Her Gynaecologist recommended him to me. Ironic: the best urologist in New York is French. Dr Jean Claude Vigneron: BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. So I made one.
time ago when I was much younger, I read all the books that John Irving had published to date. After the reading marathon, I was left with the impression that Two pair and The epic drinking water were quite loose two novels of the author and subject also quite similar, about marital problems and adaptation to adult life, big girls with big breasts and the city of Vienna as a lost paradise that never existed. The years have brought me to reread these two novels and a very different opinion about them, Two pair seemed even more sluggish in its first reading but The epic water drinker is revealed to me as a truly novel unforgettable.
One of the triumphs of Irving as a novelist is his perfect mastery of more complex narrative structures. His novels are fragmentary, jumping back and forth in time, with characters that come and go and whose real face is not going to reveal until late in the plot. And despite all this are easy reading, the reader is never going to lose in the tangle of argument because the path is well defined. In The epic water drinker, this way of telling the story is central to the story, because the reality of the protagonist is going to be revealed gradually as we know their past and current reality, what you has led to the state it is and why he left all that was left by the wayside. The protagonist is a man of exemplary life very little, but the novel exudes an atmosphere of tenderness, understanding and empathy so great that there is no choice but to end up feeling sympathy for him.
A less talented writer might finishing pink falling into melodrama, but John Irving has a style and a narrative voice so personal and at times so extreme that they prevent him from falling into easy labels. The result is a novel that everyone can read with pleasure, a great book to reach all audiences and a good book for experienced readers who want to start reading in English.