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Love in the Ruins
by
Dr. Tom More has created a stethoscope of the human spirit. With it, he embarks on an unforgettable odyssey to cure mankind's spiritual flu. This novel confronts both the value of life and its susceptibility to chance and ruin.
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Paperback, 416 pages
Published
September 4th 1999
by St. Martin's Press
(first published 1971)
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Nov 17, 2013
Darwin8u
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
aere-perennius,
2015
“Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.”
― Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins
Every time I read Walker Percy I fall in love. I seduce myself into thinking I'm actually just a bad Catholic and promise myself that next time I get a chance I will lose myself in the desert, the woods, or anywhere I can see the cold stars and the burning sand and live forever somewhere in between.
Reading another Percy novel is like discovering an unopened can of cashews in ...more
― Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins
Every time I read Walker Percy I fall in love. I seduce myself into thinking I'm actually just a bad Catholic and promise myself that next time I get a chance I will lose myself in the desert, the woods, or anywhere I can see the cold stars and the burning sand and live forever somewhere in between.
Reading another Percy novel is like discovering an unopened can of cashews in ...more
Capsule Review: Don't Read Walker Percy. Ever.
Longer Review: If somebody recommends this book (or any other of his books) to you, rest assured that that he will one day soon try to convince you that the Eagles really are rock n' roll. Afterwards, he will probably inflict some of his "poetry" on you. You know the kind of stuff I mean: four-line stanzas in ABAB that will inevitably rhyme the words "pain" with "insane," "soul" with "hole," "heart" with "apart," and "feel" with "unreal." Luckily, ...more
Longer Review: If somebody recommends this book (or any other of his books) to you, rest assured that that he will one day soon try to convince you that the Eagles really are rock n' roll. Afterwards, he will probably inflict some of his "poetry" on you. You know the kind of stuff I mean: four-line stanzas in ABAB that will inevitably rhyme the words "pain" with "insane," "soul" with "hole," "heart" with "apart," and "feel" with "unreal." Luckily, ...more
This is my favorite novel. The protagonist, Dr. Tom More, explores the possibility of simultaneously loving three women for different reasons while living in a world that is falling apart. Perhaps Percy's "Ruins" is a metaphor for the decline of our society and for Dr. More's mental illness. It isn't always clear to how much of More's paranoia is imagined, and how much is a product of his alcohol and allergy-induced visions. Percy's description of the decay of Southern Coastal society into armed
...more
This is Walker Percy at his misanthropic, self-hating Catholic best. The story centers around Thomas More, a self-professed "bad Catholic" who loves women and whiskey a lot more than God or his fellow man. (He basically could care less for his fellow man, and he'd probably choose his beloved Early Times over women as well). What makes him appealing is his grasp of the human condition that he is faced with, where people are continually estranged from themselves and their own swirling desires. So,
...more
Maybe the strangest book I've ever read.
this book is a perverse, pious, and odd angled look at the downfall of the American mind and American society. having just finished it, my head is spun with thoughts of the dislocated and disassociated nature of the prose and themes. I don't know if I should recommend it or bury it in the backyard for fear the children might stumble onto it. you'll have to decide for yourself.
this book is a perverse, pious, and odd angled look at the downfall of the American mind and American society. having just finished it, my head is spun with thoughts of the dislocated and disassociated nature of the prose and themes. I don't know if I should recommend it or bury it in the backyard for fear the children might stumble onto it. you'll have to decide for yourself.
Jan 03, 2009
Melody
rated it
it was ok
Recommended to Melody by:
Brian Johnson
Shelves:
third-thursday-bookgroup
I slogged through this only making it because of an occasional witty descriptive phrase. The story is about the collapse of a fragmented society. Dr. Tom More has invented a device (a lapsometer) which he believes can cure people from their demons. He has his own demons too.
Some will find his writing and the plot clever and brilliantly written. I found both very tedious.
Some will find his writing and the plot clever and brilliantly written. I found both very tedious.
Robert Moynihan, reporting from Rome, "Inside the Vatican Magazine" Newsflash, Letter from Rome, #22: 'I studied the works of Walker Percy, the American Catholic novelist, when I was in college, at Harvard. I went to meet Percy in 1977. His most important book is a collection of philosophical essays entitled The Message in the Bottle.
The entire goal of his writing was to show how the historical events of Christian history constituted a "message" which brought life to people who were in the ...more
The entire goal of his writing was to show how the historical events of Christian history constituted a "message" which brought life to people who were in the ...more
I sometimes can't decide if Love in The Ruins is my favorite or least favorite Percy novel. I enjoyed it a great deal upon a recent re-read. Perhaps it is because I'm now much closer in age to the protagonist and so better able to relate to his perspective. The absurdist nature of the story can be a bit confounding - and at times perhaps even a bit self indulgent. But, that very context allows Percy to explore from yet another angle the core theme of all his novels; the difficulty of finding
...more
This is a great Catholic novel, and an excellent satire that still holds up. My favorite character: Father Kev Kevin, the ex priest who looks like Pat O'Brien and spends his working days at the Love Clinic sitting at the vaginal console reading Commonweal....if you get why this is funny, or even if you don't, but particularly if you do, read the book.
This was a weird one.
It's satire, surreal, sci fi, I would even call it screwball, but then at times the events and setting don't seem so ungrounded anymore. It just takes place in Louisiana not very far into the future from the novel's publication date of 1970.
A doctor named Thomas More works on a new 'lapsometer' that can read and influence the emotional state of the mind to some extent. Perhaps it can improve the state of the country, perhaps it will win him the Nobel prize, or perhaps it ...more
It's satire, surreal, sci fi, I would even call it screwball, but then at times the events and setting don't seem so ungrounded anymore. It just takes place in Louisiana not very far into the future from the novel's publication date of 1970.
A doctor named Thomas More works on a new 'lapsometer' that can read and influence the emotional state of the mind to some extent. Perhaps it can improve the state of the country, perhaps it will win him the Nobel prize, or perhaps it ...more
Walker Percy is a writer I read when I was attending a Jesuit University in the 1980s. I am a heathen these days but I am steeped in the traditions of the one true apostolic church. Percy writes from this familiar Catholic strain. I read his "lost in the Cosmos" and it struck a chord with me about the fallen condition and hope. Percy is writing a dystopian novel about a future a few decades after the time of writing from the vantage point of the early 1970s of an America which is extremely
...more
This books reads like some dumpster baby of Kierkegaard and Clancy (Yes, Tom Clancy).
The existential inquiries into man in the face of a culture whose pace or direction cares little for its constituents is, as in The Moviegoer, a wonderful one.
Unfortunate for the fool who picks up this book to do more with it than crush a pill bug, that is about 2% of the book. The rest is a poorly edited barebones satire of autumn-century America, and as is the case with nearly all satire, difficult to keep ...more
The existential inquiries into man in the face of a culture whose pace or direction cares little for its constituents is, as in The Moviegoer, a wonderful one.
Unfortunate for the fool who picks up this book to do more with it than crush a pill bug, that is about 2% of the book. The rest is a poorly edited barebones satire of autumn-century America, and as is the case with nearly all satire, difficult to keep ...more
Hard to justify the time spent writing this review but I can't just give something one star and not explain. I thought this story was slow and meandered too long without direction. There was too much introspection, it lacked a feeling of cohesion, and there was too little meaning for everything that was happening (which wasn't much) in the first 150 pages for me to justify spending any more time with it. I just didn't care and was bored out of my mind. I had hoped for more since I'd heard great
...more
What was probably at one time a revolutionary, subversive and thought-provoking novel is now only a curiosity in the wake of better books by Vonnegut and Robbins and Wilson. I don't think that I will ever understand the tendency of stories from this era (the 1970s) to be so paranoid and winky. Then again, I wasn't alive at the time.
This is not to say that Percy is a bad writer, but I've come to expect more from my questionable narrators and post-apocalyptic scenarios.
This is not to say that Percy is a bad writer, but I've come to expect more from my questionable narrators and post-apocalyptic scenarios.
Walker Percy has expertly taken us along a 4-day long journey close to the end of the world. Our protagonist is a bad Catholic—but he’s the best protagonist we could have asked for. Although he is troubled, depressed, a sex-addict, and a drunkard, he is also real and honest, and he’s the only character who keeps his head while the world falls apart.
The religious, Christian, and biblical references throughout the book make it an incredibly enjoyable read for religious people, especially those ...more
The religious, Christian, and biblical references throughout the book make it an incredibly enjoyable read for religious people, especially those ...more
Here is another slipstream/satire novel where the targets are The American South and America's political and religious troubles (at least as they were in the 70s, but it seems, at least to my own unschooled eye, to be the same troubles as today, only today we have more TV and internet). My friend Grieg said that Percy was trying to do what O'Connor did successfully. I suspect this statement is true. But behind it is another statement: which genre is more effective in asserting a morality (or
...more
This is a cynical, farcical, joyful ride through the not-so-apocalyptic post-America. At the beginning, Percy tells us that the end of America has come, and what is left is a fractious, conceited, egoistic culture. The liberals have their manias, the conservatives theirs, and guerilla groups hold the perimeters of society. Hippies have withdrawn "to the swamp." Tom More is somewhere in the middle of it all--a bad Catholic whose only sorrow is his lack of penitence over his wicked ways.
Yet More ...more
Yet More ...more
A couple of years ago I read a lot of Walker Percy and loved his books. Reading Love in the Ruins - The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World now shows me again that there are times and conditions that are right or wrong for certain books. I've marked this book as "Read" though I stopped at 16%. (Thank you, Kindle.) I'd started it after a reference to it in somebody's essay somewhere. I didn't quite slot it in my "ugh" sub shelves because, after all, Walker Percy. But
...more
This is certainly a strange book. I read this just after reading Peter Augustine Lawler's Postmodernism Rightly Understood, which cleared up the philosophy behind the book. My general impression is that in this book Percy is settling into a didactic mode, which I don't mind since I find the theory interesting. But it could be hard to just drop in if you don't know what Percy means by “angelism,” or what he thinks of Descartes. Generally, it seems like the actions of Percy's protagonists are
...more
A quirky, absurdest, medical comedy set against the backdrop of the real-life oddity that is south Louisiana culture . An African American uprising, a sex laboratory (with a "panic" room), college educated hippies living in the swamp, a sniper in the abandoned golf club house, polygamy, Early Times whiskey... ...these are just some of the events and devices that Dr. Tom More encounters during the 3 day period over which the novel takes place.
With sharp wit and sound wisdom, Percy explores the ...more
With sharp wit and sound wisdom, Percy explores the ...more
I sometimes feel a little abashed to say how much I love this book, because if you're a serious literary person you can *only* like the Moviegoer. But Love in the Ruins is the first book I ever read by Percy, and I thought it was the smartest, funniest, oddest book--all dressed up in this hilarious country-club Southern accent. The world (the late 60s) is divided into Knotheads (conservatives in a delusional rage) and the Leftpapasanes (ineffective, muddied liberals). There's a great line: "The
...more
May 25, 2017
Leslie Jem
rated it
it was ok
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
audible-com,
spirituality
I have no idea what in the world I just read...
At once philosophical study, religious treatise, and apocalyptic fiction, Love in the Ruins extrapolates modern society to its conclusion and envisions a hyperbolic United States on the eve of its own destruction. With constant wit, undeniable charm, and a pithy grasp of what constitutes the modern United States, Walker Percy lays bare the ills of society and intimates deftly at their solutions.
Love in the Ruins is fundamentally satirical, and is really less about the apocalypse than it is set ...more
Love in the Ruins is fundamentally satirical, and is really less about the apocalypse than it is set ...more
Well-written and it kept moving, but the story was too oddball for me and I couldn't enjoy it.
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Prophetic, insightful, dizzying.
In his essays and fiction Walker Percy speaks of man as a wayfarer on earth. Some synonyms for wayfarer are nomad, drifter, gypsy, vagabond, as well as vagrant, which suggests that, as we travel through life we're liable to go places we don't belong, shouldn't be in, and are not wanted. What complicates the situation is that many places in which we feel uncomfortable are just where we should be -- and vice versa. The events in Love in the Ruins mirror this complexity in a picaresque adventure in
...more
Well, that was different. Quite good actually, but pretty strange. And daring in a way that probably couldn't be published today.
Walker Percy wrote four exceptional books during his distinguished career. The two novels, Love in the Ruins and The Second Coming, Lost in the Cosmos, which he referred to ironically as a “self-help manual,” and his collection of essays, The Message in the Bottle. The rest were merely outstanding.
Love in the Ruins looms above them all, a book I have read almost as many times as the Bible and which never fails to disappoint. My graduate advisor recommended the book while I was laboring over my ...more
Love in the Ruins looms above them all, a book I have read almost as many times as the Bible and which never fails to disappoint. My graduate advisor recommended the book while I was laboring over my ...more
There is an interesting disconnect when you enter the "Tomorrowland" section of the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World. You are seeing a vision of the future, but it is a vision steeped in the culture of the early 1970s, when the park opened. I had the same disconnect reading Love in the Ruins. Unlike George Orwell's timeless dystopian novel, 1984, Percy's vision of a dystopian future is firmly rooted in the early 1970s, when he wrote the book. I enjoyed the book well enough to read it to the
...more
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Walker Percy (1916–1990) was one of the most prominent American writers of the twentieth century. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, he was the oldest of three brothers in an established Southern family that contained both a Civil War hero and a US senator. Acclaimed for his poetic style and moving depictions of the alienation of modern American culture, Percy was the bestselling author of six fiction
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“Why did God make women so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?”
—
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“Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.”
—
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