The Last Gentleman

I am a Percy addict, I admit it, and a vein full of this didn t help Percy s novels are like non fiction disguised as fiction, which I think throws a lot of people He has ideas, and fiction is a vehicle for them But just like with O Connor, you can read his books without having a clue about the author s ideas and still love them for the literature they are Percy s turns of phrase alone make his stuff worth reading And boy, did this one get me Starts out like a quaint, good ish book, perfect for [...]

I ended my review of Cormac McCarthy s Suttree by adding almost as an afterthought that it is very funny I ll start this on Walker Percy s The Last Gentleman by saying it too is very funny It s slapstick and absurdist at times, satirical, iconoclastic, wickedly spurting out stereotypes, and if you like your humour refined it s got that subtle taste of a Socratic Kierkegaard at glee I m only an Englishman eavesdropping on this tale of Southern gentility so for better or worse a lot has passed by [...]

Will Barrett is a slacker A Princeton drop out from a genteel Alabama family, unable to attend to his studies, or his life really, because he has amnesiac spells, he moves to New York City where he gets a room at the YMCA and a job as humidification engineer at Macy s basically a janitor working in the basement It s the Eisenhower era He spends 1,900 on a fancy telescope that s about 966,000 in today s dollars to watch a peregrine in Central Park, but ends up training it on two successive women [...]

Walker Percy is one of the great novelists of the South and is at his best when he describes quotidian life there The protagonist, whom Percy shapes as an engineer, is the personification of the Deep South The engineer is a Princeton man with a high powered telescope living in New York City with episodes of amnesia or fugues, which disorient him This poor man takes a job caring for a desperately sick young man named Jamie and falls in love with his sister, Kitty Jamie is receiving treatment in N [...]

Whether it be Brooklyn or Birmingham I seldom appreciate accounts of banal domesticity, neurosis laden diaries I have really made poor choices lately I am however a huge fan of Walker Percy, and though I disliked this, I realize that description might fit 50% of his work This was the one that completes my list of every novel he has written I m aware The Moviegoer should be one I object to, but I love it My ultimate WP favorite is The Thanatos Syndrome Oh, correction I just noted that I have not [...]

My first Percy but definitely not my last His words are addictive Very much interested in how much of the main character is autobiographical, just curious.

Written in 1966, Percy s second novel following the classic The Moviegoer Young, confused Southerner, adrift, suffering 60 s style existential angst, a blank slate whose radar lets him know what others want him to be A vehicle for Percy s ideas on philosophy, theology, the South and I suffered existential angst trying to get through it.

Walker Percy, a much honored novelist, might be best known in some circles for his noble effort to get the great Confederacy of Dunces published after its author, John Kennedy O Toole, committed suicide Percy knows great writing when he sees it, and his 1966 novel, The Last Gentleman, features some great writing.Like other Percy novels The Second Coming and The Thanatos Syndrome come to mind , The Last Gentleman is not easy stuff It features a cast of largely unlikable characters, including its [...]

I m going to be EXTREMELY generous and give a book I couldn t take past page 108 where the sex scene in Central Park begins, or maybe failed sex scene, I give no shits two stars Why Because the engineer is admittedly a very haunting character in certain respects Life going nowhere because of neurosis and the inability to actually choose a path in life instead of wallowing in potential God, the man is writing about me Kind of I wish I had a plantation and a check every month, however modest.Unfor [...]

One of Walker Percy s several masterpieces, this book tells the story of Will Barrett, a man who suffers from bouts of memory loss and who, through his own peculiarities, ends up intimately attached to a Southern family he encounters while living in New York City Like all of Percy s novels, this is both a fascinating story and an exploration of life through the insights of Christian existentialists like Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky Some of the concepts Percy explores in this novel are elucidated [...]

My favorite of Walker Percy s novels Williston Bibb Barrett, the protagonist, although that is a somewhat inappropriate label for him, wanders through the novel reacting to other people in a highly mannered way, initiating very little, but his very self effacement presents a tabula rasa for those around him to fill in.Somewhere in this book I remember seeing the description of manners as existing so that nobody would ever not know what to do I have looked for the line and not found it lately, bu [...]

This was an unusual reading experience for me I slogged through the book and the story never gripped me I even considered giving it up about 100 pages in However, I was always conscious of the undeniable skill of the author and wanted to find out how he ended the story He had something very tangible to say that was developing in a seemingly disconnected, but very unique way I may come back and write a review after I mull things over, because this is a remarkable book with a powerful ending I can [...]

Wow Just finished this wonderful journey of a book Barrett is a wonderful surreal character living on the edge of his own life He holds in his soul the confusion and disorientation that comes from living old in a modern world Incredible Percy is a master of both dialogue and the stream of consciousness This last gentleman is a tragic but enviable character For those living in the South, or familiar with this strange place facing the Gulf, Percy s references will truly hit home The author is a ma [...]

This book, based in small part on Dostoevsky s The Idiot, is, is, is everything The final pages will make you tremble or cry, or just appreciate how we kiss and kick around despair.

Walker Percy s second novel also picaresque Southern gentleman s look at the world going on around him as he tries to fit in while making sense It s a straight telling with stable plot points well limned but always from the unreliable narrator Will Barret who with bouts of deja vus and or fugues where amnesia leaves holes to memory yet takes us through a series of events beginning in New York city parks on into the deep south in or about the mid to late sixties or so frame There is an interestin [...]

I am giving this book one star because I did not like it The beginning was ok It concerns a young man transplanted from the South living in a YMCA apartment working the night shift in a basement Perfect young man stuck in the labrynth This I can work with But then he meets some other characters and goes on a road trip down South and the whole book falls apart It s the South with a capital S Walker Percy is one of those southern authors you read in college so of course he tries to make everything [...]

I really enjoyed this book It was strange the author made some interesting choices, like calling his narrator the engineer all the time, instead of by his name This was odd, because all the characters called him by his name, but for the first part of the book he doesn t interact with anyone, so you don t learn his name until 50 pages in or so Odd p.s the narrator shared my surname There s a ton of philosophy in here, no surprise from Percy, and overall the story is mostly compelling and the char [...]

The Last Gentleman is difficult to review and I kind of think that I should reread it to really get a grasp of many of the ideas presented within The book follows a young man who somewhat lacks an identity and constantly suffers from bouts of amnesia Through him the author explores themes of identity, society, and religion The book often feels as aimless as its protagonist and can be somewhat difficult to follow but about halfway through I thought it became easier to follow or perhaps I became [...]

An Alabaman with a telescope and nervous fits is taken in by a rich, faltering Southern family Reading it made me feel like a better, wholesome person like I should sit down with a glass of milk and eat whatever kind of homemade sandwiches Southerners favor It s a very warm novel I liked it against my will I think it s a good 100 pages too long, maybe Percy takes his time when he has something to say, but at the same time it s weirdly quick and not boring The silence was disjunct It ran concurr [...]

This one didn t do it for me There were some interesting trains of thought and ideas and some lovely description Interesting that the main character suffers from mental issues and goes into spurts of amnesia and fugue states, but the way this is written is too difficult, cumbersome, annoying for the reader to follow I did not relate to nor care for any of the characters Or rather I did not feel emotionally invested in their journeys The journey of the main character, the engineer, felt random Th [...]

Just went back through this a third time in prep to lead our book club through it at our next meeting It just gets better and better with age All of Percy s work feels or less prophetic, as humanity has still not fully come to terms with the dislocation of the individualized, technological society birthed by WWII The New South , the old South, the sexual revolution, cultural Christianity, and so much comes under his withering eye.

I read this at 17, but found that, ten years later, I couldn t remember it at all except for the opening scene in Central Park I haven t changed that much in ten years I just re read it and really wanted to like it, took my time with it, trying to understand the metaphors and trying to picture the scenes in my mind but I just didn t get much out of it Maybe I m not philosophical enoughI do like the descriptions of Southern culture as a New Yorker with some Southern experience

This is my 2nd try at Walker Percy, the first being The Moviegoer, which won the 1962 National Book Award for Fiction and was on TIME s list of the 100 best English language novels since 1923, and both have been 1 stars for me As with The Moviegoer, the book is mostly existential nonsense I can handle no plot if the dialogue is profound enough, but here it s not I should have stopped with The Moviegoer.

I don t know what it is about Walker Percy I always seem to think I m going to like his books than I do This one in particular felt like I needed to devote time to it and try to finish it faster but it s pretty long to demand that And I found it rather slow going Some parts were funny, sad, and interesting but others seemed really bizarre and unconnected like the excerpts from Sutter s casebook I was left not fully understanding the novel but maybe that s to be expected.

Read the whole thing for the reward of the last 20 pages a true and honest depiction of the moments just prior to death after a prolonged illness What will you do with your life What will you do with your death There s a lot to think on here memory, identity, recognizing who we are and our place in the world, home and not home Challenging, but worthwhile.

Some amusing parts but over all a ridiculous book to me I am sorry I took the time to read it.

Walker Percy is an excellent writer His most notable book, The Moviegoer, is very well known, this book is much less so In this book we meet Will Barrett, a 25 year old man who suffers from mental fugues and memory loss After learning some of his backstory we watch him meet a Southern family purely by happenstance in a hospital This family is your traditional southern aristocracy from the middle of the last century Race relations and the burgeoning trouble appear at the edge of this story but it [...]

Two things marked this book for me First, it seems to be a Southern Catcher in the Rye, which it followed by 15 years Knowing about Percy s life as an existentialist, a man of faith, and one who struggled against depression helped the book make sense to me A young white Southerner, a dropout from Princeton caught in New York in the wrong place and time, serendipitously falls in with a classic Southern family and is launched on a journey with no destination the hero can see, but one he may hope f [...]

I have very mixed feelings about this book I enjoyed the story of the young engineer s journeys both physical and emotional but at times I found the writing style to be so convoluted that I had to re read entire paragraphs to get the gist of what the author was saying A tad too verbose for me.Here is an example It was possible for him to be at home in the North because the North was homeless There are many things worse than being homeless in a homeless place in fact, this is one condition of bei [...]

this is, i suppose, the confusion of the modern american south though dated already, and a smaller world than any i can really imagine i would have liked this if i had inclination to feel something for the grand families in collapse, but i think i was interested in the odd details than the sweep.