Name: Vojtech's review of The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Item: The Catcher in the Rye
Rating: 5
Author: Vojtech

J. D. Salinger

Anyone who has read J.D. Salinger's New Yorker stories--particularly A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, The Laughing Man, and For Esme With Love and Squalor--will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is full of children. The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield.

Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it.
There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep.

The Catcher in the Rye

clara

Then the carousel started, and I watched her go round and round...All the kids tried to grap for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she's fall off the goddam horse, but I didn't say or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it is bad to say anything to them.

Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.

It's Christmas time and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school. Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters - shooting the bull with strangers in dive hotels, wandering alone round Central Park, getting beaten up by pimps and cut down by erstwhile girlfriends. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the phonies and find a life of true meaning. The Catcher in the Rye is an all-time classic in coming-of-age literature- an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.

kemi

“Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles.”

Veronica Palmieri

«Ciò che contraddistingue l'uomo imnmaturo è che vuole morire nobilmente per una causa, mentre ciò che contraddistingue l'uomo maturo è che vuole vivere umilmente per essa.

Non faccio che ripetere «è stato un piacere» a gente con cui non è stato un piacere per niente. Ma se vuoi sopravvivere certa roba devi dirla.

 Si chiamava comandante Blop o qualcosa del genere. Era uno di quelli che pensano di sembrare delle checche se stringendoti la mano non ti spaccano una quarantina di dita. Dio, è roba che odio.

Sensibile. A momenti ci resto secco. Morrow era sensibile piú o meno come un asse del cesso.

 Mio fratello Alie aveva questo guanto da baseball da esterno mancino. Era mancino anche lui. Si prestava alla descrizione perché c'erano scritte delle poesie sulle dita, nel palmo e dappertutto. Con l'inchiostro verde. Se le era scritte lui da solo, per avere qualcosa da leggere quand'era in campo e nessuno batteva. Poi è morto. Gli è venuta la leucemia ed è morto mentre eravamo nel Maine, il 18 luglio 1946. Vi sarebbe piaciuto, lui. 

Ci ha detto di pensare a Gesú come a un amico o roba del genere. Che lui con Gesú parla sempre. Perfino mentre guida. M’ha fatto morire. Me lo vedo, quel bastardo ipocrita, mentre ingrana la prima e intanto chiede a Gesú di farne secco qualcun altro. 

- Ma la vita è una partita, caro ragazzo. È una partita che va giocata secondo le regole.

Partita un cazzo. Alla faccia della partita. È una partita se stai dalla parte di quelli forti, allora sí, te lo concedo. Ma se stai dall'altra parte, dove di forte non c'è nessuno, che razza di partita è? Non lo è. Non c'è gara.

La partita con il Saxon Hall era una specie di affare di stato, lì a scuola. Essendo l'ultima dell'anno, se la vecchia Pencey non vinceva sembrava dovessi come minimo suicidarti. 

Come se lí uno non facesse altro che giocare a polo dal mattino alla sera. Io non ci ho mai visto un cavallo nemmeno per sbaglio. E sotto la foto del fenomeno a cavallo e'è sempre la scritta: «Dal 1888, forgiamo magnifici giovani con le idee chiare». Beato chi ci crede. Alla Pencey non forgiano un accidente, come in tutte le altre scuole. E io, lí, di gente magnifica e con le idee chiare eccetera, non ne ho mai conosciuta. Forse due tizi. Ma al massimo. E probabilmente erano cosí già prima di arrivarci, alla Pencey,

“My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. He was left-handed. The thing that was descriptive about it, though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up at bat. He's dead now.”

“Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them - if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”

Avarni B

Here's what he said: 'The mark of the inmmature man is that he wants to die nobly fora cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.'

Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it.

All I did was, I got up and went over and looked out the window. I felt so lonesome, all of a sudden. I almost wished I was dead.

It was a very good book. I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.

i'm not saying that this novel inspired the prose style of my immortal, but also.....

"Boy!" I said. I also say "Boy!" quite a lot. Partly because I have a lousy vocabulary and party because I act quite young for my age sometimes. I was sixteen then, and I'm seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I'm about thirteen. It's really ironical, because I'm six foot two and a half and I have gray hair. 

why did nobody tell me how fucking funny this book is? can't believe i had to discover this myself after years of procrastination 

It was the last game of the year, and you were supposed to commit suicide or something if old Pencey didn't win

Kdo chytá v z̆itĕ

Lucik

Vojtech

The catcher in the rye

Joe Ross

I read this at least once a year and it keeps me young.

The "brilliant, funny, meaningful novel" (The New Yorker) that established J. D. Salinger as a leading voice in American literature--and that has instilled in millions of readers around the world a lifelong love of books. "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth." The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caufield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days.

Lara Engle

I hated this book in high school. HATED. And I was one of those kids who found something to like in every book we read in school. It was Holden. He's just the worst. 

I still think Holden is the worst, but I genuinely enjoyed reading this book ( most of the time) now that I'm almost 40. At first, I found Holden's immaturity kind of pathetically funny. As his anxiety became more apparent, I began to feel sorry for him. Then, with traumatic events from his past stacking up and his loneliness and alcohol issues in the foreground, the true piercing tragedy of Holden's listlessness and bumbling about jabs through. 

Maybe it's the intervening years. Maybe it's that I'm his mom's age, rather than his age. Maybe it's the students I see in him. Maybe it's just that I've developed some compassion over time. Whatever it is, I feel sad for him, not annoyed by him. (Mostly.) I hope Holden finds his way, and I hope we never get some ridiculous unpublished sequel to tell us whether he did.

Patricia Nelson

I had never read this classic before, and while I can see that it is well-written, it's not for me. I finished it because it was a book club book, but found it hard to get through. It's not a book that I will keep, re-read, and think about a great deal.

I feel like this book would have made such an impact on me when I was a teenager, however as an adult now I can still appreciate this piece of literature. Interpreting it as a “coming of age” piece, where the main protagonist John Holden doesn’t want to be apart of the greying adulthood and is determined to hold onto his youth. 

jaz ☁️

Shape Mismatch

tl;dr: READ THE DAMNED BOOK. READ IT WITH A OPEN MIND.

Reading this book has been pending for a long time. It wasn't born out of countless recommendations. It wasn't born out of checking out why is this book so famous. It wasn't because the first twenty pages hit me out of the blue, and were nothing that I expected. It was because of the coming together of all these reasons, just one fine day. I'm glad I picked it up.

His account, as presented in the book is nothing like I've read before. It's raw. It's in sepia. It's brutally honest and it's innocent as hell. It gives you a very surreal perspective inside the narrator's head. 

It's very difficult to describe what it feels like to read this book. I can't help but notice that there are some similarities to (inspirations from) Russian authors, like Dostoevsky, or Bulgakov. A very small slice of events in one's life reflect his/her mindsets, in a very honest manner. That's what is accomplished in the book. This honesty is disorienting. It's a breather from this modern (postmodern? idk) way of life we've donned; of the pretence that we've all come to expect in social interactions. The book always challenges you to judge Holden to be right, or wrong. I was trying, and I failed everytime to put him in my framework or right/wrong, rational/dysfunctional. And it is this failure that made the experience so disorienting, miles out of my comfort zone, and unforgettable. 

A lot of other reviewers argue that you either associate with Holden, or you don't. I don't entirely. But I do sometimes. Sometimes I wish I did. Doing what I've never known books to do, this book increased my horizons of what consists of a great book, a great narrative and an unforgettable piece. If you're really read this far (why would you?), and are still unsure about reading it, try reading the first few chapters. That should compel you.

Nox Schoonmaker

Pretty good. I like this style of writing a lot.

nidia t

It’s that teenage spirit - the sort of urge to rebel against societal norms, the sort of urge to ‘live fast, die young’, the sort of rash, careless urge to grow up in a hurry - that fully characterizes Holden Caulfield and the novel, being a realistic and relevant depiction of youth that still holds relevance in modern society. It’s that essence of trying to find your place in the vast, cold-blooded world we call home. It’s that loss of innocence and navigation of the world - universal experiences that accompanies and defines the process of growing up. 

“I think that one of these days...you’re going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you’ve got to start going there. But immediately. You can’t afford to lose a minute. Not you.” 

The seemingly endless yet spontaneous nature of it all depicts the trials and tribulations of youth, serving as a basis for the novel and common themes experienced by us all today; reflective of the true nature of youth and life.

I remember I really liked this the first time I read it many years ago but for some reason on its second reread I barely enjoyed the story. Settling on a tentative (and confused) 3 stars...

Connor Bragg

Really enjoyed this. I think it’s gonna stick with me a long time after.

Bilge Ince

I know he's dead! Don't you think I know that? I can still like him, though, can't I? Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them, for God's sake-- especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that’re alive and all.

I couldn't finish this book when I read it 

Lexy 

alexandra

i don't know why but i cried, like, three times. holdon is such a strange character to read from but you could clearly see that he's an extremely complex and thorough characters. this book made me think and think and think. i haven't read one that's given me that type of experience for a while so it was really refreshing. i love this not because the writing was good or plot was or even characters were good; i love this this because it is so in-depth and the layers in the meaning are endless. symbols! metaphors!

El guardián entre el centeno

Marianela Arevalo

It was a good book even if it is not the style that I am used to reading.

This new edition reproduces, for the first time in Penguin Books, the original American text.

Rosamund Mather

Still really good.
"Don't tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

El Guardian Entre el Centeno/ The Catcher in the Rye

Daniel Carril

Sin dudar de su icónico carácter, el caso es que no me pareció tan extraordinaria como mucha gente afirma. Quizá la leí demasiado tarde. Quizá la leí en un momento poco adecuado. Quizá sea yo un insensible.

I‘m not sure if I understood.. it was as if you were listening to a person with ADHD jump from one topic to the other, lots of swearing, seemingly unconnected yet somehow connected, quite quirky eventually depressing. It was quite stretched, i had to force myself to finish reading it (though I have to say I am happy to have finished it, the meaning of the title seems very deep).

Valentina

dilara sener

Gavin

Mostly annoying, but I can see how it was important (for at least lending an actual voice, at least pointing at the real deal hyperactive aimlessness of many young adults).

if it wasn't a literature classic i would have dnfed it 2 chapters in. 

claire cheah

Joana da Silva

“i have a feeling that you’re riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. but i don’t honestly know what kind.”

holden caulfield is the rightful poster boy for teenage angst and disillusionment, but reading this novel again after a few years and in the wake of a depressive episode made me respect his character much more. his recurring question of where ducks go in wintertime, after their lakes have frozen over, can also be read as: "where do we go when things get tough? where do we go when there's nothing to turn to?" god knows we could all use a straight answer, but holden is never actually given one. he has to venture into the literal/metaphorical dark to find it himself, and i hope it comes someday.

“i have a feeling that you’re riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. but i don’t honestly know what kind.”

holden caulfield is the rightful poster boy for teenage angst and disillusionment, but reading this novel again after a few years and in the wake of a depressive episode made me respect his character much more. his recurring question of where ducks go in wintertime, after their lakes have frozen over, can also be read as: "where do we go when things get tough? where do we go when there's nothing to turn to?" god knows we could all use a straight answer, but holden is never actually given one. he has to venture into the literal/metaphorical dark to find it himself, and i hope it comes someday.

Interesting the different take I have on it now as opposed to my middle school take. In middle school it was more so a strong contrarian influence, and now it’s seeing a boy in a difficult state, who accurately sees the overwhelming injustice in society but who also participates in his own way in some injustices (as far as I can tell). He is himself phony sometimes when he lies, though maybe not in the same sense in which he calls other people phony.

Zeke Taylor

The Catcher in Rye is the ultimate novel for disaffected youth, but it's relevant to all ages. The story is told by Holden Caulfield, a seventeen- year-old dropout who has just been kicked out of his fourth school. Throughout, Holden dissects the 'phony' aspects of society, and the 'phonies' themselves- the headmaster whose affability depends on the wealth of the parents, his roommate who scores with girls using sickly-sweet affection. Lazy in style, full of slang and swear words, it's a novel whose interest and appeal comes from its observations rather than its plot intrigues (in conventional terms, there is hardly any plot at all). Salinger's style creates an effect of conversation, it is as though Holden is speaking to you personally, as though you too have seen through the pretences of the American Dream and are growing up unable to see the point of living in, or contributing to, the society around you. Written with the clarity of a boy leaving childhood, it deals with society, love, loss, and expectations without ever falling into the clutch of a cliche

This book was not what I was expecting. People were saying it's 'problematic' and all that bad stuff so that was one of the reasons why I wanted to read it. The thing is it's actually really wholesome I mean I expected some dark twist towards the end, but it didn't happen. I really felt at home reading this book and I get it why people say it's 'problematic' beacuse of the language book uses. But it teaches good lessan and how I understood it it's that you will always have someone you can rely on even if you feel all alone on this world like Holden had Phoebe. Also their relationship is another thing I like in this book.

This book is really good and easy to read. It's also pretty short so you can read it in a day or two. And I'm glad I bought it.

Wirt

This book was not what I was expecting. People were saying it's 'problematic' and all that bad stuff so that was one of the reasons why I wanted to read it. The thing is it's actually really wholesome I mean I expected some dark twist towards the end, but it didn't happen. I really felt at home reading this book and I get it why people say it's 'problematic' beacuse of the language book uses. But it teaches good lessan and how I understood it it's that you will always have someone you can rely on even if you feel all alone on this world like Holden had Phoebe. Also their relationship is another thing I like in this book.

This book is really good and easy to read. It's also pretty short so you can read it in a day or two. And I'm glad I bought it.

Der sechzehnjährige durch New York irrende Holden Caulfield ist zu einer Kultfigur ganzer Generationen geworden. 'Der Fänger im Roggen' war J. D. Salingers erster Roman, mit dem er weltweit berühmt wurde.

Roman

Der Fänger im Roggen

Ein Buch über die Wachstumsschmerzen beim Erwachsenenwerden. So universell wie beliebig. Es bietet in seiner Einfachheit alles und nichts an. Man kann die Sprache und Wandlung des Protagonisten sezieren und endlos interpretieren oder es einfach zum verschenken rauslegen: beides würde dem Buch gerecht werden. 

Vojtech &
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

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The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger