John Hughes
speaker
199 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 4 Jun
John Hughes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Came before Radetzky March, although we've already discussed perhaps the most famous novel.
But Job is perhaps a close second, certainly...
looking at his reputation around the world.
It's a very widely read, translated, much-loved novel.
Give it its full title, it's Job, the story or the novel of a simple man.
And in a way, it reprises some of the things that made Rebellion a great novel.
It has a sort of simplicity about it, a sort of fable-like structure.
It plays loosely with the story of the book of Job.
But unlike Rebellion, it's firmly set in the past.
It's the first novel in which he sets the story firmly in the pre-war world in central Europe in which he'd grown up.
And it's also unusually amongst Roth's works.
It's firmly set in a Jewish milieu, which is not something he did that often.
So the main character Mendel Singer, the simple man of the title, is an embodiment of the Hasidic Eastern Jews, the Ostjuden.
And he's presented as a pious man, as a village teacher who lives just on the other side of the border with the Russian Empire.
So just outside of the geographical limits of Galicia.
And in the course of the story, he suffers misfortune after misfortune, both him personally and his family, starting with the birth of a son with disabilities, Menuchim.
He then becomes alienated from his older sons and then loses them during the war.
His wife, Deborah, dies and his oldest daughter, Miriam, becomes mentally ill.
And the description of Miriam's sort of mental collapse and institutionalisation shows
writing in 1930, shortly after the same thing had happened to Friedl, is indeed, you know, very... It's a tough read.
Showing 101–120 of 199 · page 6 of 10
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