The Moviegoer - Softcover

Walker Percy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0413773272 ISBN 13: 9780413773272

Publisher: Methuen Publishing Ltd, 2004

Synopsis

Winner of the 1961 National Book Award

The dazzling novel that established Walker Percy as one of the major voices in Southern literature is now available for the first time in Vintage paperback.

The Moviegoer is Binx Bolling, a young New Orleans stockbroker who surveys the world with the detached gaze of a Bourbon Street dandy even as he yearns for a spiritual redemption he cannot bring himself to believe in. On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, he occupies himself dallying with his secretaries and going to movies, which provide him with the "treasurable moments" absent from his real life. But one fateful Mardi Gras, Binx embarks on a hare-brained quest that outrages his family, endangers his fragile cousin Kate, and sends him reeling through the chaos of New Orleans' French Quarter. Wry and wrenching, rich in irony and romance, The Moviegoer is a genuine American classic.

About this title

Review:

This elegantly written account of a young man's search for signs of purpose in the universe is one of the great existential texts of the postwar era and is really funny besides. Binx Bolling, inveterate cinemaphile, contemplative rake and man of the periphery, tries hedonism and tries doing the right thing, but ultimately finds redemption (or at least the prospect of it) by taking a leap of faith and quite literally embracing what only seems irrational.

From the Inside Flap:

"A curious, tender book, provocatively and intelligently imagined."

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Binx Bolling is s small-time stockbroker who lives quietly in suburban New Orleans, pursuing an interest in the movies, affairs with his secretaries, and living out his days. But soon he finds himself on a "search" for something more important, something that will measure and mark and hold his life forever against the passage of time. And one fateful Mardi Gras week, he finds it in a way, and with a woman, he would never have expected....

"A brilliant novel...Percy touches the rim of so many human mysteries."

HARPER'S

From the author of THE THANATOS SYNDROME.

About this edition

• Publisher: Methuen Publishing Ltd
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0413773272
• ISBN 13: 9780413773272
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256