Richard ford the sportswriter pdf

Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to fiction, novels lovers. Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. Great book, The Sportswriter pdf is enough to raise the goose bumps alone. Old School. Tobias Wolff. Cormac McCarthy. All the Little Live Things. Wallace Stegner. A Slipping-Down Life.

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To redeem, copy and paste the code during the checkout process. See Account Overview. Your account has been created. Upload book purchases, access your personalized book recommendations, and more from here. GOT IT. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — The Sportswriter by Richard Ford.

As a sportswriter, Frank Bascombe makes his living studying people--men, mostly--who live entirely within themselves. This is a condition that Frank himself aspires to.

But at thirty-eight, he suffers from incurable dreaminess, occasional pounding of the heart, and the not-too-distant losses of a career, a son, and a marriage.

In the course of the Easter week in which Ford As a sportswriter, Frank Bascombe makes his living studying people--men, mostly--who live entirely within themselves. In the course of the Easter week in which Ford's moving novel transpires, Bascombe will end up losing the remnants of his familiar life, though with his spirits still soaring.

Get A Copy. Paperback , pages. Published June 13th by Vintage Books first published March More Details Original Title. Frank Bascombe 1. Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about The Sportswriter , please sign up. Lists with This Book.

Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of The Sportswriter. Sep 20, Glenn Russell rated it it was amazing. What I found particularly disturbing about the first-person narrator and main character, Frank Bascombe, was the way Frank would always project motives, backgrounds, ideas and futures onto all the people he encountered -- family, friends, strangers.

Frank even layered his categories onto neighborhoods, towns, cities, regions and countries. It was a kind of poison. The other disturbing thing about Frank was the way he would always tell you, the reader, that what he said to people was not what he really felt or what he really thought.

In other words, Frank was incapable of saying what he meant or meaning what he said. Talk about living in a kind of hell. What a commentary on modern life. Frank Bascombe as a modern day Babbitt, incapable of change. To me, this sounds like a life sentence. View all 24 comments. May 05, Jaline rated it it was amazing Shelves: completed.

This is a deeply introspective book. I felt an empathy with his character and many of the sad things he had experienced. I felt secure in the knowledge that he had done something of note: he wrote a book of short stories that was picked up by a Producer in Hollywood and gave him and his then-wife a nice start when he was just 24 or In his ruminations, it is difficult to tell exactly when I began to see some subtle discrepancies in his thought patterns.

It is hard to say when this began because for the most part he avoids the first 20 or so years of his life altogether. When did Frank Bascombe begin to spend most of his life in the passenger seat while life and other people steered and had their foot on the gas pedal?

When did he begin to obfuscate many incidents in his life? When did he begin the process of projecting his own thinking and desires onto other people? When did he begin to skip reality and skew it to his own purposes? Now that his 39th birthday is just around the corner, what is it he is seeking and does he have the complete honesty necessary for his contemplations to bear any fruit worth biting into? Frank Bascombe is a mass of contradictions. He claims to want intimacy, yet he flees from it or sabotages intimate relationships so the other person flees in self-preservation.

He wants to be seen as helpful and kind — enraptured by the mysteries of life to the degree that he turns everything into a mystery. Other times, confronted by less ethereal mysteries, the hard and gritty mysteries, he puts his own stamp on them — always slightly off-kilter like a sailboat struggling to right itself on a stormy sea.

He finds family members there from the Bascombe side of his family and that is where we leave him. For now. View all 59 comments. Nov 01, Will Byrnes rated it really liked it. He just never got around to writing another, veering off into the world of sportswriting. He is divorced, with one child having died. His girlfriend is clearly inappropriate for him and that ends as well. A sort-of friend comes out and on to him, ending badly. We see his semester as a teacher and the complications that ensue.

The above really tells nothing about the book. Much resonated. It is not an action adventure tale, but things do happen, dramatic on an individual scale, if not a global one. It is about expectations of life and of ourselves. Not a quick read, but very good stuff. P 24 All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life.

P 24 My own history I think of as a postcard with changing scenes on one side but no particular or memorable messages on the back. P 27 It may be just the fate of boys whose fathers die young never to be young—officially—ourselves; youth being just a brief dream, a prelude of no particular lasting moment before actual life begins.

Only I stopped at the wrong time. View all 3 comments. Not much happens. View all 47 comments. Dec 08, Duane rated it it was amazing Shelves: book-challenge , american-classics , rated-books , 5-star-books , reviewed-books , guardian Frank Bascombe, he is the sportswriter, and he is the first-person narrator of this novel which takes a slanted and sometimes brutal look at the failings of a 20th century American family, especially of the father and husband, Frank himself.

We learn early in the story that Frank is not a happy person, and with good reason most of us would agree. He is divorced, but still living in the family's suburban home in New Jersey. He has three children; one of them, a son, has died. And his dreams of be Frank Bascombe, he is the sportswriter, and he is the first-person narrator of this novel which takes a slanted and sometimes brutal look at the failings of a 20th century American family, especially of the father and husband, Frank himself.

And his dreams of being a novelist have been abandoned and he has turned to writing sports for a national magazine. Honestly, Frank is not a very likable guy. He's not a bad guy, he's just that guy you want to grab and shake and say, snap out of it Frank.

But alas, that never happens. So what makes this a five star book, one that many consider one of the best of the 20th century? It's quite simply the writing. What Richard Ford does here is what John Williams does in Stoner , what Philip Roth does in American Pastoral ; he transforms the mundane, the everyday events of life, into a work of art.

You may not like Frank Bascombe when you are finished, but you will know him, and you will feel for him, and you may even recognize something of yourself in him. View all 6 comments. Nov 27, Robin rated it it was ok Shelves: , american , literary-fiction. Most people who read my reviews know I have great admiration for John Updike's work.

I don't mind a good "mid-last-century man who misbehaves" story, written by a literary god. In fact, I can't seem to stay away from those for long at all. So it's natural that I picked up Richard Ford's novel. He, like Updike, won the Pulitzer Prize. He, like Updike, wrote about men who misbehave. He, like Updike, said pretty fucked up things from time to time. So why the middling rating, you might wonder?

Well, fr Most people who read my reviews know I have great admiration for John Updike's work. Well, from the onset, I felt the spectre of Updike looming and he casts a long shadow. Ford's protagonist finds comfort in writing about sports.

Rabbit's "good old days" are when he played sports basketball, in particular. Ford's protagonist is unfaithful to his wife. In the dictionary under unfaithful, there is a picture of Rabbit Angstrom. Ford's protagonist has suffered the loss of a child.

Ditto for Rabbit. And, Ford's protagonist suffers the suburban malaise that has afflicted Rabbit since the s. So, very, very similar in theme and plot. So much so, I can't help but make further comparisons. Where I was sympathetic with flawed Rabbit even found him relatable , I actively disliked Frank Bascombe.

Rabbit knows he's a mess. Frank Bascombe, on the other hand, seems to have it all figured out, making wise, declarative statements about life that had me rolling my eyes. He's so unlikable! He muses about "hundred dollar whores" more times than I can count. He refers to his former wife as nothing more than "X" - for what possible purpose? Now, I know that Rabbit says some god-awful things too. Ford didn't beguile me in the same way.

I found his style so deeply introspective I got a neck-ache from all the navel gazing. Little "happens" in this book that spans one Easter weekend. But you sure get to know every thought that crosses Frank Bascombe's mind. Also, the dialogue is surprisingly bad! Characters speak each other's name in almost every single line of dialogue. I found it really distracting. I need to know what you think. But describing someone as "a bony African with an austere face, almost certain the kind to have a long, aboriginal penis" just couldn't possibly be okay, even in !

You knew I had to include that quote, didn't you? Maybe though, it's not Ford's fault at all. I mean, lots of lovely readers I know and respect see plenty to appreciate in these pages. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that it's Updike's fault. He ruined me for all other misbehaving men.

View all 60 comments. Feb 02, Wendy rated it it was ok. The Sportswriter started out really strong for me - seemed thoughtful and familiar and American, a bit like Stegner's Crossing to Safety. But after a while, say about pages, I stopped finding the character thoughtful and subtle and started thinking he was kind of a boorish self-serving windbag.

It didn't help that I'd rather have spent more time with his ex wife and children, who seemed charming, funny and smart, than his ditzy and unappealing girlfriend or his sadsack friends. I think I als The Sportswriter started out really strong for me - seemed thoughtful and familiar and American, a bit like Stegner's Crossing to Safety. I think I also didn't believe him that the New Jersey suburbs were the real stuff of life, as he thought. I found myself wishing that he'd shut the hell up already.

Maybe all of this was sort of the point, but I felt like, well, I knew all that already. View all 13 comments. Great writing!!! Slow story. View 2 comments. Aug 27, Alex rated it it was ok Shelves: Did you hear the one about the middle-aged white guy who has a mid-life crisis? You did! The world is brimful of middle-aged white guys having midlife crises. Describing women tits-first? Oh man, check this one out: he actually does the fruit thing! Extreme solipsism? And will there be hard-won wisdom?

Boy howdy, will there! The weird thing is how much of his hard-won wisdom is nonsense. Has he even read Shirley Jackson? Almost certainly not - The truth of most things turned out to be waiting just over the edge of worried thought. Well, Frank ambles through this book, dropping his questionable pearls. The abdication of agency. The book is, in fact, more about sportswriting than I thought it would be.

I thought it would be a metaphor? This is too bad, given my complete lack of interest in sports or sportswriting. Instead of facing tragedy, Frank has awkward conversations with other sad middle-aged men about their stunted lives.

He is casually racist see Appendix B, and it was not okay to say "Negro" or "colored" in , let me assure you. He has an affair with a younger woman. She was plump with large, white teeth and a perfectly pie-shaped face. It's just disembodied legs. What does it even have to do with anything? View all 8 comments. Jul 18, Lyn rated it really liked it. This takes a long way to get where its going; however the last third of the book is quite good.

Inconsistent and with too frequently one dimensional dialogue, however when it is good, it is very good, reminding the reader of Phillip Roth or John Cheever.

Actually, and this is a stretch, this could be a modern, more sympathetic retelling of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and there are some hints to indicate this is where Ford was coming from. Ford's protagonist Frank Bascombe is an existential wr This takes a long way to get where its going; however the last third of the book is quite good.

Ford's protagonist Frank Bascombe is an existential wreck and deals with life as it comes to him, not having given up, but surviving. Ford would win the Pulitzer prize for the follow up to this work, 's Independence Day , and his talent is evident. View all 4 comments. Dec 31, Lawyer rated it really liked it Recommends it for: Folks who don't mind good writing about a guy you don't like. Shelves: 20th-century , loss , on-the-southern-literary-trail , marriage , time-best-novel , group-read , , family , love , divorce.

I am a sportswriter. For the past fourteen years I have lived here at 19 Hoving Road, Haddam, New Jersey, in a large Tudor house bought when a book of short stories I wrote sold to a movie producer for a lot of money, and seemed to set my wife and me and our three children--two of whom were not even born yet--up for a good life.

Just exactly what that good life was--the one I expected--I cannot tell you now exactly, though I wouldn't say it has not come to pass, only that much has come in between. I am no longer married to X, for instance. The child we had when everything was starting has died, though there are two others, as I mentioned, who are alive and wonderful children. And, although Ford writes beautifully, and paints characters in crystal clarity, Frank Bascombe is not a protagonist that is easy to like, much less love.

Critics have described Bascombe as heroic and a decent man. Either I read a different book, or my dictionary has become outdated. The first hint of Bascombe's revelations to come is calling his former wife "X. One could trace the disintegration of the Bascombe marriage back to the death of their first born son, Ralph, who died of Reyes syndrome.

How many marriages have evaporated following the death of a child? Yet, no blame is cast between the two of them. There is no question as to which parent gave Ralph aspirin while running a fever.

It simply occurred.