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Sometimes a Great Notion (Penguin Classics) Paperback – August 29, 2006

by Ken Kesey (Author), Charles Bowden (Introduction)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,276 ratings
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The magnificent second novel from the legendary author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Following the astonishing success of his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey wrote what Charles Bowden calls "one of the few essential books written by an American in the last half century." This wild-spirited tale tells of a bitter strike that rages through a small lumber town along the Oregon coast. Bucking that strike out of sheer cussedness are the Stampers. Out of the Stamper family's rivalries and betrayals Ken Kesey has crafted a novel with the mythic impact of Greek tragedy.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Previous page
  1. Print length
    736 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Penguin Classics
  4. Publication date
    August 29, 2006
  5. Dimensions
    7.72 x 5 x 1.72 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0143039865
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0143039860
  8. Lexile measure
    1020L
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"As in Cuckoo's Nest, Kesey brings to life people you will never forget . . . Getting into this book is getting into a fascinating, crazy world of a fascinating, crazy family which has a throbbing reality and a desperate dedication to living . . . and then there is that great gift for comedy, for purely sensational writing. When Kesey describes the Canada honkers flying over the woods you can almost see them; when he describes the smells of the grass and the tastes of the strawberries you feel and you smell and you taste."
--Ralph J. Gleason, San Francisco Chronicle  

"Sometimes a Great Notion, a big book in every way, captures the tenor of the post-Korea America as nothing I can remember reading . . . Beyond the PTA and the beer commercials, beyond the huge effluvium of the times, exist people who live by the ancient passions, and Mr. Kesey in the fullness of his material discovers them for us."
--The New York Times Book Review 

"A tremendous achievement . . . Set against the damp and brutal background of an Oregon logging community, the book by turns gasps, pants, whoops, and shrieks . . . you cannot help but admire Kesey's vigor, his profligate command of the language. And you have to stand back in awe of the man's ability to create character."
--The Cleveland Plain Dealer

About the Author

Ken Kesey was born in 1935 and grew up in Oregon. He graduated from the University of Oregon and later studied at Stanford with Wallace Stegner, Malcolm Cowley, Richard Scowcroft, and Frank O' Connor. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, his first novel, was published in 1962. His second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, followed in 1964. His other books include Kesey's Garage Sale, Demon Box, Caverns (with O. U. Levon), The Further Inquiry, Sailor Song, and Last Go Round (with Ken Babbs). His two children's books are Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear and The Sea Lion. Ken Kesey died on November 10, 2001.

Charles Bowden's is the author of Inferno and A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Classics (August 29, 2006)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 736 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0143039865
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0143039860
  • Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1020L
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.08 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.72 x 5 x 1.72 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,276 ratings

About the author

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Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey

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Ken Kesey was born in Colorado in 1935. He founded the Merry Pranksters in the sixties and became a cult hero, a phenomenon documented by Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He died in 2001.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
1,276 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Scott&Scott (aka Romentics)
5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning, Epic
Reviewed in the United States on September 23, 2021
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Kesey’s towering, epic, sprawling, Northwest old growth forest of a book is a dizzying often non-linear mishmash of characters, shifting points of view, and drenching unremitting rain and violence. Ultimately it’s a dynastic story of a rough hardy logging family that thwarts a strike against the dominant logger in the area by cutting its own deal and how its ethos of stern individualism allows it not only to sustain the opposition but to tweak their neighbors. It’s also the story of the return of the black sheep intellectual of the family from his eastern elitism, where he discovers the value of labor but also the joys of taking revenge on his older brother by sleeping with his wife under his nose. It is no spoiler to understand from page one that the dynasty’s family home is perched on unstable soil along the river’s edge and will not survive the novel.

In Kesey’s rich decaying world full of rot and rotten livers and failed ambition sparked by early high school achievements and a crazily dangerous logging world which in an instant can widow a wife kill or unlimbers a man or end a dream, Kesey poses the question of what it means to be a man.

The novel could have used some editorial trimming, cleaning out the literary underbrush, Sometimes a Great Notion depicts some of the most compelling harrowing scenes I’ve read in a novel—in particular, the calm yet desperate slow-drowning of one of the most sympathetic characters as a result of a logging accident is something I’ll never forget.
12 people found this helpful
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Curious Skeptic
5.0 out of 5 stars masterpiece twice over
Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2023
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I first read this marvelous book many years ago, while living in the Pacific Northwest. I was young and deeply moved by the entrancing nature of the narrative as much as by the skillful inventive writing style.

I picked the book up again , older and (in theory) wiser. And this time around I found that the book was even more engaging then I remembered. This book belongs in the cannon of great literature.
2 people found this helpful
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John B. Rogers
4.0 out of 5 stars Remarkable writing, dense and difficult to read
Reviewed in the United States on April 23, 2021
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Lots of pages, lots of characters, lots of story, lots of heads gotten into. Read it for the writing, stay for the story (which is good once it begins). Sometimes I get a great notion to be jealous of a book like this. We regular everyday writers study technique and painstakingly rewrite in order to create clear prose that draws the reader effortlessly through the veil of words to the meat of the story. Ken Kesey doesn’t feel it necessary to cater to the reader this way. So as a reader, you have to be a bit like his lead character, Hank Stamper—ready to whip ‘er down, grab ‘er ‘round ‘er girth with a 5/8” steel cable and drag ‘er to the water, where she can float … okay, torturing a metaphor here, but you have to really, really want to read this book to get through it. In fact, it almost seems as if Kesey is daring you to keep on reading. 265,000 words of often elegant, sometimes frustrating prose. Hopscotching through points of view and tenses. He often writes wonderfully, but for too long. About 2/3 of the way through, he tells about the migrating Canada geese, weaves them into the story so artfully. The introduction of the idea is, good lord, so artfully drawn; but good god, it’s three freakin’ pages long.

The writing is outstanding, beautiful. In particular, the description of natural events, animals and the outdoors; but tough going. It reminded me of the famous New York Times 1925 critique of Joyce’s Ulysses: “A few intuitive, sensitive visionaries may understand and comprehend ‘Ulysses,’ James Joyce’s new and mammoth volume … but the average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it … save bewilderment and a sense of disgust.” But the reviewer then goes on to opine, “ ‘Ulysses’ is the most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the twentieth century.” Ulysses is written stream of consciousness; A Great Notion is many streams of consciousnesses, often careening off each other like bumper cars. Kesey relies on random italics and different characters’ voices to let us know which head we’ve hopped into. And because his voices are skillfully differentiated, it often works … but he doesn’t make it easy. In one particularly difficult skirmish mid-book, Hank runs through first person, third person, and first person italics punctuated by in-paragraph diversions to Vi and Lee, to get his point across. Oftentimes we roll through four or five characters at a point in time. Usually this is skillfully done, a writer showing off his versatility and talent. Sometimes, it’s frustrating because the story stops dead, the prose gives no hint of whose head we’ve hopped into just when the reader might like to move along.

Then there’s the length. A thumb in Hemingway’s eye. And in that of Hudie Ledbetter, too, to poach a line from a very simple song for the title of a very complex book. The Amazon description starts: “A bitter strike is raging in a small lumber town along the Oregon coast.” That, apparently, is the plot of the story. It’s mentioned tangentially in the first book-length half of the novel, which is extended character development and backstory. At about 150,000 words or so, the story begins, and, yup, that’s the plot.

The last half of the book is compelling. The death of Joby is heartbreaking and Hank’s one stupid mistake is just as painful because we’ve come to respect him, even if we don’t always like him. Hank’s firm knowledge that Leland will bed Viv is an interesting side of Hank, but I didn’t see the act itself coming. Maybe it was because I didn’t much like Lee, who seemed to me a self-absorbed prig. Viv was so lovely and down to earth that the act itself came as a shock, and Lee’s one-upmanship motivation was disgusting. I’m sure Kesey meant every gorge-raising bit of it.

When an author writes a book that’s difficult to wrangle, is he intent on putting his brilliance on the page, reader be damned? Self-centered? Selfish? All three?

Writing, 5-star ++; story-telling 3 -; overall, 4. Can’t be lower than 4. If you’re willing to read a 700-page book that begins with 300 pages of backstory, Sometimes a Great Notion is for you.
32 people found this helpful
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Aren LeBrun
5.0 out of 5 stars "Time overlaps itself"
Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2021
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“Sometimes I lives in the country
Sometimes I lives in the town
Sometimes I haves a great notion
To jump into the river an’ drown”

“Goodnight Irene” — Lead Belly (1933)

“Sometimes a Great Notion” is a terrific, funny, tender, and psychologically demanding work of art that has few equals and no superiors in the entire body of 20th century American literature. Some parts “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Absalom! Absalom!” and “The Brothers Karamazov,” Ken Kesey weaves together a compelling story of a labor strike in a coastal Oregon town while simultaneously crafting a portrait of the Stamper family — Henry, Hank Jr., Leland, Vivian, and Joe Ben — expertly alternating between first person narrators w/o warning or indication (e.g. Faulkner), often in the middle of a paragraph. The Stampers quickly usurp the logging strike as the main window into what Kesey wants to show his reader about the doomed tragedy of masculine hubris (the family motto, carved on a board nailed to their wall, is: “Never Give A Inch!”). A closer read will pay higher dividends in direct proportion. This novel is outstanding as a combined celebration of artistic pathos, structural innovation, comic timing, and mastery of dialect. Highly recommended for serious readers as well as anyone who enjoys a story about relationships unveiling themselves at a tense and reflective pace. Also if you’re into logging.

“Time overlaps itself. A breath breathed from a passing breeze is not the whole wind, neither is it the last of what has passed and the first of what will come, but it is more — let me see — more like a single point plucked on a single strand of a vast spider web of winds, setting the whole scene atingle. That way it overlaps....As prehistoric ferns grow from bathtub planters. As a shiny new ax, taking a swing at somebody’s next year’s split-level pinewood pad, bites all the way to the Civil War. As proposed highways break down through the stacked strata of centuries.”
8 people found this helpful
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Fátima
5.0 out of 5 stars Excelente
Reviewed in Mexico on August 14, 2018
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La compré como regalo, llegó en magnífico estado y antes de lo estimado. Por lo que me contaron, es una novela muy buena, aunque el inglés es un poco complicado, ya que no es "estándar", sino prácticamente dialectal.
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Francois Davin
5.0 out of 5 stars Une langue fascinante, une histoire improbable
Reviewed in France on August 18, 2017
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On pourrait penser à Louis Ferdinand Céline, dans un registre américain, très américain. L'histoire d'une famille douée d'une énergie étonnante, avec un mélange de brutalité et de tendresse, parfois désespérée par la violence de la société environnante. Au coeur du roman, la rivalité entre deux demi-frères. Toujours surprenant!
One person found this helpful
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Jazzguy
5.0 out of 5 stars A great saga
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 27, 2013
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Persevere with this book it will reward you. It starts off with a flourish but then the next 100 pages take a bit of getting through. Once you get the hang of the multiple voices used (and who is using them ) all becomes clear and it really demands your intention. I raely finish a novel and then immediately go back and re-read the first fifty pages. But I did here..........just to make sure I'd got it right.
3 people found this helpful
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Big Daddy
5.0 out of 5 stars Great seller
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 30, 2018
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Great book, great seller. Book as described. I would be happy to purchase again from this seller.
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christopher hugh courtenay
4.0 out of 5 stars Great read.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 10, 2018
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Great read, everything bit as good as one flew over the cuckoo's nest?.
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