The Pornographer

by John McGahern

Book Overview

By "arguably the most important Irish writer since Samuel Beckett" (The Guardian), a character study of a young resident of Dublin who pens erotica for a living, making his money through fantasy while denying the realities of love and sex in his life.

The Pornographer is the story of a writer down on his luck, not a Dubliner but a resident of Dublin penning far from erotic tales to make ends meet. These tales--revolving...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1681378809
• ISBN13: 9781681378800
• Release Date: September 2024
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 7.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

A vivid and textured novel

The Pornographer is a complex novel, wonderfully vivid and textured in its mining of the human condition. It is a disturbing and yet calming warm bath of words, swirling with components of love, lust, loss, disenchantment, duty, and denial. Above all, however, I'd say this is a novel about growth. Michael is a young man who writes pornography for a living, although he doesn't particularly enjoy the writing. His life experiences and trysts, however, mirror his stories in their shallow sex-based origins. He meets 37 year-old virgin Josephine, and their affair, in which she craves and he obliges sex every time they meet, mirrors Michael's stories. But Michael's feelings for Josephine do not run beyond the physical, and when she gets pregnant, his apathy and life choices are put to the test. The great irony and juxtaposition of the work is that in the midst if Michael's indifference to Josephine and the child she carries is his devotion to his dying aunt, whom he visits every week. Michael's visits and emotional pain are suffused with a felicity that opposes his personal life. While he deals with his aunt's dying, he also faces the growth of a new life with his love child, and the possibility of a new life as a married father. Despite his apathy, love slowly burgeons in Michael's life from an unexpected source, showing him that loss can lead to discovery and growth. Michael learns he must resurrect the corpse of his tattered heart, shattered by lost love, and allow it to love again. McGahern's writing is as resonant and stirring as always, proving again his mastery of English prose. He deals with the realities of life, its disappointments and hardships, in a way that a great novel should: without pulling any punches or emotions, but leading you deftly by the hand into a world rich in meaning, emotion and irony. Despite the wonderful content, the great allure of McGahern's writing is its poeticality. It lulls you into another reality, enmeshing you in its fictional world in so smooth and comforting a way that you must shake your head and remind yourself where you are every time you close the pages.