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Sto caricando le informazioni... Foreign Bodies (originale 2010; edizione 2011)di Cynthia Ozick (Autore)
Informazioni sull'operaForeign Bodies di Cynthia Ozick (2010)
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. Una mujer de mediana edad parece andar sin rumbo por las calles de París en una tarde de calor asfixiante de finales de julio de 1952. Finalmente se sienta en un bar, pide un zumo y pregunta al camarero si por casualidad conoce a un tal Julian. No es la primera vez que lo hace, pero nadie recuerda a ese chico norteamericano de pelo rubio y aspecto desaliñado, que un buen día dejó su casa de California para viajar por Europa e instalarse en París, lejos de un padre intransigente y una madre que se ha refugiado en la locura para aliviar el deber de vivir. Quien busca y pregunta es su tía Bea, dispuesta a llevárselo de vuelta y hacer de él un hombre de provecho, pero cuando finalmente la mujer descubra el paradero de Julian, habrá algo insólito esperándole: otros cuerpos, otras voces, reclamándole una nueva versión del amor. Lejos de su tierra y abrumada al principio por el desorden que aun arrasa Europa tras la guerra, Bea ahora quiere comprender, y lo que había empezado como un simple viaje acaba siendo una lección de sabiduría. I don't remember The Ambassadors, and was not interested enough in this book to look at it again. Most of the writing is fine, and I was interested in what happened to the characters, even though I did not really care about them. Ozick wrote each one to represent something that she knew more about than the reader did, and I found that tedious. Foreign Bodies opens with Bea, a middle-aged Amercian divorcee, ruining her first visit to Paris as she becomes embroiled in a wild goose chase to find her nephew (who is a stranger to her) on the back of her estranged, overbearing brother's demands. This opens up the premise of the novel, as Bea becomes reluctantly sucked in as the linchpin in her brother's family relations. This was an OK read, but it failed to grab me in the way that I'd hoped it would. 3 stars - a bit bland for my liking. I revere Cynthia Ozick (although sometimes I think I like the idea of her more than I like her actual work). This was just okay for me. I think I would have liked it more if I'd read it in tandem with The Ambassadors. Oddly, I found it less can't-put-it-down compelling than the other two books I read last week (The Irresistible Henry House and The Art Student's War), but it's the only one of the three I would ever want to reread.
In Foreign Bodies, Ozick has taken the framework of James's plot and turned it into a scaffold to support her perennial subject – the fate of the 20th-century Jew. The novel she has produced extends the reach of James's novel geographically and emotionally – and moves beyond homage into the realm of independent creation. It turns out that the road to perdition is a fruitful one. Instead of an hourglass, Ozick has given us, to use James's own term, “a loose, baggy monster” accommodating, among other things, Yiddish folk tales, a series of letters, zigzags in time and space and digressions on the advent of television in America and the nature of a scherzo. As for language, in place of James's filigree of circumvolution and ambiguity, we get overt statement and oodles of over-the-top-and-down-in-the-ditch prose... It's as if Ozick has seized the exquisitely written chamber music of James's masterpiece and arranged it for brass band; while there are passages as good as Gershwin's An American in Paris – many graced by marvellous images – there are frequent false notes, too....For a consummate celebration of Paris and for a profound exploration of the tragic disjunction between what we wish to be true and what we can't escape knowing to be real, read The Ambassadors. But for an evocation of unspeakable loss and unfathomable love rooted in the nightmare of a history James couldn't begin to imagine, you couldn't do better than Foreign Bodies. Yet, unlike "Heir to the Glimmering World" or "Dictation," "Foreign Bodies" never seems to come to fruition. Partly, that's due to the nature of its construction — even though you don't need to have read "The Ambassadors" to understand it; there are no overt references to the novel, other than a few puns and one-liners, a comment about "all this ambassadorial traffic" in an early piece of dialogue, or a recollection of Bea's father reading "George Meredith and Henry James." Foreign Bodies tells a tale of “children gone wrong, life gone wrong, love traduced [and] hope rotted”. Bea’s meddling in these awful people’s lives leads to tragedy. She acts out of a mixture of boredom and despair but her desire for revenge after years of neglect is laced with kindness. Ozick is not in the business of providing easy answers. She deals in big themes – not the least of which is anti-Semitism – yet uses a playful style to explore them. To echo the most famous line in The Ambassadors (“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to”): read this wonderful novel; it would be a mistake not to. Ozick follows in his distant wake, but however much she reveres James’s great art, she doesn’t fear sailing on the oceans of blood spilled after his own slow-moving galleon finally docked. “Foreign Bodies” is a nimble, entertaining literary homage, but it is also, chillingly, what James would have called “the real thing. È ispirato aPremi e riconoscimentiMenzioniElenchi di rilievo
Presents a retelling of Henry James's "The Ambassadors" that follows the efforts of divorced schoolteacher Bea Nightingale to navigate a turbulent year spent with her estranged brother's family. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classificazione LCVotoMedia:
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