As an undergraduate at UCLA, I read and re-read Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, reveling in the antics of the boozing, brawling, working-class character Arthur Seaton. However, as years passed (and I got my Ph.D., married, bought a house and had a kid), I found it difficult to identify with the literary hero of my young adulthood.

Birthday has made Arthur Seaton alive and relevant to me again. What a joy to catch up with Arthur over 40 literary years later and see how an "angry young man" ages gracefully... sort of . Arthur is now a responsible parent, loving husband to a terminally-ill wife, and tender of a vegetable garden in his own home. Yet, he is the same old Arthur: telling outrageous stories, complaining about the uselessness of the government, and half-threatening to kill a young co-worker for wasting food (remember, Arthur Seaton grew up in a war-deprived England).

Birthday alludes to many moments from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Sometimes, the results are hilarious: A 60-year-old Arthur, for example, finds himself counseling a spitting-image son who has visions of blowing up Parliament and telling his boss off -- the same fantasies Arthur professed as a young man. Often, the past references are touching. See the recently-widowed Arthur frolic with his grandson (and re-engage in life) the way he used to with his young nephew back in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

Fans of Saturday Night beware: much of Birthday focuses on Arthur's brother Brian and his weary struggle with existential issues and regret. The subplots with Arthur, however, really crackle with energy and good humor. I felt great after reading this book. If Arthur Seaton can remain vital through older adulthood, then maybe so can I. Cheers, Arthur!

First time I took a hold of that book I was 13. "Start In Life" seemed to be a timely reading. I was a bookish teenager looking for role models and Mike Cullen turned to be a major find. The flamboyant clerk then strip-club bouncer then mafia boss chaffeur then crazy writer's secretary then gold smuggler then convict then landlord is a fascinating figure.

Mike Cullen flirts with danger, takes to bed as many ladies as he can manage, tries to make a quick pound in every way possible, falls in love, makes friends, engages in philosophical conversations and fistfights - he is bursting with life and certainly is not afraid of living.

Since then that jaunty working class hero was always on my mind, urging me not to be a sissy and add an extra spice to life. My bookish side was captured by Thornton Wilder's Theophil Nort but every time I was in for a trick or two it was Mike Cullen stirring in me.

Now I am 33 and these two decades were not as eventful as I hoped - but is that not the case with all of us?

Anyway, when the gloom and depression lurk nearby I open that book, read, smile and hope for a new start.

Nihilon is a country turned upside down. Two-storey buildings have wooden ground floors and concrete second floors. TV and radio news is announced as "Here are the lies!" Pets are part of the census in the city of Fludd, so when the dam breaks, the number of "souls" lost can be so mush higher (international aid, don't you know). Natural resources are conjured out of thin air by geographers, to attract foreign mining operations.

And on and on and on.

This is a hugely funny book about the sort of cynicism you see in places like Yugoslavia, assorted third-world countries, and the UN. Highly recommended.

Gillian Hanson provides her audience with a comprehensive and technically wonderful critical analysis of Silitoe's works - in effect, a brilliant overview of one the twentieth century's greatest writers. Hanson displays an amazing aptitude for conveying the inherent meaning in Silitoe's writing - an almost uncanny understanding of the thoughts and emotions that drove his fiction. It is an excellent choice for either scholarly efforts or casual reading - highly recommended.

Sillitoe's work shows Arthur living his life to the extent his class boundaries will allow. Drinking, womanising, and violence dominate Arthurs life away from his lathe. We follow him on the breathless ride that is his life in the first part of the novel Saturday Night, and then on his reajustment to a calmer more sustainable life in Sunday Morning. The perspective the reader is given is Arthurs if only he could articulate it. This allows the reader to experience the working class perspective without the limits that somone lacking the education to express themselves as effectively would have. This is the key to the novel as the reader can utterly empathise with Arthur. A working class novel that does not focus on poverty but how class frustrations are expressed makes a welcome change.

one of the best books i have ever been forced to read. my english class is reading it. an awesome novel.

A working class man in northern England, Sillitoe bring to life the way it used to be. Between cups of tea, Woodbines, too many pints for sobriety and a long list of ladies, our man Arthur spends his days in mindless bicycle manufacture and his nights forgetting it all. There is the smell of coal smoke in the winter air, the taste and crunch of fried bread and bacon, the scent of a woman and the hard reality of no exit. Arthur came from a family who had spent too many years on the dole, a situation now repreating itself in England. Prosperity was a full larder and an endless supply of cigarettes and new clothes. Sillitoe has captured it all in a book which still breathes the life he infused into it almost 40 years ago.

I spent a whole term going over this book in freshmen English class. It is an overall good book, full of interpritations. There are many symbolisms and allusions. However, it is important to remember that this book was originally a serialization, as it came out every week in the paper. There are some parts when Dickens drawls on with his plans, events, ect. However, there are scenes that are very fast paced and action filled. The overall plot is a young, naive boy of about ten lives with his sister and her simple husband named Joe. However, Pip is given a secret benefactor and is thrust in the life of nobility. Pip is tangled in his probelems of leaving Joe behind and his encouters with the shallow (and I mean SHALLOW) Estella and the wicked Miss Havisham. Dickens is a master with characters and the languege, but he doesn't describe any everyday events. For example, Pip goes to study law, but thats all we know. In my opinion, it gives the characters this higher than life importance, and less real. But, if you take this book slowely, maybe a chapter a night (instead of the five I had to do), you will definately enjoy this book.

I've never read any Dickens of my own free will. I was forced to read "A Tale of Two Cities" in high school and I thought that was enough for me. However, one day, on a whim, I bought a copy of Great Expectations. I'm not sure what I expected, but I certainly didn't expect to love it as much as I did.

Dickens is not a writer to read at a swift pace. Indeed, this novel was written in weekly episodes from December 1860 to August 1861 and, as it was created to be a serial, each installment is full of varied characters, great descriptions and a lot of action which moves the plot along and leaves the reader yearning for more. Therefore, unlike some books which are easily forgotten if I put them down for a few days, Great Expectations seemed to stick around, absorbing my thoughts in a way that I looked forward to picking it up again. It took me more than a month to read and I savored every morsel.

Basically the story is of the self-development of Pip, an orphan boy being raised by his sister and her blacksmith husband in the marshlands of England in 1820.

Every one of the characters were so deeply developed that I felt I was personally acquainted with each one of them. There was Pip's roommate, Herbert Pocket, the lawyer, Mr. Jaggers, and his clerk, Mr. Wemmick. And then there was the wicked Orlick. The dialogues were wonderful. The characters often didn't actually say what they meant but spoke in a way that even though the words might be obtuse, there was no mistaking their meaning. I found myself smiling at all these verbal contortions.

Dickens' work is richly detailed and he explores the nuances of human behavior. I enjoyed wallowing in the long sentences and letting myself travel backwards in time to a different world. However, even with the footnotes, I found myself sometimes confused by the British slang of 150 years ago, and there were several passages I had to read over several times in order to get the true meaning. Of course I was not in a particular rush. I didn't have to make a report to a class or take a exam about the book. This is certainly a pleasure.

I heartily recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good read.ting from the secret wealth of Magwitch, who made a fortune in Australia after being transported. Moreover, Magwitch's unlawful return to England puts him and Pip in danger. Meanwhile, Estella has married another, a horrible man who Pip despises. Eventually, with Magwitch's recapture and death in prison and with his fortune gone, Pip ends up in debtors prison, but Joe redeems his debts and brings him home. Pip realizes that Magwitch was a more devoted friend to him than he ever was to Joe and with this realization Pip becomes, finally, a whole and decent human being.

Originally, Dickens wrote a conclusion that made it clear that Pip and Estella will never be together, that Estella is finally too devoid of heart to love. But at the urging of others, he changed the ending and left it more open ended, with the possibility that Estella too has learned and grown from her experiences and her wretched marriages.

This is the work of a mature novelist at the height of his powers. It has everything you could ask for in a novel: central characters who actually change and grow over the course of the story, becoming better people in the end; a plot laden with mystery and irony; amusing secondary characters; you name it, it's in here. I would rank it with A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield among the very best novels of the worlds greatest novelist.

GRADE: A+

Dickens, along with Dostoevsky, stands atop my list of novelists who could most accurately portray the subtleties of human emotion and passion. "Great Expectations" is simply a masterpiece of 19th-century fiction, and is pure Dickens. In this semi-autobiographical work (a trademark of Dickens' writings), the life of a poor young boy, Pip, is followed from his humble beginnings to his rise into the middle-class, due to the mysterious aid of an unknown benefactor. His pursuit of Estella, a beautiful young girl raised to break the hearts of men by her jilted caretaker, Ms. Havisham, is a classic of literature that has been repeated countless times since. The tragic, gradual break between Pip and his family (particularly the humble but caring Joe) is heartwrenching. Pip's eventual realization of the insincerity of the middle class, and his love for Joe, brought tears to my eyes.

"Great Expectations" is a wonderful, moving book that has been copied and satired again and again, from Mishima's "Forbidden Colors" to South Park. An important and unforgettable novel!

Up to 1945 the working class in Great Britain was expected to kow-tow to the 'educated' ruling classes. After 1945 social change blurred the divisions between the classes and one of the people who gained most from this change was Alan Sillitoe. He came from a working class background but was allowed to fulfil his ambitions to be a writer that up to WW2 was the province of the wealthy. Sillitoe wrote about what he knew i.e. the working class in a Midlands town in a period of social change from the end of WW2 up to (in this particular collection of short stories) the mid to late 1950's. He does not attempt to moralise and , I believe, does not attempt to romanticise what it was really like to live in Britain in the aftermath of WW2. He does attempt to paint a picture of a class of people that may appear to be alien to people who have been influenced the Pathe News Reels of the 1940's and 1950's. This book describes better than most academic text books what life was really like for the majority of the British people after WW2.

This is Sillitoe's best-known work, a collection of stories presumably drawn in large part from his working class life in Great Britain. The book's emphasis on gritty realism will not be everyone's cup of tea -- no pun intended -- but I found his prose clean, powerful and nearly free of sentimentality.

Sillitoe's sympathy for the working class is best demonstrated in the title story, narrated by a teen resident of a reform school whose voice vibrates with rebellion. The youth shows a keen awareness of his position within England's rigid class structure and has made a conscious decision to resist those whom he says have "the whip hand" over him. Sillitoe reveals the motivation for his protagonist's attitude in an understated but memorable scene in which the youth remembers finding his laborer father dead, blood spilled out of his consumptive body. The reader sees the boy's perception that his father's life has been used up by the system. In the story's surprising final turn, the youth -- who has become a champion runner for his school -- attempts in his own way to turn the tables on that system.

The book contains several other strong stories. "The Fishing-Boat Picture" is the bittersweet memoir of a failed marriage; it effectively dramatizes the sense of lost opportunity we feel when our most important human connections are broken. "Mr Raynor the School-Teacher" brings to life the stultifying atmosphere of a London public school classroom presided over by a jaded teacher whose only ambition is to keep his rebellious charges at bay so that he can drift in reverie. "The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller" has the feeling of a memoir. The narrator describes his hardscrabble youth and subsequent escape from his environment. Frankie Buller is the symbol of the ruined youth he left behind: a boy who was once a giant among his playmates who has grown older without ever progressing spiritually or creatively. The narrator would never wish to be a Frankie Buller, but his words are permeated with the guilty tone of the survivor.

Not all of the stories succeed as admirably as these. Still, at his best, Sillitoe crafts the claustrophobic environments of his stories, often in the service of social criticism. His characters may long to escape the grays and blacks of their worlds, but the stories themselves offer no such escape for the reader.

It was a bit difficult for me to understand the book bacause English is not my native language, but I think the book will be really great if you understand this kind of low-class colloquial English. It is very philosophical and makes you think about the moral question of what is right or wrong and also about honesty and cheating. The race that Smith loses on purpose at the end is very interesting, I always thought he would change his mind and win the race, when he was thinking about his father's death and the possibility to have a wife and children and a "honest" work. Sometimes I wished he would change his mind because he is an intelligent guy but most of time I think it's good that he goes his own way and doesn't do what other people want him to do.

I think the story is not very interesting. And it`s very difficult to understand, because there are a lot of time leaps between the past and the future and you can`t differentiate between them. I wouldn`t recommend it.