The Natural

The Natural
by Bernard Malamud

The Natural
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Book Summary Information

Author: Bernard Malamud
Introduction: Kevin Baker
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2003-07-07
ISBN: 0374502005
Number of pages: 248
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Book Reviews of The Natural

Book Review: Not so sugary sweet
Summary: 4 Stars

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.

Summary of The Natural

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."

Roy Hobbs, the protagonist of The Natural, makes the mistake of pronouncing aloud his dream: to be the best there ever was. Such hubris, of course, invites divine intervention, but the brilliance of Bernard Malamud's novel is the second chance it offers its hero, elevating him--and his story--into the realm of myth.

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