were being composed from the scraps and orts of court and peasant life.

Behler finds this world to be a disorderly screen for his memories of ordinary life. No longer a young man, the whole progress of his life back home comes back to him in perfectly realized fragments, almost worthy of Sherwood Anderson, and we begin to realize that the novel is being staged around the age-old questioning of, what is more valuable--"home" or "away," the comfort of the familiar versus the thrill of the unseen.

The female characters leave a lot to be desired, but at this stage in the game, Barth is not even trying to pretend he has any feminist sympathies. His day in the sun happened years ago, but this testament of a man's "last voyage" has a bittersweet texture, like taking chocolate from an Iraqi baby. If you are enjoying the new bestseller by Umberto Eco, THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME OF QUEEN LOANA, you owe it to yourself to check out this predecessor, which employs many of the same devices although more clumsily.
“The high ground of traditional realism, brothers, is where I stand! Give me familiar, substantial stuff rocs and rhinoceri, ifrits and genies and flying carpets, such as we all drank in our mother’s milk and shall drink—Inshallah!—till our final swallow. Let no outlander imagine that such crazed fabrications as machines that mark the hour or roll themselves down the road will ever take the place of our homely Islamic realism, the very capital of narrative—from which, if I may say so, all interest is generated. … And may not the same be said for a story’s action? Speak to us from our everyday experience shipwreck and sole survivorhood, the retrieval of diamonds by means of mutton-sides and giant eagles, the artful deployment of turbans for aerial transport, buzzard dispersal, shore-to-ship signaling, and suicide as necessary. Above all, sing the loss of fortunes and their fortuitous re-doubling the very stuff of story!"

Sums it up.

The Last Voyage is filled with layers of irony and clever, tongue-in-cheek jokes. It’s definitely a showcase of narrative experimentation. I admired this book for its dizzying technical turns, but it never made the leap for me into anything more than a literary exercise, so I didn’t really relish it as much as others have.
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.
This is the book I wanted and it is in very acceptable condition, with one caveat--I didn't realize that what I was getting was a library discard and still had ALL the library "stuff" attached. Not only the card holder inside the cover and the (black marked-out) code tag on that same page, but the heavy taped library identification info on the outside. oh well, it is the book I wanted to replace one lost, or taken, from my bookshelf. It will work...
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.