The Centaur by John Updike

The Centaur Reviews

• 
  Jeffrey Keeten

  ”It must be terrible to know so much.”
  
  A pause.
  
  “It is,” my father said. “It’s hell.”
  
  
  
  Chiron depicted in Roman art. The Greeks always depicted him with human front legs. Chiron educated the children of the gods and goddesses so he is an apt mythological creature for George Caldwell to identify with.
  
  George Caldwell is a school teacher at Olinger High School. He struggles with teaching, not because he isn’t good at it, but because he wants it to be so much more. His mind is so expansive that it often slips the bonds of Earth. One of those moments when he is taken by a flight of fancy was with Vera Hummel, a teacher as well, and also a lovely woman desired by all. John Updike is able to show off his knowledge of mythological creatures as Caldwell morphs into Chiron, and she of course becomes Venus. They discuss the gods and goddesses while flirting outrageously with each other. She extorts him to help her.
  
  ”Come, Chiron, crack my maidenhead; it hampers my walking.”
  
  It is a good thing I wasn’t drinking coffee when I read that because it would have been spewed all over this book.
  
  The narrative switches between George and his son Peter. Peter is a student at the same high school his father teaches at. He adores his father, but at the same time his father is so exasperating. George is self-deprecating to a painful point, and as an extension of his own view of himself, he wears a ratty cap and a dilapidated coat that make him look more like a bum than a well educated teacher. Peter is afraid for his father because he seems so vulnerable, so inept at the most mundane things, so lost in thoughts that can never be solved. In a moment of frustration, he yells at his father.
  
  ”But there’s nobody else like you Daddy. There’s nobody else like you in the world.”
  
  The plot of the novel revolves around George and Peter trying to get home each day and encountering Herculean obstructions that keep them from arriving at their house in the country. George didn’t want to move to the country, but his wife yearned to be on the family farm. Some of George’s continuing issues with the car might have a lot to do with him never intending to own one. He prefered to live in town where he could walk everywhere he needed to be. After one of these thwarted attempts, they end up spending the night in the Hummel house. It proves to be an eye opening experience for Peter to have a day away from the chaos of their own household and have a glimpse at how normal people live. Vera truly becomes a magical goddess dispensing orange juice and bananas upon him like ambrosia.
  
  ”Intimations of Vera Hummel moved toward me from every corner of her house, every shadow, every curve of polished wood; she was a glimmer in the mirrors, a breath moving the curtains, a pollen on the nap of the arms of the chair I was rooted in.”
  
  The novel in many ways is brilliant, reflecting an author’s mind that is brimming with intelligence and convoluted thoughts, maybe the inspiration for the labyrinth of George’s own mind. Updike does occasionally veer off course leaving the reader in the middle of the road looking in all directions for the smoke plumes of the car crash. Easily forgiven when Updike writes understated gems like the paragraph below.
  
  ”I closed my eyes and relaxed into my warm groove. The blankets my body had heated became soft chains dragging me down; my mouth held a stale ambrosia lulling me to sleep again. The lemon-yellow wallpaper, whose small dark medallions peered out from the pattern with faces like frowning cats, remained printed, negatively in red, on my eyelids.”
  
  Peter becomes an artist. His father was a teacher. His grandfather was a priest. ”Priest, teacher, artist: the classic degeneration.” It did leave me wondering at the end of the book what exactly will the next generation of Caldwell’s be? Are they predestined to be teachers? Will they start the climb back to the priesthood?
  
  I identified with both characters.
  
  Less so with Peter as time marches me further and further away from those heady days of youth. His obsession with Penny Fogelman’s hot thighs; and yet, his fear of actually taking his clothes off in front of her were familiar counterweights from my own past. I was so skinny I thought any girl would think there was something wrong with me, like a bad case of ringworm or some wasting disease.
  
  George’s mind is bulging with information comparable to a crammed bus enroute to Jodhpur. He sees life as larger than it could possibly be. He rises so high on the wings of his thoughts that when he crashes, it proves to be a long fall back to Earth. He battles daily with the odious, student stroking, Supervising Principal Zimmerman, who besides caressing female students also tortures George with obtuse evaluations of his teaching style. The question that plagues George is the one that eventually plagues most of us...there has to be more?
  
  As the pendulum of time continues to duck walk me onward with my heels dragging and my hands grasping for purchase on anything to slow the motion forward, I too ask that question. It has become apparent to me that I can’t wait for some random act of the universe to send me on the proper path. The choice is really between accepting my fate, which some see as cowardly, but I see as yet another act of bravery, or I could pack up my paint kit and follow Gauguin’s footsteps to Tahiti.
  
  Ok, well, maybe not THAT.
  
  It does beg the question of what more is, and once we find and hogtie this mythical MORE, then what? It seems to me that most of us are just never supposed to be fulfilled. The thought of fulfillment is just depressing. It reminds me of the Matrix where they designed a world where everyone was happy and the citizens started committing suicide. We should achieve I think, but maybe not achieve too much. We always have to be left with something to dream about.
  
  
  
  That is quite the self-satisfied smirk on John’s face in 1960, but then he can probably pull it off because he probably is the smartest person in the room.
  
  I’m not really sure why people have quit reading John Updike. I could not put down this flawed, but wonderful book. I do hope that he does experience a resurgence of readers because there are writers in the next generation that would benefit from reading these eloquent and graceful sentences that Updike sprinkles liberally like a trail of emeralds through the texts of his books. I read this book to reconnect with his writing in anticipation of reading Updike by Adam Begley. The name of the author may be familiar to some. He is the son of Louis Begley, the writer that best carries the Updike torch forward in his own writing. However, he is 81, so someone else will soon have to shoulder the Updike legacy.
  
  I have recently, in my hubris, launched a blog which will host my book reviews, but it will also have so much more. For example, I recently wrote a movie review of Birdman. I plan to write about whatever strikes my fancy. I thought about calling it something like The Passionate Reader, but decided I am who I am.
  http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
• 
  Vit Babenco

  Somehow The Centaur is my most favourite John Updike’s novel – it is pristinely poetic and sparkling with the freshness of adolescence…
  And John Updike was the one who with his wondrous words turned adolescence into a miraculous saga.
  

  The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.

  
  Every child, in order to be ready to reside in the vast world, must be educated and there is no better educator than the centaur Chiron:
  

  The Arcadian sun was growing warmer. Birdsong encircling the clearing turned sluggish. Chiron felt in his blood the olive trees on the plain rejoice. In the cities, worshippers mounting the white temple steps would feel the marble hot on their unsandalled feet. He took his class for their lesson to the shade of a great chestnut tree that it was said Pelasgus himself had planted. The trunk was as thick around as a shepherd's cottage. The boys arranged themselves swaggeringly among the roots as if among the bodies of slain enemies; the girls more demurely sought postures of ease on areas of moss. Chiron inhaled; air like honey expanded the spaces of his chest; his students completed the centaur. They fleshed his wisdom with expectation. The wintry chaos of information within him, elicited into sunlight, was struck though with the young colors of optimism. Winter turned vernal.

  
  And it isn’t it great to have legendary Chiron as your father. Isn’t life beautiful even if there are some clouds on the horizon?
  

  Had the world been watching, it would have been startled, for my belly, as if pecked by a great bird, was dotted with red scabs the size of coins. Psoriasis. The very name of the allergy, so foreign, so twisty in the mouth, so apt to prompt stammering, intensified the humiliation. ‘Humiliation,’ ‘allergy’ – I never knew what to call it. It was not a disease, because I generated it out of myself. As an allergy, it was sensitive to almost everything: chocolate, potato chips, starch, sugar, frying grease, nervous excitement, dryness, darkness, pressure, enclosure, the temperate climate – allergic, in fact, to life itself.

  
  But anyway, everything is new, everything happens the first time and the world is calling…
  Adolescence is a magic season of life – it’s a fountainhead of knowledge, it's a myth and it's a legend and it's a gallant quest for love.
• 
  Barry Pierce

  In this modern retelling of ancient Greek myth (à la Joyce's Ulysses) Updike presents us with the famed myth of Chiron, the centaur. Set in late-40s small town America we have the stories of George Caldwell, a teacher in his 50s, and his son Peter, 15 years old and laden with psoriasis. The father's and son's narratives switch every second chapter with the father's narrative being in the third-person and the son's in first-person.
  
  The narratives that we are presented with can be read as coming-of-age stories. The son coming of age and facing the harsh reality of life and the father coming of age and facing the harsh reality of death. Updike weaves both lives seamlessly which demonstrates his deftness with prose. Not once was I bored with this novel. It harks back to the stories of the time from Salinger and Isherwood and the like. Readers with a penchant for Greek mythology and stories of post-war America will thoroughly enjoy this novel, as I did.
• 
  brian

  when updike croaked out edmund white wrote that the father/son sections of the centaur were his personal favorite of the dead man's writings. the rabbit cycle has gotta be updike's greatest work, the one that continues to grow with time, and the one that is more than the sum of its parts. but the book with the best parts?
  dunno, maybe white is right.
  
  the guy can pack a lot inside just a few sentences: "I had loved that tree; when I was a child there had been a swing attached to the limb that was just a scumble of almost-black in the picture. Looking at this streak of black, I relived the very swipe of my palette knife, one second of my life that in a remarkable way had held firm. It was this firmness, I think, this potential fixing of a few passing seconds, that attracted me, at the age of five, to art. For it is at about that age, isn't it, that it sinks in upon us that things do, if not die, certainly change, wiggle, slide, retreat, and, like the dabs of sunlight on the bricks under a grape arbor on a breezy June day, shuffle out of all identity."
• 
  Cosimo

  "Appesantito e stordito dalla propria morte, torpido e diafano come un predatore trasparente che trascini i propri tentacoli velenosi attraverso le pressioni adamantine delle profondità oceaniche, si sposta alle spalle degli spettatori e cerca suo figlio tra la folla".
  
  Updike si muove in questo testo nel segno dell'ironia fantastica e della sperimentazione creativa, accompagnando il lettore in un viaggio ai limiti della forma, in una narrazione che ha come centro l'introspezione e la ricerca di senso in un contesto di medietà moderna, nel mezzo di un'esistenza comica e profonda. Il centauro è uomo del cielo e della terra, la sua natura è duplice: così in questa bipolarità si muovono padre e figlio, professore e studente, in un universo provinciale talmente meraviglioso da apparire fittizio, inventato, irreale. Ma ecco la strabiliante abilità del narratore ancorarci alla realtà con un linguaggio esatto e concreto e con personaggi originali, pieni di spirito e vivi, in un terapeutico flusso di ombre e luci; egli fa rinascere questo universo scolastico come un mito, tramite un metodo letterario e simbolico in virtù del quale la realtà esplode simultaneamente al racconto, dal di dentro. Ed è solo America, paesaggio e sogno, commedia e dramma, riso e gioco e sole e sensazione: la scoperta di quella temibile assenza che a volte è la vita.
  
  "Il tuo sonno contiene innocenza come la notte contiene rugiada".
• 
  Nood-Lesse

  In medio stant virtus et umbelicus
  
  Mi sono chiesto più volte per quale motivo John Updike abbia un seguito scarso qui da noi. Su Anobii un gruppo di americanisti aveva dedicato schede autore e discussioni a tutti, perfino a Dan Peterson e Mike Bongiorno (è la mia solita esagerazione), ma Updike non aveva trovato posto (non è vero neanche questo, mi sono occorsi dieci minuti di link che non si aprivano ma poi ho trovato la scheda striminzita
  https://www.anobii.com/forum_thread?t... ). Luca Briasco nella prefazione scrive:
  
  C’è qualcosa di ombelicale nell’insistenza con la quale Updike si rifugia in un mondo banale, che non reca traccia delle violenze e dei conflitti che attraversano l’America del secondo Novecento se non in una versione depurata e ineluttabilmente media quando non mediocre; e di conseguenza, c’è qualcosa di narcisistico nei florilegi di stile, nella stupefacente finezza descrittiva, nei prodigi linguistici di cui l’autore dissemina ogni suo romanzo o racconto. Da queste accuse di medietà, di mancanza di profondità e di ambizione, non va esente neppure Il centauro…
  
  Lo scarso seguito potrebbe avere motivi analoghi a quelli per i quali una buona parte di spettatori non sopporta Ugo Fantozzi: non voler veder rappresentata e parodiata la propria mediocrità. Più avanti sempre Luca Brasco scrive:
  
  Una tendenza all’introspezione e un eccesso di autobiografismo che impedirebbero ad Updike di prendere di petto i grandi temi sociali dei quali un grande romanziere dovrebbe fare la propria bandiera
  
  Cercando il motivo per il quale non piace agli altri, potrei aver trovato quello per il quale piace a me: manca di grandi temi sociali, scrive per il gusto di scrivere, è spudorato e ombelicale (cerco di farmelo andar giù questo aggettivo, lo detesto, forse perché lo sento riferito più a me che a John). Updike ha scritto il suo capolavoro con il terzo episodio della saga di Harry Rabbit Angstrom, se siete anche solo leggermente ombelicali lo apprezzerete, se invece non potete fare a meno della ciccia e dei brufoli sociali, meglio che rimaniate sul blindo di Filippo Roth. Per apprezzare il Centauro non guasterebbe conoscere la mitologia greca ma anche il sistema solare, il cristianesimo, la secolarizzazione; Updike possiede una conoscenza dettagliata di svariati argomenti teorici e pratici, pare a suo agio con l’origine della specie e con quella del pignone. Quando scriveva Wikipedia ancora non esisteva, forse si documentava su l'Encyclopedia Americana. Questo libro è consigliato agli insegnanti, ai padri e ai figli: George (il padre) e Peter (il figlio che racconta) sono una strana coppia, fa quasi tenerezza il figlio che cerca di proteggere il genitore dai baratri di bontà dai quali è attratto. Gli anti fantozziani non sopporteranno il modo in cui George si sminuisce, il suo essere “esilarante e lagnoso” un tale che non farà mai la storia, ma la subirà, come la maggior parte di noi.
  
  Colonna sonora
  Doris Day - A Sentimental Journey
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUw12...
  
  
• 
  Katie

  This book is sadly underrated among Updike's oeuvre. I think it's his best literary accomplishment. The Centaur is both a distorted, modernized retelling of the myth of Chiron and a moving story of a father and son. The prose is dense and rich, heavy with classical illusion; this isn't the easiest read, but it's worth the work. Updike's erudition and his gorgeous way with a sentence are on display here to a degree unmatched by any of his other work.
• 
  Francesco

  il più bel romanzo di Updike e il suo capolavoro... acquistatelo (o prendetelo in biblioteca) e leggetelo...
  la lezione di astronomia da sola vale il romanzo
• 
  Gerald

  I read The Centaur in my senior year of high school. Rereading it now, I realize either that I cheated and didn't actually read it before I wrote the book report - or I'm just getting so old that I don't remember it at all. My book report was on its parallels with Greek mythology, which are numerous and complex. Could be I just thumbed through and wrote down all the names of the gods, then looked them up in the encyclopedia so I could make some kind of diagram about how their relationships fit together. I'm sure I got an A on the report. Did Ms. Kaiser suspect I'd faked it?
  
  Except the mythology doesn't have all that much to do with the story.
  
  The central metaphor is that Chiron, the noblest of all the centaurs, took pity on humankind. Prometheus had screwed up and given them fire, which they weren't supposed to have. And even though Zeus punished Prometheus, apparently that wasn't enough. Some other immortal would have to pay the price. So Chiron took a poisoned arrow, which not only made him lame but also proved to be fatal. Chiron's loss of immortality gave birth to the technology humans would eventually use to rival the gods.
  
  The Chiron of Updike's story is George Caldwell, a middle-aged high-school teacher in small-town Pennsylvania. Although Caldwell would seem to be the main character, a lot of the narration is by his teenaged son Peter. The lad loves his father but wishes the old man had a higher opinion of himself. George thinks he's a loser, even though he seems to be beloved by most of his students, even the ones who mock him mercilessly.
  
  The father-son relationship is the core of the book. Mother Cassie isn't much of a character at all, unless you sense the compassion between the lines. There isn't much mythology in it, except in bookend chapters that take us in and out. Updike seems to have done his homework and knows his Greek stories. But how those intertwine with the Caldwell family saga is obscure.
  
  Updike's legacy has been his Rabbit books, much like Roth's Zuckerman series (Updike came first). I sampled both, wasn't drawn to either. Too cynical, too bitter. Does anyone really care whether middle-class white men experience heartache and disappointment? (Sarcastic, rhetorical question. Please go ahead and comment.)
  
  I haven't read them all, but I suspect The Centaur might be John Updike's best book. Even he might admit it was all downhill from here.
• 
  Tatyana Naumova

  Очень непросто.
• 
  SARAH

  زندگی اونقدر کوتاهه که جایی برای دروغ گفتن باقی نمی‌مونه.
  جان اپدایک سنتائور
  رمان سنتائور، داستان جرج کالدول و پسرش پیتر را برای ما روایت می کند.داستانی از این پدر و پسر و عشق همراه با انزجار شان نسبت به هم در سه روز،رمان ۳۱۰ صفحه ای با ترجمه سهیل سمی روایتگر سه روز از زندگی جرج کالدول معلم فرسوده دبیرستان،که هر روز با ماشین قراضه و اوراق اش با پسرش به سمت دبیرستانی که در آن درس می‌دهد،روانه شده،و به عللی مجبور میشود،سه روز دور از خانه را با پسرش بگذراند.مانند تمام آثار آپدایک کتاب روی لحظه ها مانور می‌دهد،داستان نه پیچ اش عجیبی دارد نه افت و خیز غریبی ،درست مثل همه شخصیت هایی که این نویسنده مهارت غریبی در توصیف شان دارد،داستان روایت زندگی های سرشار از روزمرگی است و آدم هایی که تن به این مانداب متعفن روزمره دادند(زندگی هاشان) و به اصطلاح در نقش یک loser یک شکست خورده ،منفعلانه،ناخوشنود،تهی،به بودن شان ادامه می‌دهند.از جهاتی جرج و پیتر (پدر و پسر)من را به یاد تمام داستان های این چنینی می‌انداخته قبلا خوانده بودم، مثل جز از کل و جسپر ،مارتین ؛یا جاده اثر مک کارتی،هنر اپدایک توصیف لحظه است. اپدایک به جای آنکه در یک خط بگوید این پدر و پسر سوار ماشین شان شدند رفتند مدرسه،در ۳۰۰ صفحه سفر این دو را برای ما بسط می‌دهد. آنهم با توصیفات دقیق از جزئیات....بنابراین به جای اشارات مستقیم برای روایت با توصیف لحظه ها شخصیت و ویژگی هایی آن را برای ما می‌سازد و ما نیز با تمام وجودمان آنها را،تمام زوایا و پیچ شخصیت های داستان را درک میکنیم.روایت همچنین دارای مایه و تم اساطیری هم هست .و به تحلیل نمادین شیرون و شخصیت این موجود که معلم تمام خدایان هم بوده و فناناپذیر ، هم می‌پردازد.من اولین بار با رمان کوتاه از مزرعه عاشق آپدایک شدم.سنتائور رمانی خاص و خاص پسند است. رمانی که توصیف ها و زبان پیچیده نویسنده کمی حالت خلسه وار برای من داشت...چشمهایم روی سطور میدوید ولی نمی‌توانستم هم پای نویسنده صحنه را در ذهنم تجسم کنم،شرح جزئیاتی که رگباری تشریح میشد سبب شد از نویسنده عقب بمانم .در نهایت من هم مثل جرج تسلیم محض، منفعل فقط رمان را می‌خواندم و ادامه میدادم.انگار طلسمی در کار بود....از اپدایک باید بیش از این ها خواند و این امر مسلم است و باقی دیگر هیچ....
• 
  Paul

  An interesting novel which finds meaning in the mundane of everyday life; concerning George Caldwell and his son Peter, a boy in his mid teens. There are strong autobiographical elements. It is set in rural Pennsylvania, where Updike grew up. Updike's father was a schollteacher and like Peter in the book, Updike had psoriasis and loved art. Woven into all this is Greek mythology; hence the title. George is the centaur Chiron and all the other characters are have their mythological equivalents. The autocratic headmaster Zimmerman is Zeus (and has some of Zeus's sexual mores too), but Updike keeps the mythological ties quite understated most of the time.
  The real strength of the novel is its analysis of the father/son relationship and how it changes during the teenage years. George is essentially a decent bloke, who is struggling to stay on top of his life and work. He believes he may be dying and feels he is a failure as a teacher and a father. The novel spans three or so days when George and Peter and prevented from returning to their rural home and have to stay in town.
  Peter travels that inevitable journey from feeling his father is immortal and knows everything to the awful realisation that he is fallible and mortal; and even more worrying his father is also embarrassing! (I think most of us have been there). The mythological links here become a little tenuous. Chiron is immortal and gives up his mortality to save Prometheus; Peter can be seen as Prometheus, but other critics have argued George is both Chiron and Prometheus and I think this is more likely. The move in the novel is from the idealised immortal father to the mortal embarrassing one and there are some very typical father/teenage son exchanges.
  I know Updike has been accused of sexism and of concentrating on marraige and infidelity, but in this book the focus is on men: sons and fathers and Updike does this rather well because it made me think about my relationship with my father.
  The writing is accomplished and the description beautiful at times. All in all an enjoyable read.
• 
  Moira

  It wasn't a bar bet, exactly, but one night not long ago I made a few sweeping (and whiskey-fueled) statements about the irrelevance and sexism of mid-century white dude novelists like Roth, Cheever, and Updike that quite unexpectedly garnered such a thoughtful, knowledgable defense of Updike from my friend Dave that the only possible way I saw to save face was to immediately promise to read the Updike novel of his choosing. (
  Jodi was there, she saw it go down.) Which is how I came to The Centaur.
  
  I didn't love it. I didn't even much like it, even as I admire the craft with which it was made. In the end, my main takeaway was a kind of grudging respect for just how clearly this book does not give one single fuck about me. If Updike wrote for anyone, I can only imagine that it was a reader just like him - a white, highly educated, wealthy, East Coast heterosexual man who loves boobs, and latin, who didn't know how to connect with his father, and who believes the body a shoddily-made prison for a soul as refined as his.
  
  More than a few images from this novel will stick with me, but I am still glad Updike and his kind no longer rule the literary world.
  
• 
  J. Aleksandr Wootton

  Lit-fic is really not my genre. Lit-fic books often feel as if they're trying too hard to be meaningful and authentic, yet without standing for anything or having any particular aim beyond producing a profundity of feels in the reader. (The film Stranger Than Fiction did a great job playing with the prototypical lit-fic playbook). But I keep trying various famous titles and authors who are felt to be "important," either critically or popularly. The Centaur was my first Updike.
  
  And it won't be the last. The writing is excellent; the composition, masterful; the elevation of the ordinary to the mythic, the grounding of the mythic in the ordinary, evinces a near-perfect grasp of myth itself. In a sense, The Centaur is a robust outworking in prosy fiction of Patrick Kavanaugh's poem Epic, published a few years before:
  
  I have lived in important places, times
  When great events were decided; who owned
  That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land
  Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
  I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul!’
  And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
  Step the plot defying blue cast-steel –
  ‘Here is the march along these iron stones’
  That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
  Was more important? I inclined
  To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
  Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
  He said: I made the Iliad from such
  A local row. Gods make their own importance.
• 
  Patrizia Galli

  Le pagine che narrano di 3 giorni di vita di George Caldwell, un insegnante depresso e disilluso dalla vita, si alternano a quelle dedicate a Chirone, un centauro immortale che, a causa di una ferita inferta da una freccia avvelenata ad un ginocchio che gli procurava indicibili sofferenze, scelse di espiare le colpe di Prometeo, scelse la morte per mettere fine al suo dolore. E’ fin troppo chiaro, quindi, che George è un moderno Chirone, un uomo in una posizione precaria all’interno della scuola in cui lavora, poco considerato dai colleghi, dedito al vittimismo e all’adulazione altrui, continuamente pervaso da un senso di sconfitta, tanto da credere che non sarebbe sopravvissuto oltre i cinquant’anni di vita.

  
  Updike ci racconta di un uomo solo, triste, nel mezzo della sua vita, incapace di scegliere un destino migliore per sé quando ne aveva l’occasione, tanto che lo sentiamo spesso ripetere tra le pagine che insegnare è l’unico mestiere capace di fare, nonostante sia evidente che lo odi con tutto se stesso. Nella prefazione del libro leggiamo che il soggetto di elezione di Updike sono «le classi medie americane protestanti che vivono in piccole cittadine. Mi piace tutto ciò che è in mezzo, perché è nel mezzo che gli estremi si scontrano e l’ambiguità rega sovrana». E George Caldwell è l’incarnazione dell’ambiguità, un uomo assolutamente insoddisfatto, che cerca negli altri conferme che non avrà mai, che nemmeno si fida della buone notizie (vedi il medico, quando gli comunica che i raggi X hanno dato esito negativo, lui sta benissimo), che rimane sempre in bilico tra comicità e tragedia, tra vita e morte: perché nonostante dica il contrario George cerca la morte, la lambisce, la invoca in più parti del racconto, fino a trovarla alla fine del romanzo, dove il suo personaggio di sovrappone per l’ultima volta alla leggenda di Chirone, quando sceglie di accettarla con tutto se stesso. La sua voglia di morte, però, non è tanto una ricerca del suicidio, quanto piuttosto una pervasiva sensazione di aver fallito nella vita su tutti i fronti, di essere sopravvissuto alla sua inutilità, di non aver mai trovato il suo posto nel mondo. Updike è bravissimo in questo, nel descriverci i pensieri che plasmano il carattere di George e, di conseguenza, il suo rapporto con suo figlio Peter. Peter è quasi soggiogato dalla travolgente disperazione del padre, dalle sue paure. I suoi giorni sono scanditi dalla psoriasi, i cui segni si sforza di tenere nascosti, e dallo stato di costante vergogna e di intensa vulnerabilità provocata soprattutto dalle implacabili autocritiche e dalle dichiarazioni di inettitudine di suo padre. Peter è combattuto tra il desidero di far star bene suo padre e il non considerarlo ridicolo, a causa delle sue imbarazzanti uscite con compagni di scuola e professori.
  Un romanzo bello e intenso, tragicomico e toccante. Però no, io il National Book Aword l’avrei comunque assegnato a V. di Thomas Pynchon nel 1964 😊
  
• 
  Heather

  One of the most beautiful things I've ever read was from this book:
  
  "My vast canvases- so oddly expensive as raw materials, so oddly worthless transmuted into art- with sharp rectangular shoulders hulk into silhouette against the light. Your breathing keeps time with the slow rose. Your solemn mouth has relaxed in sleep and the upper lip displays the little extra racial button of fat like a bruise blister. Your sleep contains innocence as the night contains dew. Listen: I love you, love your prim bruised mouth whose corners compress morally when you are awake and scolding me, love your burnt skin ceaselessly forgiving mine, love the centuries of being humbled held in the lilac patina of your palms. I love the tulip-stem stance of your throat. When you stand before the stove you make, all unconscious, undulant motions with the upper half of your body like a drinking hen. When you walk naked toward the bed your feet toe in as if your ankles were manacled to those of someone behind you. When we make love sometimes you sigh my name and I feel radically confirmed. I am glad I have met you, glad, proud, glad; I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoons, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs."
• 
  Kent Winward

  Updike certainly has a unique prose style that is enjoyable. The father/son interchange fell flat, in part it felt because of the attempt to tie the story into a broader mythological realm. Maybe it worked better back in the day, but the story seventy years in the past didn't seem to have the same universality as the mythology upon which it was loosely based.
• 
  Megan

  This book tells the story of three days in the lives of a man and his son, living in rural Pennsylvania in the early 50s. The dad is a teacher at his son's school, and is convinced he is going to die. Soon. He also likens himself to the mythological beast Chiron, the centaur, and parts of the book are told from this point of view. The son is a typical teenager, somewhat embarrassed by and for his father, and never feeling like he quite gets the attention he feels he deserves. He also feels protective of his father, that his father is far too naive and all to ready to just move on to take care of things as "normal" people do.
  
  If you find this description of the book interesting, then just read it again instead of reading the book. The storytelling is disjointed and confusing, with strange juxtapositions between the mythological world and the real world, and between past, present and future. The characters were interesting and well-developed, and I could really feel for Peter and his angst. But the mythology was unnecessary, and the subordinate characters were mostly just annoying wallpaper. That this book won the National Book Award just proves that those who do the judging have no idea what a good book actually is.
• 
  Andrey zz

  Грандиозно, но не все понятно.
  
  И круто, что в США есть холодильники и бананы в 1947 году
• 
  Stephen

  The Centaur is a rich, thought-provoking novel worth reading and rereading. Having read it just now for at least the third time (including before I got on Goodreads), I still admire it for its exploration of the teacher/student relationship and the father/son relationship, the setting in late-1940s Pennsylvania, and the beautiful turns of phrase--even if I still do not understand everything that is going on!
  
  Reading this novel as a teacher and as a father is a moving experience. As a high-school science teacher, George Caldwell is self-deprecating to a fault, but there is a lot here that teachers would find familiar. For example, Caldwell has an impromptu evaluation by his principal at the worst possible time, when everything is out of control. At another point, Caldwell expresses the sense of futility in teaching: "That's what you learn in teaching; people forget everything you tell 'em. I look at those dumb blank faces every day and it reminds me of death. You fall through those kids' heads without a trace" (92). And there's also this insight as counterpoise: "for what is a teacher but a student grown old?" (93). Later, when Caldwell experiences pain at the hands of a former student who has become a dentist, he "recognizes the pain branching in his head as a consequence of some failing in his own teaching, a failure somewhere to inculcate in this struggling soul consideration and patience; and accepts it as such" (217). George is an incredibly vivid character--he is so full of life, so funny and engaging with people, it's difficult to believe that he could die.
  
  Caldwell's son, Peter, who has his father as his science teacher, is narrating sections of the novel years later, working as an artist and living in New York City. He addresses his narration to his lover, and makes a big deal about how she is black. I'm not sure why her race is so significant to Peter or to the novel overall, but it would make for good discussion among a reading group. Anyway, Peter reflects on his father's and grandfather's callings in relation to his own: "Priest, teacher, artist: the classic degeneration" (269). I've always found that pithy quote about "the classic degeneration" curious. What's "degenerate" about being an artist instead of a teacher or a pastor? Art can go places, can move people, in ways that preaching or teaching can't. Perhaps Peter has inherited his father's self-deprecating manner--or perhaps he is reflecting what he thinks others from his hometown must be saying about him? Updike himself was an artist (he made his fame as a writer, and he also had formal training in visual art) and his father was a teacher; so much of this novel, including the setting (Alton=Reading; Olinger=Shillington; Firetown=Plowville) is autobiographical.
  
  Updike's writing is beautiful. Some descriptions have stuck with me all these years, like the description of a snow shower: "Those who step outside discover that it is snowing. This discovery is ever surprising, that Heaven can so prettily condescend" (238). The idea of heaven coming to earth resonates deeply with the Greco-Roman mythology as well as with the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation--far from being degenerate, Updike's verbal artistry beautifully illustrates a Christian mystery.
  
  As much as I love this novel, I have some critiques--but they may just flow from my own limitations or lack of understanding. Though my knowledge of Greco-Roman mythology has increased over the years, as I've been teaching classical literature, I'm not sold on the mythological overlay, which comes across to me as forced or unnecessary. How much horse-imagery do we need to show us that George is the mythical Chiron the Centaur? Also, in some parts of the novel, it's unclear whose point of view is narrating--some sort of super-omniscient voice with access to private conversations that neither Peter nor his father could have heard, like between the principal (Zimmerman) and the school board member (Mrs. Herzog) with whom he is having an affair.
  
  I'm also uncertain about what actually happens in the end. Are we to conclude that George does, in fact, die at the end (as Chiron dies for Prometheus)? George's obituary is printed in the very middle chapter of the novel (Chapter 5 of 9). But is that obituary only in George's imagination, or does he actually die within the novel, at the age of 50? George had been obsessing about his physical symptoms and talking about death throughout the novel, only to learn out at the end that the X-ray does NOT show signs of impending death--but then he somehow dies anyway? Does he die digging his car out of the snow, just when he's accepted the idea that he would go on living (or slowly pouring out his life for his students and his family) for a while?
  
  Despite my confusion, it's still a richly rewarding novel.
• 
  Judy

  I thought I was done with Greece for a while but it turned out, not exactly. The Centaur is John Updike's third novel, it won the National Book Award in 1964, and is a loose retelling of the Greek myth of Chiron, noblest of all Centaurs.
  
  George Caldwell is Chiron. It is 1947 and George is unhappily though gratefully employed as a high school teacher in the small Pennsylvania town where some of Updike's novels are set. The story takes place over a few winter days in the life of George, his wife and his son.
  
  In the myth, Chiron was wounded by a poison arrow. The wound never healed, the pain never lessened. As a Centaur he was immortal but, longing for death, he traded his immortality as atonement for Prometheus, who defied the gods by stealing fire and giving it to mankind. Prometheus plays a large part in Circe, the novel I read a few weeks ago.
  
  This novel probably follows the myth more closely than I was willing to work for. I was content to enjoy Updike's tale while I noted that sometimes George appeared as a Centaur but most times as a man. He consistently appeared as an emotionally wounded man.
  
  The chapters alternate between George and the first person voice of his teenage son. That son has dreams of being a painter, is frustrated beyond endurance by his father, and yet tries to understand him.
  
  I love John Updike's writing. Whether in description, dialogue or action, every word contributes to creating his tale. Therefore, even though the connection to the myth was tenuous for me, I was thoroughly absorbed in this novel about a husband and father who knew he was flawed but gave all he had to his family.
• 
  Artem Huletski

  Сложно описать впечатление, которое производит "Кентавр". Не могу оторвать взгляд от лукавого прищура Апдайка. Как будто за фотографией скрыватся лошадиное тело, а сам автор в следующую минуту развернётся и уйдёт, помахивая хвостом. Отмечу прекрасное воображение автора и изобилие стилистических приёмов.
• 
  Moeen

  لذتِ مزمزه‌کردنِ یک شاهکار
• 
  Carol Storm

  Tons of easy sentimentality and very little real drama. The "suffering, heroic dad" is a lot less memorable than the brutal, Harvey Weinstein lechery of the high school principal -- which Updike seems to accept as part of the natural order of things.
• 
  Miguel Azevedo

  Shockingly… no centaurs.
• 
  Steve Petherbridge

  Since reading the biography of John Updike, "Updike By Adam Begley", earlier in the month, this was a gap in the writer's work that I had not read. Reading it now, I can appreciate the obvious biographical nature of the novel. Names of places and characters have been changed, but, there is no doubting that this is Updike writing of his own family. He gives a graphic account of the conflict in gifts between his articulate self and, in particular, his inarticulate Dad. His father is totally lacking in self-confidence and self-esteem, pandering to his inadequate boss and acquaintances alike. He is a man of unrealised ambition, a man who is unhappy in himself. This is underwritten by hypochondria and a degree of paranoia. Updike creates within the mindset of his reader a feeling of frustration with the father.
  
  In The Centaur (1963), George Caldwell, the father, is afraid of his cancer and does not have any religious faith. The Centaur, published in 1963 won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. George Caldwell, a school teacher, and his son Peter, live outside of Alton (i.e., Reading), Pennsylvania. The novel explores the relationship between the depressive Caldwell and his resultantly anxious son. George has largely given up on life and is treading water, but, not without negatively affecting Peter; what glory he knew, as a football player and soldier in World War I, has passed. He feels put upon by the school's principal, Zimmerman, and he views his students as hapless and uninterested in anything he has to teach them. Peter, meanwhile, is bright, a thinker and a budding aesthete who idolizes Vermeer and dreams of becoming a painter in a big city, like New York. He has no friends his age, bar Penny his casual girlfriend, and regularly worries that she and his peers might detect his psoriasis, which, besides sapping his confidence, stains his skin and flecks his clothes every season but summer. He dreams of migrating to Florida. In fact, one thing George and Peter share is the desire to get out, to escape their hometown, which is a major theme of the aforementioned biography. This masculine desire for escape also appears in Updike's famed "Rabbit" novels. Similarly, the novel's image of Peter's mother alone on an unfarmed farm, her dream home and refuge from her youth, is one we later see in Updike's 1965 novel Of the Farm.
  
  Quotation from a review:
  
  "Like James Joyce in Ulysses, Updike drew on the myths of antiquity in an attempt to turn a modern and common scene into something more profound, a meditation on life and man's relationship to nature and eternity. George is both the Centaur Chiron and Prometheus (some readers might see George's son Peter as Prometheus), Mr. Hummel, the automobile mechanic, is Hephaestus (AKA Vulcan); and so forth. The novel's structure is unusual; the narrative shifts from present day (late 1940s) to retrospective (early 1960s), from describing the characters as George, Vera, and the rest, to the Centaur, Venus, and so forth. It also is punctuated with a feverish dream scene and a newspaper obituary of George. Near the end of the book, Updike includes two untranslated Greek sentences. Their translation is as follows:
  
  “ Having an incurable wound, he delivered himself into the cave. Wanting, and being unable, to have an end, because he was immortal, [then with] Prometheus offering himself to Zeus to become immortal for him, thus he died. ”
  This quote is from Bibliotheca 2.5.4, and describes the death of Chiron.
  
  The character of Peter is similar to Updike himself; both had schoolteacher fathers, lived in rural Pennsylvania, were passionate about painting, and suffered from psoriasis.
  
  To quote from Amazon, "In a small Pennsylvania town in the late 1940s, schoolteacher George Caldwell yearns to find some meaning in his life. Alone with his teenage son for three days in a blizzard, Caldwell sees his son grow and change as he himself begins to lost touch with his life. Interwoven with the myth of Chiron, the noblest centaur, and his own relationship to Prometheus, The Centaur is one of John Updike's most brilliant and unusual novels."
  
  I am glad to have read the book now rather than earlier as my understanding of the novel is deeper having read the recent biography and lends much background to John Updike the author. My plugging the gaps in my unread parts of his work has started here and will continue! There is never any doubting the quality of the output.
  
• 
  Andrea Muraro

  "Chirone inspirò; l'aria come miele espanse la sua cavità toracica. Il centauro si sentiva completato dai suoi allievi. Infiammavano d'aspettativa la sua sapienza. Il freddo caos di nozioni dentro di lui, tutto al sole, veniva trapassato dai colori giovanili dell'ottimismo."
  
  Ci sono tanti romanzi sulla scuola e sugli insegnanti come protagonisti e spesso diventano banali nel momento in cui emerge quel lato eroico (e stucchevole) del docente come colui che salva ragazzi sbandati dall'ignoranza e dalla perdizione. E invece John Updike costruisce un romanzo incentrato su un insegnante, George Caldwell, poco rispettato, scontento di sè, quasi un inetto, lamentoso e ipocondriaco.
  Il titolo fa riferimento al mito di Chirone, il centauro-insegnante, il centauro colto ed esperto di scienze e astronomia che, ferito da una freccia avvelenata durante una battaglia, è destinato per l'eternità a soffrire di atroci dolori finché non scambierà con Prometeo la propria immortalità. Da un lato, dunque, Updike sostituisce Chirone con Caldwell, in una sorta i riscrittura in chiave moderna del mito; dall'altro, Caldwell stesso sembra vagare con la sua mente in un mondo di immedesimazione, come se il suo interesse per le scienze lo avesse fatto perdere nell'infinito microcosmo e nell'infinito macrocosmo, dove mito e presente si mescolano con un comune denominatore: la sofferenza. Se Chirone tuttavia trova soddisfazione nei suoi allievi, così non avviene per George, che, pur avendo una moglie e un figlio a lui attaccatissimi, non riesce ad evitare di autocommiserarsi e di trovare ragioni per evidenziare il suo senso di nullità.
  Chi legge questo romanzo trova una scrittura di altissima qualità e soprattutto quasi un manuale di descrizione e aggettivazione. Updike è, già da questo primo suo romanzo che leggo, uno degli scrittori che più mi hanno stimolato, per l'accuratezza nella costruzione sintattica e per l'attenzione al dettaglio.