Wish You Were Here

Onvan : Wish You Were Here - Nevisande : Graham Swift - ISBN : 330535838 - ISBN13 : 9780330535830 - Dar 352 Safhe - Saal e Chap : 2011

"Wish you were here". An old chestnut, but oh, it can be so painfully heartfelt. I immediately think of the great Pink Floyd song: youtu/DPL_SV3n7IUAnd did they get you to tradeYour heros for ghosts?Hot ashes for trees?Hot air for a cool breeze?Cold comfort for change?And did you exchangeA walk on part in the warFor a lead role in a cage?And then there's the epigraph,Are these things done on Albion’s shore? William Blake: ‘A Little Boy Lost’Here is the complete paragraph, And burned him in [...]

Description: On an autumn day in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, Jack Luxton, former Devon farmer and now the proprietor of a seaside caravan park, receives the news that his soldier brother Tom, has been killed in Iraq. For Jack and his wife Ellie this will have a potentially catastrophic impact. For Jack in particular it means a crucial journey.Opening: THERE IS NO END to madness, Jack thinks, once it takes hold. Hadn't those experts said it could take years before it flared up in human beings? So [...]

A Marriage, several Deaths, a Soldier, and the Dream of Palm Trees.This is the best book I’ve read so far in 2012. Swift presents an intricacy of loyalties, emotions, and attachments between a boy and a girl who grew up together outside Devon, England. Their families had adjoining dairy farms that barely scraped by during the years of animal diseases that were feared to infect people. The farmers were forced to kill many seemingly healthy animals as a preventative. Many farmers were forced out [...]

I've liked Swift's short stories very much in the past, finding them told with a masterly reticence and economy (eg "Seraglio"). I was disappointed in this novel because it showed just the opposite qualities.In the first place it's "writerly" in the wrong way; it shows a lot of fancy writerly tics that in my view just get in the way of a good story (not that there is one, in this case). I can see why he uses tricksy narrative methods like a lot of flashing back and forward, changing viewpoints e [...]

I’ve read a couple of books by Graham Swift: I discovered his Last Orders when it won the Booker (see my review at The Complete Booker) and I read and enjoyed Waterland with one of my online book groups. (It’s on the 1001 Books I Must Read list too). On the strength of that, I bought Tomorrow for the TBR and some Op Shop finds as well : The Sweet Shop Owner and Ever After.So having established my credentials as an enthusiast, I’m not best pleased about having to admit that Wish You Were He [...]

I found this a highly moving, intelligent novel and I hope I can do it a bit of justice in my review. In this novel Graham Swift writes movingly about families and relationships, the secrets that are held inside, the things that go unspoken and that we never know about others, and in particular, even about those closest to us. Jack Luxton and his brother Tom grew up at Jebb dairy farm in North Devon, with parents Michael and Vera. A young Jack sends a postcard from the seaside on the two holiday [...]

Wish I had been Elsewhere…As a fan of Swift’s novels in the past, I was very much looking forward to reading WISH YOU WERE HERE.However, I felt tedium overtake the pace, plot, and cast of characters throughout most of the novel. As much as Swift can be mesmerizing and brilliant in passages, I slogged through what felt much like a slow monotonous and bereaved dullness. Jack Luxton bottled up as bovine in his sentience symbolic of his cattle.Ellie, self-centered and unsupportive in her relatio [...]

I absolutely loved this, just couldn't put it down. Very much along the lines of Last Orders (another of my favourites) the narrative flow of this book jumps backwards and forwards in time and switches point of view at key points, which keeps you speculating and page-turning, desperate to know what happened. It was funny, touching, heart-wrenching, harrowing, infuriating, quirky, and overall what it was, was human. I know this is a strange word to use, but I mean it was about being human - flawe [...]

Graham Swift’s previous novel, “Tomorrow” (2007), was such a fiasco that a grim kind of suspense built up around his new book. Would “Wish You Were Here” inspire another round of jeering on both sides of the Atlantic?We shouldn’t have worried. “Tomorrow” was clearly just a Booker winner’s misstep, an awkward exorcism of some writerly kink. “Wish You Were Here” is an extraordinary novel, the work of an artist with profound insight into human nature and the mature talent to d [...]

“A good novel,” Graham Swift wrote in a recent essay in the New York Times Book Review, “is like a welcome pause in the flow of our existence; a great novel is forever revisitable. Novels can linger with us long after we’ve read them — even, and perhaps particularly, novels that compel us to read them, all other concerns forgotten, in a single intense sitting.”Swift has it right, and has given us another great novel in “Wish You Were Here.” Like his Booker Prize-winning “Last O [...]

Book of LamentationAs part of his investigations into the properties of light, Isaac Newton poked around behind his own eyeball with a bodkin. In this novel, Graham Swift undertakes an equally painful investigation of the darkness that lies behind the demise of a traditional farming family.Jack Luxton and his wife Ellie run the Lookout Caravan Park on the Isle of Wight, when one November - and in this book it is always November - Jack is notified of the death of his younger brother Tom, a soldie [...]

I loved this - very possibly the best book I've read this year. All the reviews I've seen seem to concentrate on it being a story based around the return home of the body of a soldier from Iraq. However I don't think that's really the centre of the story. It's certainly a story with a lot to do with death, dying and legacies left behind, but the return of a soldier is only one part of it and not to my mind the most important part. He's just part of the story of the end of a Devon farming family. [...]

Ultimately this book is about guilt and everyone’s individual way of dealing with their own regrets. Told mostly from Jack’s point of view, we also get enough of Ellie to not see her as a complete villain. I thought the additional two chapters (one from Tom’s perspective and one from that of the Robinsons were unnecessary). The story takes place in about an hour (while Jack waits for Ellie’s return) in which he relives his life and his most emotional moments. Simultaneously, Ellie sits i [...]

-So what did you think about the new Graham Swift?-Hmmm.-Hmmmwhat?-I've mixed emotions about it.-Why? He's the bloke who wrote Waterland, Last Orders, modern classics if ever there were! Let's not forget Shuttlecock, The Light of Day, and the short story 'Learning to Swim' either. What the hell's NOT to like?-He wrote Out of this World and Tomorrow, too. Two suckfests if ever there were.-Oh, picky picky. Anyway. We're back in vintage Swift territory - landscape and memory.-Meaning, he's doing th [...]

I read this book during this autumn season, it’s all gloomy, rainy and dark clouds all the weeks. it sort of matched with the situation in the book. it gave me the exact feelings while reading this. i think this is the first book that i felt that the character was going through too much. first his mother died, then followed by his sick dog which was shot by his dad. then his dad committed suicide. and his brother, who was in the army, hasn’t been home for years, returned in a coffin. what ch [...]

Jack Luxton is a farmer. He has grown up on a farm in England that has been in his family for generations. He looks and moves like a farmer; built large and solid and moving deliberately. He has the farmer ethical mindset; he is there to care for others and do his duty by all. It is even more surprising, then, to find that Jack moved from the farm over a decade ago. He is on his final trip back and reviewing his life.Life was not easy growing up. His father is remote and withholding, setting hig [...]

With With You Were Here, Graham Swift returns to that which he does better than anyone else -- the contemplative novel that probes the innermost secrets of the past and how they affect the present and future. Jack Luxton's transition from running the Devonshire farm his family ran for over 400 years into a proprietor of a caravan holiday site on the Isle of Wight is neither simply explained or treated lightly. Hs inner growth has been shaped mostly by those around him who are now mostly gone. Al [...]

I am a Graham Swift fan, listing Waterland as one of my all time favorites, and this book evokes both Waterland, in its intense sense of place and history, and Last Orders, since like that book it is centered around a death-related ritual. It is an extended meditation on loss: the loss of a brother, the loss of parents, the loss of security; the loss of s farm/family home; and the loss of the English countryside (to nouveau riche Londoners with a yen for second homes). It is about what it means [...]

I should say right up front that this is not my kind of book--a painstakingly thorough (slow-motion) description of a few key events in the main character's life, told almost entirely in flashback, as something dreadful may be about to happen in the present moment. This sounds like it might be a good way to build suspense, but in this case the narration keeps spiraling back on itself, revisiting the same scenes over and over, each time with the reader having a little more knowledge of what is re [...]

I had only ever read one book by Graham Swift and that was his prizewinning "Last Orders". So when his latest novel came out in paperback, I thought it might be worth a try. This is not a fun book. It tells a distressing story of Jack and Ellie, childhood friends from neighbouring farms in Devon. Now married and in their late forties, the death of their parents still haunts them (well Jack anyway), even though their lifestyle has hugely improved having inherited a profitable caravan park on the [...]

Swift is a brilliant, deft writer, and this novel amply displays his gifts--examining ordinary people grappling with the often bewildering and terrorizing aspects of human existence: love, loss, identity, family. While Jack, the main character, is forced to confront the death of his younger brother in Iraq and reconcile that with the tragic suicide of his father by a self-inflicted gunshot wound, there is no grand event in this novel, no key occurrence that provides a convenient hook. Rather, we [...]

I really enjoy reading Graham Swift. He writes intensely, often using stream of consciousness techniques, displaying the innermost thought and feelings of his characters who are expertly and exquisitely fully rounded and believable. I just wish occasionally that there was a happier feel to the stories. My first encounter with Swift was "Last Orders" a novel about infidelity, loss and the scattering of the main protagonists ashes. In "Waterland" it was about death, abortion, murder and kidnapping [...]

“Wish You Were Here” is an extraordinary novel, the work of an artist with profound insight into human nature and the mature talent to deliver it just the way he wants. The British author has set this unhurried exploration of grief and longing in the English countryside, but it’s infected with the violent terrors of contemporary life. As he did with "Waterland" (1983) — as every truly great novelist does — in this new book, he demonstrates that perfect coordination between style and st [...]

I've wanted to read Swift for a long time, but somehow it never quite happened. I must have started with the wrong book though, because this one is a disaster. I didn't believe a single emotion the characters were said to be experiencing. The list of tragedies goes on and on, but they're never dramatized in such a way that made me believe they were tragedies or that the characters would be as devastated as the narrator kept claiming they were. The devices Swift uses to ostensibly bring us closer [...]

When I started on this book, the mood of which is so very different from what we've become accustomed to reading in the news and hearing on television, that I was afraid I wouldn't be able to make the mental shift, but I became utterly immersed in this quiet, subtle and very psychological story. The main characters, especially the man, are revealed expertly and gradually and with great richness. This is a writer who does not fear exploring "that dark but silvery, frosty tunnel" of the human soul [...]

I loved Last Orders and was afraid that Wish You Were Here wouldn't live up to my expectations. However there was no need to worry. If anything it surpassed them, perhaps because the events referred to were ones that I could more closely relate to.I am a fan of Graham Swift's style: scenarios rerun from different angles, allusions to future developments in the storyline, descriptions of conversations that might have been, the examination of universal human relationships.I must read more of his w [...]

My first GS novel; it could just be my last. I found his recursive style of every nuance of thought & emotion quite tedious. Maybe I wasn't in the mood. I know its a 'good book', but I didn't enjoy it particularly & forced myself to finish.

Well written & slightly disturbing. I preferred Waterland.

If you like a fast-paced story that leaves you breathless with excitement, then do not read this book. But if you like to take the time to follow a storyline that slowly unravels, leaving you time to think, then by all means do. Jack Luxton is the only living member of the Luxton family from Jebb Farm, North Devon. At the beginning of the book we find Jack in his bedroom in Lookout Cottage at the Isle of Wight, with a loaded shotgun in his hands. Images of the destruction of cattle after the out [...]