Not so sugary sweet

books:


	• The Natural (Time Reading Program Special Edition) Bernard Malamud Time-Life Books, 1980 - 241 pages average customer review:based on 99 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Defining Work

The Natural is the very best that baseball novels has to offer. As a reader, one follows the sordid life of Roy Hobbs as he tries to rebound from an indiscretion of youth that has derailed his career for many years. Just as in Frank Nappi's novel The Legend of Mickey Tussler, [[ASIN:0312381093 The Legend of Mickey Tussler], you find yourself cheering and rooting for this phenom to attain all sorts of baseball glory. But regrettably, there is something about the character -- a flaw or imperfection if you will -- that holds him back from grabbing the glory that by all means should be his. This great work reminds us that we as humans are all flawed and vulnerable, despite our physical skills and prowess. Frank Deford's novel The Entitled [[ASIN:1402208960 The Entitled]does the same thing on a more modern level. I found myself is all three cases, but mostly with Malamud's work, frustrated but riveted to the idea that these baseball stars just could not get to the level that their ability seemed to portend.

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Not Free SF Reader

A supremely outstanding baseball player is not supremely outstanding off the field, and ends up having a lot of problems because of his stardom and inability to cope with that in general.

This book is ok, but as far as sport books go you can certainly get better and more interesting things to read than this.

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Not so sugary sweet

I thought the movie "The Natural" was great. The story the book tells is even better. I think that each of the different tellings works for the different medium in which it is presented. I won't ruin it for readers by giving it away, but it's worth a read.

The only criticism I have with the book is I'm not a huge fan of Malamud's writing style. I have read several of the reviews stating that's the best thing about the book, but I don't see it. I sometimes felt like the writing got in the way of the story, rather than moved it along.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

The classical novel (and basis for the acclaimed film) now in a new editionIntroduction by Kevin BakerThe Natural, Bernard Malamud?s first novel, published in 1952, is also the first?and some would say still the best?novel ever written about baseball. In it Malamud, usually appreciated for his unerring portrayals of postwar Jewish life, took on very different material?the story of a superbly gifted ?natural? at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball era?and invested it with the hardscrabble poetry, at once grand and altogether believable, that runs through all his best work. Four decades later, Alfred Kazin?s comment still holds true: ?Malamud has done something which?now that he has done it!?looks as if we have been waiting for it all our lives. He has really raised the whole passion and craziness and fanaticism of baseball as a popular spectacle to its ordained place in mythology.?

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