Steven Carroll (1) (1949–)
Autore di The Time We Have Taken
Per altri autori con il nome Steven Carroll, vedi la pagina di disambiguazione.
Sull'Autore
Steven Carroll was born in 1949 in Melbourne, Victoria. He studied at La Trobe University. He has taught English at secondary school level, and drama at RMIT. He has been Drama Critic for The Sunday Age newspaper in Melbourne. Steven Carroll is now a full-time writer living in Melbourne. He will be mostra altro speaking at the inaugural History Writers' Festival April 2015 in Melbourne. His title's include Remember Me, Jimmy james, The Lovers' Room, The Love Song Song of Lucy McBride and A World of Other People. He will be featured at the Mudgee Readers' Festival 2015. He made the finalist for the Melbourne Prize for Literature 2015. He also made the Victorian Premier¿s Literary Awards 2016 shortlist in the Fiction category. (Bowker Author Biography) mostra meno
Serie
Opere di Steven Carroll
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Altri nomi
- Carroll, Steve
- Data di nascita
- 1949
- Sesso
- male
- Nazionalità
- Australia
- Luogo di nascita
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Istruzione
- La Trobe University
- Attività lavorative
- novelist
playwright
teacher (high school English)
lecturer - Relazioni
- Carroll, J.R. (brother)
Glasson, Toni (sister-in-law) - Organizzazioni
- RMIT University
Utenti
Recensioni
Goodnight, Vivienne , Goodnight.
The final chapters caught me up in the drama and suspense when TSEliot is delivering a speech to an audience.
The novel started out slowly, but the rescue of Vivienne from the asylum was exciting. Then the detective searching for her.
The flirtatious friendship between Stephen and Brigid was charmingly told, and her playful abuse of the siren had me laughing.
The affair with Bertrand Russell kept my interest, as was Stephen’s interview with T S Eliot in chapter 6.
It wasn’t all engaging, sometimes lost my interest.
I was impelled into learning about The Wasteland, ‘the greatest literary work in the twentieth century’. I found out why it was revolutionary in the history of English literature.
What would Stephen do when he caught Vivienne? the suspense in the final chapter was wonderful. I reacted physically.… (altro)
The final chapters caught me up in the drama and suspense when TSEliot is delivering a speech to an audience.
The novel started out slowly, but the rescue of Vivienne from the asylum was exciting. Then the detective searching for her.
The flirtatious friendship between Stephen and Brigid was charmingly told, and her playful abuse of the siren had me laughing.
The affair with Bertrand Russell kept my interest, as was Stephen’s interview with T S Eliot in chapter 6.
It wasn’t all engaging, sometimes lost my interest.
I was impelled into learning about The Wasteland, ‘the greatest literary work in the twentieth century’. I found out why it was revolutionary in the history of English literature.
What would Stephen do when he caught Vivienne? the suspense in the final chapter was wonderful. I reacted physically.… (altro)
1 
MaximWilson | 1 altra recensione | May 28, 2022 |
MaximWilson | 1 altra recensione | May 28, 2022 | 
Carroll's novel explores the idea that Anne Cécile Desclos (1907 – 1998), a French journalist and novelist who wrote under the pseudonyms Dominique Aury and Pauline Réage, wrote The Story of O as an unconscious metaphor for the most shameful episode in modern French history: the Nazi Occupation of France in the Second World War. That is, O's surrender to degradation is a metaphor for the French surrender in June 1940 and the ensuing partition of France into the Occupied territory in the north and west; and in central and southern France, the pro-Nazi collaborationist state of Vichy under Marshal Philippe Pétain. In his Notes on a Novel at the end of the book, Carroll writes:
While Carroll's O isn't biographical fiction, some of the characters and events are based on real life. The novel begins with Dominique Aury's fury and disgust about the Surrender, and her meeting with her soon-to-be lover, the publisher at Gallimard, Jean Paulham. Amongst other things, we learn that he is also involved in Les Éditions de Minuit the real-life clandestine publisher of books to counter German censorship. The most famous of these books, Le Silence de la Mer (which I reviewed here) isn't mentioned, but the underground materials that Dominique delivers at Jean's instigation would have included it. But as Carroll explains, the real-life Dominique Aury never did anything as dangerous as the rescue of Pauline Réage, who is an authorial invention.
The Dominique of the novel writes her novel to rekindle the flame of her affair with Jean, who is starting to look at other women, the way he first looked at her. She also wants to prove to him that women can write sexual fantasies just as men can, just as the Marquise de Sade did. Her work isn't intended for publication, but Jean persuades her, and though Gallimard dismisses it as pornographic smut, they find an alternative publisher. It causes a scandal, and it divides its readers.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/03/26/o-by-steven-carroll/… (altro)
If Story of O had been written in the 1970s and later it wouldn't have mattered. But the fact is that Dominique Aury wrote it as a love letter to her lover, publisher Jean Paulham, soon after, in the rain-shadow of the Occuption, when words such as 'surrender', 'submission', 'defeat' and 'liberation' had a meaning redolent of an all too recent, shameful past. Everybody was on edge, nerves were jangled, the experience still raw, and to a large extent the populace wanted to put the Occupation behind them. Repress it.
But the moods and preoccupations of a country, especially at certain pivotal moments, have a way of surfacing through art. Whether consciously, unconsciously, or a combination of both, art can sometimes mirror the very thing that a country wants to forget. And it increasingly occurred to me that, as unlikely a candidate as it may seem, Story of O was just such a work: one of those cases in which the individual psyche is like the whole society writ large. (p.301)
While Carroll's O isn't biographical fiction, some of the characters and events are based on real life. The novel begins with Dominique Aury's fury and disgust about the Surrender, and her meeting with her soon-to-be lover, the publisher at Gallimard, Jean Paulham. Amongst other things, we learn that he is also involved in Les Éditions de Minuit the real-life clandestine publisher of books to counter German censorship. The most famous of these books, Le Silence de la Mer (which I reviewed here) isn't mentioned, but the underground materials that Dominique delivers at Jean's instigation would have included it. But as Carroll explains, the real-life Dominique Aury never did anything as dangerous as the rescue of Pauline Réage, who is an authorial invention.
The Dominique of the novel writes her novel to rekindle the flame of her affair with Jean, who is starting to look at other women, the way he first looked at her. She also wants to prove to him that women can write sexual fantasies just as men can, just as the Marquise de Sade did. Her work isn't intended for publication, but Jean persuades her, and though Gallimard dismisses it as pornographic smut, they find an alternative publisher. It causes a scandal, and it divides its readers.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/03/26/o-by-steven-carroll/… (altro)
Liste
Premi e riconoscimenti
Potrebbero anche piacerti
Autori correlati
Statistiche
- Opere
- 16
- Utenti
- 602
- Popolarità
- #41,741
- Voto
- 3.6
- Recensioni
- 30
- ISBN
- 102
- Lingue
- 2
And Britain is at war with Germany. It is July 1940 and the streets are sandbagged but the real horror of the Blitz is yet to come. Into this impending chaos comes Vivienne, successfully making her escape from the asylum with the help of her sympathetic friend Louise Purdoy and George from the Lunacy Law Reform Society. Vivienne is in the hands of a covert network of people who engineer escapes from asylums so that the inmate can take advantage of an old law which offered the possibility of freedom to anyone who could break out and stay free for 30 days. Louise Purdoy thinks that Vivienne is as sane as anybody else, and so she wants to help her.
Vivienne, of course, has to lie low, as any escapee does, but she doesn't. She likes to be out and about, as anyone does. (I suspect that Carroll's experience of Melbourne's Lockdowns influenced her realistic yearning to escape being confined indoors.) Fatally, perhaps, she just can't resist a TSE public appearance where he is to do a reading of 'East Coker', (the second of his Four Quartets, published in real life in 1940.)
Vivienne turning up and creating a scene at a public appearance is exactly what TSE fears, and he has powerful friends. She had been committed in the first place because of a public 'episode' involving a knife and hysterical rantings about TSE being beheaded. Adding to the panic is a stabbing episode involving a Lord and his ex-wife. So Detective Stephen Minter is assigned to find Vivienne ASAP.
Minter might be a fugitive too, of a sort. His parents fled anti-Semitism in Australia, and he grew up in England. They are secular Jews and have settled into English life well, but they (like Minter himself) are at risk of being interned as Aliens. He has worked hard to assimilate, masking his accent and (in passages reminiscent of The Gift of Speed (2004) from Carroll's Glenroy novels) becoming devoted to cricket. But just as TSE can't quite shake off his Missouri origins, Minter retains slight traces of his past. And just as TSE is not really part of the British Establishment, much as he would like to be, Minter isn't really on their side. He's not sure that he wants to find Vivienne. He's not convinced that she is insane. But he does have an Englishman's sense of duty...
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/02/14/goodnight-vivienne-goodnight-2022-the-eliot-...… (altro)