The Magus
by John Fowles
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Read in August, 2007
My students like to use the made up word, "unputdownable." I always laugh at this. I can always put down a book, I can even put down this one. The problem is, I can't seem to stop picking it up again.
We are thrown, whether we like it or not into the addled frantic mind of Nicholas Urfe, a man in the middle of a suspenseful psychological experiment. The only problem is, without telling us, Fowles turns it into a suspenseful philosophical experiment as well. We are left never fully k...more
We are thrown, whether we like it or not into the addled frantic mind of Nicholas Urfe, a man in the middle of a suspenseful psychological experiment. The only problem is, without telling us, Fowles turns it into a suspenseful philosophical experiment as well. We are left never fully k...more
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Read in January, 2008
recommends it for:
Everyone
This is one of those books that was recommended to me a long time ago, by my Mom, who's opinion I very highly regard. I don't know what I put it off for so long. The book's synopsis captured my imagination. It has a variant of magic realism, a dizzying blurring the real and imagined, a heavy dose of both psychological and pilisophiscal exploration.
The book opens up a labyrinth of a plot where the narrator goes through varying levels of understanding aobut the nture of the labyritnth he'...more
The book opens up a labyrinth of a plot where the narrator goes through varying levels of understanding aobut the nture of the labyritnth he'...more
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Read in November, 2007
I put off reading this book for two years after receiving it as a gift. I had asked for it, but I had trouble reading The French Lieutenant's Woman in 85 and The Collector in 98, so quite expected it to be a difficult read. Who knows why I accepted Steve's challenge to read it, but I managed to make it through to the end in just a few days. My hands hurt holding 650 pages, but it was a real pageturner. Just when you think you might have it sussed, it takes a different direction. The story kept ...more
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Read in November, 2007
a good read so far. actually, it's fairly slow and i've been working on it for a month and only have a 100 pages left but just haven't gotten back to it yet. i like the book. really. but there is just something about it that keeps me from loving it. i love the literary references and it makes you either feel smart or dumb depending on the ones you do or don't get. the characters are interesting and well developed. however, it does suffer from the standard criticisms of this book. a first ...more
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Read in January, 2002
I'm not sure how I would review the book if I read it now. When I did read it, I worked at a store that afforded me all day to read--and to read in an environment that heightened the imagination and hinted at all possibilities while revealing nothing. It was a Platonic world of forms which, I'm convinced, was created at the same time the imaginative novel was. Perhaps this novel had an unfair advantage because of the setting in which it was read; nevertheless:
I LOVED this book. It took the...more
I LOVED this book. It took the...more
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Has a copy to sell/swap
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Read in August, 2005
recommends it for:
people who like twists and turns, who are into Greece and like the occasional sex scene.
This book grabs you by the figurative balls and never lets go!!! I had never heard of Fowles when I saw this at a thrift store and liked the cover. I wasn't crazy about the ambiguous ending but, you know.. endings are tough. I can't think of many endings I've been happy with.
The protagonist is Nick, a twenty-something narcisstic, emotionally distant orphan who takes a job teaching English at a remote Greek boarding school. He dumps his Australian flight attendant girlfriend in London sho...more
The protagonist is Nick, a twenty-something narcisstic, emotionally distant orphan who takes a job teaching English at a remote Greek boarding school. He dumps his Australian flight attendant girlfriend in London sho...more
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Read in September, 2007
this book fucked me up. i suppose it could be defined as a "psychological thriller" but its very jungian, steeped in metaphor and symbolism and eroticisim and mythology and shakespeare. its also an intense love story of sorts, the main character is a completely fleshed out, real, flawed person who you relate to and fear for and empathize with. the premise is that this british guy gets a teaching job on a small island in greece soon after WWII ends and becomes intwined in the lives/min...more
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A month after finishing The Magus, I'm still not quite sure if I loved it or hated it. I suppose that is entirely due to my obsessions with clarity of plot and identification with characters... one moment, you trust and love a character, and think you know exactly where the story is going (or even, is at the moment); the next, the rug is pulled out from under you and all your alliances and expectations have to suddenly change. Frankly, I don't find that sensation particularly pleasant--even as I...more
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Read in January, 2007
I read the first edition of the book when I was 16. It arrived unordered from a book club. At the time I was also just starting on Freud and the English romantic poets. The novel was my first book that changes your life mindblower. Cutting across the surging hormones of my adolescent fever, it brought evrything I felt into a magical frame. For the first time I knew the imaginative power of metaphor. I was also studying the Tempest at the time, and Prospero's/Shakespeare's valediction. The island...more
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Read in January, 1999
recommends it for:
Anyone willing to unravel the mystery
This is my mom's favorite book that I read my senior year of high school and plan to read again when I have the appropriate amount of time to dedicate to it. When I finished it the first time and asked my mom in high frustrtation what it was all about, she simply said "It changes every time I read it". It's just that good-a book about a young British teacher sent to a school in Greece, his encounters with a magus or magician and the ensuing mystery that unfolds...only to be resolved ...more
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Read in April, 2008
recommended to Tyler by:
Abbyrecommends it for: anyone but my mom
Holy Shit! This book is the mind fuck you want from Thomas Pynchon without all the unresolved issues at the end like bad things at the bottom of your drink...
What a plot: guy meets older mentor type, mentor type tells him he's a psychic, but everyone else says the man is crazy and that the phantasmagoric scenes playing themselves out before the narrator's eyes are pure movie magic (a lá theatre).
Can't say I've read a book this enthralling in a while.
CAUTION to those who are sensiti...more
What a plot: guy meets older mentor type, mentor type tells him he's a psychic, but everyone else says the man is crazy and that the phantasmagoric scenes playing themselves out before the narrator's eyes are pure movie magic (a lá theatre).
Can't say I've read a book this enthralling in a while.
CAUTION to those who are sensiti...more
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Read in October, 2007
Wow. This chilling exploration of psychological issues packs a powerful wallop. I read this over the course of two days, engrossed within a plot that navigates the labrynth of the human psyche. Drawing strongly from Jungian techniques, this book made psychology "real" for me, setting up the characters in simulations that explored some of the major concepts.
I hesitate to probe the plot too much, lest I give away some of the major points within the mystery.
I will write, however, th...more
I hesitate to probe the plot too much, lest I give away some of the major points within the mystery.
I will write, however, th...more
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Read in April, 1990
This is the only book so far I wish there were ten stars for.
I agree with a writer I know who thinks this book might be the greatest novel of the 20th century. I've recently read his diaries, Vol 1, I've read all his books, but the Magus, which I've read a number of times, still stands out.
It takes your whole life, if you identify with the protagonist, which I tend to do when I read, and puts it into total tumult. You don't know which way is up. Truly. You come to moments in the book where...more
I agree with a writer I know who thinks this book might be the greatest novel of the 20th century. I've recently read his diaries, Vol 1, I've read all his books, but the Magus, which I've read a number of times, still stands out.
It takes your whole life, if you identify with the protagonist, which I tend to do when I read, and puts it into total tumult. You don't know which way is up. Truly. You come to moments in the book where...more
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Read in April, 2003
This is one of my favorite books ever. I almost always figure out the ending of books and movies ridiculously early and then scorn them as predictable. But I could never have foreseen how this would turn out. I recall pausing about 200 pages from the ending and lamenting to a friend, "I want it to end here!" Not because it was too long (although it is very long) but because it would have been such a nice ending and those 200 extra pages promised all would not stay well. It also ga...more
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This book is responsible for the first C I got in college - on my Biology midterm. Instead of going to lecture in Wiley Hall - right after lunch in a darkened and warm lecture hall where two hours of monotonous lecturing often turned into two hours of excrutiating boredom, I opted to kick off the shoes, dig my toes into the grass and break out this book while sitting on the Northrop Mall. Got to the point where the book was so much more appealing than my bio class that the spring sunshine, gre...more
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Read in January, 2003
recommended to Lauren by:
william rosser
this could be one of the best things that happened to me in a two year relationship.
the magus is a book that has so many twist and turns just thinking about me makes me dizzy. okay that was really corny. but seriously... i love this book. it is in my top five. i love to read a book that i can't figure out. this is definitely one of them. john fowles has such a beautiful imagination and the words that come from it are great. while reading this book i would have to put it down to take a break b...more
the magus is a book that has so many twist and turns just thinking about me makes me dizzy. okay that was really corny. but seriously... i love this book. it is in my top five. i love to read a book that i can't figure out. this is definitely one of them. john fowles has such a beautiful imagination and the words that come from it are great. while reading this book i would have to put it down to take a break b...more
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Read in December, 2007
this book can be maddening at times because all the twists and turns never seem to stop. the reader never feels like he or she has any idea what could happen, which can be a good thing or a bad thing. in this case it's mostly a good thing. it took me quite awhile to finish this book. it's long and can't be read quickly. i also had to take breaks through the reading and read a couple of other shorter books. but i don't mean to speak so negatively. it is an amazing book, and even now after ...more
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After many years I took the plunge and read this book. It seemed a good idea as I was visiting the Greek island of Spetses where Fowles lived and which was the inspiration for the book.
I definitely found the earlier chapters most intriguing when there was no real explaination about what was happening, most thrillingly when Apollo rises from the sea. Fowles has a riveting prose style and it was a treat to be only a few chapters in and be excited by the writing and the prospect of what was to...more
I definitely found the earlier chapters most intriguing when there was no real explaination about what was happening, most thrillingly when Apollo rises from the sea. Fowles has a riveting prose style and it was a treat to be only a few chapters in and be excited by the writing and the prospect of what was to...more
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I had no idea what this book was about. The prose style was nice, but the plot was completely unfathomable. I decided about a third of the way through the book that it was one of the worst things I had ever read. But, due to some strange self-flagellatory compulsion, I told myself there was no way I was going to let it beat me, so I slogged through, teeth clenched, until the end. I found out later that they actually made a movie out of it. About the film, Woody Allen is to have said, "If I ...more
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Read in January, 1998
recommends it for:
all Hellinists, travellers and snobs
The main character, Nicholas struggles the way most men do. He does not know what to do with the love of the intense, depressive and available Alice who wants to be with him. He meets his mentor Monsieur Conchis in a Greek Island where he has taken a post as a teacher. Conchis is Freud as God. Through a series of hallucinations and an ecounter with a pair of beautiful and exotic good and bad twins (the female double), Nicholas works through his inability to settle for the mundane life that most ...more
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book data (includes all editions)
avg rating (all editions): 4.03 (1416 ratings) avg rating (this edition): 3.62 (13 ratings) number of reviews: 204popular shelves
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quote
"I acquired expensive habits and affected manners. I got a third-class degree and a first-class illusion: that I was a poet. But nothing could have been less poetic that my seeing-through-all boredom with life in general and with making a living in particular. I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope-- an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all. But I did absorb a small dose of one permanently useful thing, Oxford's greatest gift to civilized life: Socratic honesty. It showed me, very intermittently, that it is not enough to revolt against one's past. One day I was outrageously bitter among some friends about the Army; back in my own rooms later it suddenly struck me that just because I said with impunity things that would have apoplexed my dead father, I was still no less under his influence. The truth was I was not a cynic by nature, only by revolt. I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn't found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love. Handsomely equipped to fail, I went out into the world. "
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