The Death of William Posters

William Posters #1

by Alan Sillitoe

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

Genres: Fiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Alan Sillitoe was an English writer, one of the "Angry Young Men" of the 1950s (although he, in common with most of the other writers to whom the label was applied, had never welcomed it).
For more see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Sil...

Reviews

[Karellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Frank Dawley is 26. He is sick of his job his house his marriage his life. In this novel the author brilliantly captures that feeling of wanting to escape from the shackles of conventional society. The break for freedom that is so exhilarating. One that so few of us have the nerve to attempt.
Carrie was once 26. Trapped in a boring job, a destructive relationship - in a rut. I know these feelings so well that he could have written this book for me. Like the protagonist here that girl managed to escape just in time for the sake of her own sanity.
Sillitoe is the master of the anti hero - Smith the lonely long distance borstal boy runner ; the hard drinking womaniser Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning;
These are characters drawn effortlessly from real life by an author who deserves greater recognition.

[Tom Pepper · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mostly a curiosity

If you ever wondered what happened to the author of "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner," this book is worth reading. Sometimes, such writers produce many better books that remain overshadowed by one or two popular works (especially if those are popular with schoolteachers). That doesn't seem the case here--Sillitoe's later books are just not very good. The kind of adolescent muddled thinking that is so compelling in the mind of a troubled teen in reform school is a lot less compelling in a 300-page novel in the minds of adults. In the first case, it seems to be a case of realism--uneducated and troubled boys just are poor thinkers most of the time. In this case, it is just embarrassing. Here's an example:

he had the feeling of already slipping out from the bank of an old life, not too much noise as he hit the water on a quiet stretch of this interior coast, and striking across the solitude of an unknown sea. For what? To go where? Getting out of your mother’s womb you were already there. Maybe you were even there at the first shot of your father’s prick. Life was wide, and maybe death was the only place where you could think about it. Or maybe life was death, and life was the only place where you could cogitate. If it was though, where was life?

And it just goes on like that. It gives the impression that after he cashed in on his first couple of books, he never took the time to do any serious thinking, or learn more about the world. And he certainly doesn't seem to have taken much interest in the plight of the rest of the working class. This novel is mostly just pathetic fantasy of a not-too bright and morally reprehensible working class young man. He goes about getting middle class women to cheat on their affluent professional husbands with him, then dumps them, and finally sets out to go play soldier in a conflict in Africa Sillitoe doesn't really seem to understand at all, except that being a rebel gun-runner seems Hemingway macho.

William Poster really explains why Sillitoe is all but forgotten, and his later novels never read. It also makes "Loneliness" seem much less interesting than it did when I thought it was meant to be a critical examination of the poor thinking and lack of direction of the poorly educated lower classes. Instead, "Loneliness" now seems to be evidence only of what a poor thinker Sillitoe was.

If you're fond of his earlier books, and want to keep it that way, don't read this.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this out of curiosity as Saturday Night And Sunday Morning was such a good film. Luckily, I have some understanding of post war Britain otherwise I would imagine this book being very challenging, especially for a U.S. audience.
It is of its time, that of the Angry Young Men. The dialogue is often unimaginable between ‘ordinary’ people and I found the only way to tolerate it was to convince myself that what was written was a subtext of what the characters actually said.
D. H. Lawrence meets George Orwell meets Hemingway and they don’t get on very well.

[J.C. Greenway · Rating 4 out of 5]

Signs proclaiming ‘bill posters will be prosecuted’ regularly used to be grafitti-ed with ‘Bill Posters is Innocent’ in the old days (or so my Dad tells me). Sillitoe took it a degree further in The Death of William Posters as he imagines Bill leaving behind a wife and two kids to follow what could seem to be the pull of some kind of early variant of mid-life crisis. Instead, William’s wanderings allow for a cynical eye to be cast over scenes as diverse as the London art world and the hippy trail to Morocco, as he tries to fight his way out from the control of forces he can’t see:

If that’s the only way to find yourself, then you’ll sooner or later run into what you’re running away from, even if you don’t know what it is. You’ll recognise it when you hit it – or it hits you.

Read my full review - and many more! - at my site ten million hardbacks 

[Pete Monaghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a nostalgic re read for me of a book/trilogy read when l was a teenager that had a profound affect on me. Almost 30 years on parts of it have dated but it is still one of Sillitoes best works not discussed enough.

[Greg Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

plenty of social comment as usual in Alan Sillitoe; universal story, enabling many to identify