Strange that I read 3 or 4 of Barth's bks & then? Waited 30 or more yrs to read another one? He taught (or teaches? - don't even know if he's still alive?) at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore but I never tried to meet him?! Even though I lived in Baltimore City for 18 yrs?!

At 1st, this bk was almost a sure 5-star. It was almost uncanny reading about an environment I didn't exactly grow up in but close enuf. What really cinched it was learning that "Chinese Cigar" trees (aka just "Cigar" trees) that were a common feature of my MD days landscape are called Catalpa trees. Thanks for telling me! There's even one near where I live in Pittsburgh & everytime I walk past it I wonder at my ignorance: How cd I not know this tree's name?! Now I do.

This bk is clever - a fantastic & wonderful multi-levelled narrative. A weave of stories about stories w/in stories, etc.. GREAT! A thoroughly enjoyable read, a thoroughly engrossing tale. But I give it a 4-star. As usual, these ratings are close to useless. Why not just leave the star-ratings undone? I suppose I was disappointed by the ending. I suppose Barth had no intention of having the ending be as romantic as the rest of the bk.. - still the (undisclosed here) ending just seems like a cheap shot.. after all that narrative mastery I expected more - a coup de grace of genius! No such luck.

STILL, it's way 'better' than any novel I'll ever write! If only b/c it's highly unlikely that I'll ever write one! ( )

Barth's novel appeared just as the last great era of books and things bookish was coming to an end. And nobody was more in tune with the 1980s and early 1990s postmodern obsession than John Barth. Hard to believe that such an era actually existed, where arguing over literature was a thing of some importance, where the direction of the novel seemed paramount. Now, those concerns have collapsed into the salons of the "good" and "superior." Used to be that even a mid range American city would have a reviewer to give space to fiction and literature. No more.

But as for The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, well, it just seems not to have survived over the past few decades as something to take seriously. And, frankly, many authors of that era (I can think of Kazuo Ishiguro, Jane Rogers, Julian Barnes, David Lodge--well, maybe not Ishiguro) seem to have fizzled, their work gimmicky, their preoccupations with hyper-fiction timeworn. Not a Graham Greene among the lot of them.

But back to Barth's novel. It just seems to miss the point. The intersection of myth and realism becomes a four way stop. And once your turn at the light pops up, it's difficult to engage the gears and get the engine started again. No, it's not a bad book. But it is indicative of its times. And today it seems a bit pretentious and vapid--like Jane Rogers and Julian Barnes.

But I must admit it was a fun time to be living and be interested in books. Because it all seemed to matter so much. ( )

At least twice as long as it needed to be, this is a book with a great premise and some masterful writing, diluted by tedious and often off-putting genre conventions.

The genres in question are folktale and aging-intellectual-has-one-last-youthful-lay. The latter isn't my favorite, even when well written, as it often is here. The over-the-top outdated folk style brings with it unsavory obsession with women's virginity, rape, and virility—none of this was as enjoyably silly to me as it is in Barth's excellent 'The Sot-Weed Factor'.

It's a book I want to steal ideas from, but it wasn't a ton of fun to read, and it's not easy to recommend. ( )

“The high ground of traditional realism, brothers, is where I stand! Give me familiar, substantial stuff: rocs and rhinoceri, ifrits and genies and flying carpets, such as we all drank in our mother’s milk and shall drink—Inshallah!—till our final swallow. Let no outlander imagine that such crazed fabrications as machines that mark the hour or roll themselves down the road will ever take the place of our homely Islamic realism, the very capital of narrative—from which, if I may say so, all interest is generated. … And may not the same be said for a story’s action? Speak to us from our everyday experience: shipwreck and sole survivorhood, the retrieval of diamonds by means of mutton-sides and giant eagles, the artful deployment of turbans for aerial transport, buzzard dispersal, shore-to-ship signaling, and suicide as necessary. Above all, sing the loss of fortunes and their fortuitous re-doubling: the very stuff of story!”

Sums it up.

The Last Voyage is filled with layers of irony and clever, tongue-in-cheek jokes. It’s definitely a showcase of narrative experimentation. I admired this book for its dizzying technical turns, but it never made the leap for me into anything more than a literary exercise, so I didn’t really relish it as much as others have. ( )

I read this sometime in the 90's I think. I had seen him do a reading from it at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park. He is exactly what you imagine from his writing - a literary professor with a slightly raffish aspect. ( )