Closing Time by Joseph Heller (First Edition)
In a novel as darkly comic and audaciously ambitious as was Catch-22, Joseph Heller has dared to write the sequel to his American classic, using many of Catch-22's characters, now older if not wiser, to deftly satirize the realities and the myths of America in the half century since they fought World War II.
In 1961, Joseph Heller's remarkable first novel made its way immediately into the American psyche and came to symbolize the absurdity of war and of life. Catch-22 was recognized overnight as a classic and has sold nearly ten million copies in the United States alone. It remains perhaps the funniest - and the most serious - novel ever written about war, "an apocalyptic masterpiece," in the words of one reviewer.
Now, thirty-three years later, Joseph Heller has written the sequel. You don't have to have read Catch-22 (But then, who on earth hasn't?) to enjoy Closing Time, which is a fully independent companion work, a comic masterpiece in its own right, in which Heller spears the inflated balloons of our national consciousness - the absurdity of our politics, the decline of society and our great cities, the greed and hypocrisy of our business and culture - with the same ferocious humor that he used against the conventional view of warfare. His characters are those of Catch-22, coming to the end of their lives and the century, as is the entire generation that fought in World War II: Yossarian, and Milo Minderbinder, the chaplain, and such newcomers as little Sammy Singer and giant Lew, all linked, this time in uneasy peace and old age, fighting, not the Germans this time, but The End.
Closing Time is outrageously funny and totally serious, and as brilliant and successful as Catch-22 itself, a fun-house mirror that captures, at once grotesquely and accurately, the truth about ourselves.
Format: Hardback | 464 pages
Dimensions (cm): 24.1 x 16 x 3.4 | 818g
Publication Date: 01 Oct 1994
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication City/Country: New York, United States
Language: English
Edition Number: 1
ISBN10: 0671746049
ISBN13: 9780671746049
Condition: Good
A vintage book that has been read but is in good condition. No visible damage to the cover. The dust jacket is included and in very good condition. The majority of pages are undamaged with no creasing or tearing, no pencil underlining of text, no highlighting of text, no writing in margins. There are some minor blotches of discolouring, most of which can only be seen on the block when the book is closed. No missing pages.