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    Ed King
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    Ed King
    Unavailable
    Ed King
    Audiobook14 hours

    Ed King

    Written by David Guterson

    Narrated by Arthur Morey

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A sweeping, propulsive, darkly humorous new novel by the best-selling author of Snow Falling on Cedars: a story of destiny, desire, and destruction that reimagines Sophocles's Oedipus Rex for our own era.
     
    In Seattle in 1962, Walter Cousins, a mild-mannered actuary-"a guy who weighs risk for a living"-takes a risk of his own, and makes the biggest error of his life. He sleeps with Diane Burroughs, the sexy, not-quite-legal British au pair who's taking care of his children for the summer. Diane gets pregnant and leaves their baby on a doorstep, but not before turning the tables on Walter and setting in motion a tragedy of epic proportions. Their orphaned child, adopted by an adoring family and named Edward Aaron King, grows up to become a billionaire Internet tycoon and an international celebrity-the "King of Search"-who unknowingly, but inexorably, hurtles through life toward a fate he may have no power to shape.
     
    An instant classic-David Guterson's most daring and dazzling novel yet-that brings a contemporary urgency to one of the greatest stories of all time.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateOct 18, 2011
    ISBN9780307939418
    Unavailable
    Ed King
    Author

    David Guterson

    David Guterson is the author of the novels Snow Falling on Cedars, East of the Mountains, Our Lady of the Forest and The Other; a collection of short stories, The Country Ahead Of Us, The Country Behind, and of the non-fiction book Family Matters: Why Home Schooling Makes Sense. Snow Falling on Cedars won the PEN/ Faulkner Award. David Guterson lives in Washington State.

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    Reviews for Ed King

    3/5

    69 ratings8 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Had moments but disappointing overall.
    • 3/5
      I am weary of the bleak portraits of Seattle that every author from the area paints. Having finished Guterson's "The Other" which I loved because of its depth, I had high hopes for "Ed King". Instead, it was back to the bleak portraiture of the northwest, imbued with negativity from the characters.

      One of my peeves is that while some authors paint a vivid portrait of place, Guterson names places but never gives the locations character or roundness. Like every other cliche northwest portrait, the focus is the weather. Grey, dark, bleak and rainy. Seattle has that but it also has spectacular sunny days July through October with a bright technicolor landscape from which to draw. He also names neighborhoods without ever drawing out the character of those neighborhoods.

      Of course everyone who lives here is a techie. That's old, boring and cliche. Only a few from here are homegrown techies. Most of the geeks come from outside of Washington State to work in the tech industry. Washingtonians have deeper and richer histories than Microsoft. That is lost in this book which starts in 1962 and fails to pull out the real history of the city.

      The characters are also cynical and each has an air of sleaziness or criminality attached to them. For that to be effective or make you want to have empathy or even care a little about the characters there has to be some redeeming quality.

      Given the importance of Walter, he is never fully rounded and I felt nothing on his demise. Diane was an out an out con artist and again, I felt nothing for her. Simon isn't drawn well and it became confusing during Ed's teenage years as to how old he actually was - at first he seemed like he was about 18 or 19 and suddenly he's back to 16 or 17 and a high school junior. He moved from 19 to 27 in less than a chapter and it didn't feel like those formative years were filled with experiences beyond sex.

      While the book is meant to evoke thoughts of Oedipus and Electra, the incessant descriptions of sex got boring quickly without evoking the above mentioned real stories about the agonies of those loves and the soul searching. I know he can write soul searching because I really felt that in "The Other." This time, the souls were empty.

      I will pass my copy on to others who are interested in the author but I won't recommend it - I will be interested to see what conclusions those avid readers and fans of the author draw from it.
    • 3/5
      A cleverly crafted story that take you through the highs and lows of a family overcome with greed, vanity and self absorption. It is a book you hate to put down because you know the plot will twist again in an unexpected (or expected) way in the next chapter as it did in the chapter before. A modern twist on an age-old classic "Oedipus Rex".
    • 2/5
      The book is a computer-age retelling of Sophocles' play "Oedipus Rex" which Aristotle considered the perfect tragedy. Unfortunately, Guterson's reworking of the Greek tale of patricide and incest is not quite so perfect; in fact, it won the 2011 Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award for the worst description of a sex scene in a novel. The setting is Oregon, beginning in the 1960s. Walter Cousins has an affair with his underage British au pair, Diane Burroughs, who becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son whom she abandons. The child is adopted by Dan and Alice King who name him Edward Aaron (his middle name a salute to the King of Rock and Roll). The rest of the novel covers Diane and Ed's lives. Diane constantly remakes herself; at different times she is an escort, wealthy wife, much-less-wealthy divorcee, cocaine dealer and life coach. For Ed, everything comes easily, since he has both looks and intelligence; with his attitude of superiority and entitlement, his encounter with Walter on an isolated road has predictable consequences. Ed and Diane meet and marry and become the king and queen of an internet domain. When Ed discovers that he was adopted and learns the identity of his parents, the result is a supersonic version of the myth of Icarus.One problem with the novel is that it is long on exposition and short on dialogue. There is a definite lack of showing and much telling in the vein that this happened and then this happened and then this happened. Another weakness is that all the characters are superficial and amoral. No one is likable, and their unrelenting superficiality and amorality begin to grate. Ed (a composite of modern America's gods of technology - Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg) is no tragic hero: he is not a good man with one major character flaw.The soullessness of the characters is intentional. It conveys a message about modern culture since the book is somewhat a social satire with commentary on such topics as cosmetic surgery, the violence of gaming, global warming, and the ruthlessness of tech-titans. The strongest appeal of the novel is seeing how the mythical elements have been modernized. Anyone who has read Sophocles will appreciate how some of the original tale has been incorporated: Ed, like Oedipus, is born to a man of dubious morals, is abandoned, and is passed on to a "kingly" family. Both experience foot problems. Ed's attempt to create artificial intelligence can be interpreted as his attempt to crack the riddle of the Sphinx. Ed names his search engine Pythia, the name of the Oracle of Delphi. The excerpts of internet chatter at the beginning and end serve as a type of Greek chorus. Unfortunately, sometimes the parallels are made too obvious. Does Ed really have to be told that he suffers from "an overwhelming and dangerous hubris"?It can be hoped that Guterson's book will entice people to read or re-read the original drama; its lessons about ambition and hubris need not be modernized to be seen as relevant today as they were in the time of Sophocles and Aristotle.
    • 3/5
      Ed King made me want to blind myself. This "[insert publisher's hyperbole here] retelling of Oedipus Rex" is so overdone and overdetermined that, gosh, without those useful chapter headings, like "incest," and the book's title, I don't know how I ever would have noticed all of that symbolism. Maybe Guterson should have included chapter and verse from the play so that readers could compare texts.The text is flat, the main characters stock actors from Silicon Valley. (The character of Ed King is made up of some of the more obnoxious traits of famous folk around here.) The only truly interesting character is the pilot. I wasn't going to read this, but then I read the first two paragraphs of the NYT review, which seemed positive. I didn't want to know too much about the book, so I didn't read the entire review; had I read the whole thing, I would've found that the reviewer wasn't totally impressed, either. He (I think it was a he) seemed to think Guterson was trying some literary experiment by writing at a remove about tedious people--and that the experiment didn't entirely work. My take is a little harsher: Guterson tried to make a gas, and instead got a liquid.
    • 3/5
      The intertwining stories of several people which was a bit frustrating. At times, the story would drag on with incidentals and then leap fast through the years within a paragraph. I was not surprised by the twist as I felt it was coming. Also, I was disappointed that Diane did not make more of her revenge towards her brother (ie never revealed herself). The whole thing had a Pulp Fiction tone to it.
    • 3/5
      If there were an award for “Most Unusual Novel of the Year,” David Guterson’s Ed King would most certainly be a contender for this year’s title. The buzz about Ed King is that it is an imaginative retelling of Oedipus Rex, the ancient Greek tragedy by Sophocles in which an unfortunate young man is fated to kill his father and marry his mother (remember that one from high school?). Unfortunately for Ed King (note the not so subtle similarity between the names “Ed King” and “Oedipus Rex”), he will do the same. The story begins in 1962 Seattle, just when actuary Walter Cousins finds himself in need of someone to help him care for his two young children. Lydia, Walter’s wife, has been hospitalized in a psychiatric facility, and he is unable to cope with all the demands he suddenly faces. Walter sees fifteen-year-old English au pair Diane Burroughs as the perfect solution to his problem. Immediately smitten as he is by the teen’s irreverent persona, Walter should have sensed trouble ahead. Unfortunately, he does not – and his affair with the girl produces an illegitimate child he wants desperately to hide from his wife.This boy baby, after he is adopted by a wealthy, childless Jewish couple, will become Ed King, the book’s title character. Decades later, Ed will have earned his own fortune, reputation, and cult following (a la Steve Jobs), and will be known to the world as “The King of Search” for having developed what seems to be the ultimate search engine. In the meantime, Diane Burroughs, Ed’s mother, has used her wits to con her way into (and out of) a fortune or two of her own, and his father, the philandering actuary, has used his to keep Lydia in the dark about his long string of love affairs.Ed King, despite beginning in 1962 and ending in the future, is not a particularly long book - coming in at just 320 pages. But using relatively few pages to cover more than six decades in the lives of several key characters as he does, forces Guterson to use an annoying amount of third-person summarization to catch the reader up when the author wants to skip over large gaps in time. That these sections of the book are sometimes dominated by page-long paragraphs detailing some of the book’s driest material, often kills the flow developed in previous chapters and makes it difficult for the reader to maintain momentum.Surprisingly, despite the intimate details revealed about Ed’s physical relationship with his mother, that relationship comes across as far less shocking than one would imagine. The premise of Ed King is interesting but the first half of the book, during which Ed and his parents get themselves into their ultimate predicament, is the book’s stronger half. This one is intriguing, but I do not expect it to make many “Best of 2011” lists.Rated at: 3.0
    • 4/5
      If you're expecting another Snow Falling on Cedars, you may be disappointed in Ed King, - this is an altogether different kind of book. I loved it anyway.Ed himself isn't introduced until quite a few pages into the book, although there are some postings about him at the very beginning. And most blurbs and reviewers have mentioned the whole Oedipus Rex theme. Knowing that going in, I found the book to be funny and entertaining, with a more important theme than the O.R. One. The consistent theme is that no matter who you are or what you do, bad karma is going to haunt you. And about everyone in these pages has bad karma.The humor is dark in a shoulda-seen-that-coming kind of way, lots of irony. The characters are not necessarily likeable but I still wanted to learn more about them. The time period covers several decades, and I enjoyed the references to time-appropriate products and people, Walkmans and past presidents, early computing and video games. In my opinion, it's a thoroughly enjoyable book.Thank you to Vine and the publisher for giving me an uncorrected proof for review.