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''The Centaur'' is a novel by John Updike, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1963. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Portions of the novel first appeared in ''Esquire'' and ''The New Yorker''. 〔 ("National Book Awards – 1964" ). National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-11. (With acceptance speech by Updike and essay by Harold Augenbraum from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)〕 The French translation of the novel won the ''Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger'' (Best Foreign Book Prize). ==Plot summary== The story concerns George Caldwell, a school teacher, and his son Peter, outside of Alton (i.e., Reading), Pennsylvania. The novel explores the relationship between the depressive Caldwell and his anxious son. George has largely given up on life; what glory he knew, as a football player and soldier in World War I, has passed. He feels put upon by the school's principal, and he views his students as hapless and uninterested in anything he has to teach them. Peter, meanwhile, is a budding aesthete who idolizes Vermeer and dreams of becoming a painter in a big city, like New York. He has no friends his age, and regularly worries that his peers might detect his psoriasis, which stains his skin and flecks his clothes every season but summer. One thing George and Peter share is the desire to get out, to escape their hometown. This masculine desire for escape appears in Updike's famed "Rabbit" novels. Similarly, the novel's image of Peter's mother alone on an unfarmed farm is one we later see in Updike's 1965 novel ''Of the Farm''. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Centaur」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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