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Sto caricando le informazioni... Paradise (2004)di A. L. Kennedy
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. This book was horrible in a totally amazing way. Engrossing, felt entirely realistic. Yet describing a nightmarish existence of addiction that was painful to read, but impossible to look away from. I don't know how accurate this is to life, and after reading this book, I am very grateful to not know that. Geweldige schrijfster, maar wat een naargeestig boek. Je zit de hoofdpersoon, een alcoholiste, dicht op de huid. Hierdoor wordt je samen met haar wakker en herinner je je bij flarden de vorige dag en de situatie waarin je je bevind. Genadeloos, dit portret. Heel knap gedaan, maar het ligt wel erg zwaar op de maag. "Paradise" by A. L. Kennedy had a profound effect on me in many ways. This is a somewhat difficult review to write because of my personal familiarity with alcoholism. First of all I want to say that the writing is beautiful, poetic, original, sad, haunting, disturbing, and at times extremely funny. Kennedy will knock you down with such beautiful and devastating sentences as “If we were years ago and other people. If God allowed just anything.” The depiction of alcoholism is real, honest, and brutal: “I am delicate and the world is impossibly wrong, is unthinkable and I am not forewarned, forearmed, equipped. I cannot manage. If there was something useful I could do, I would – but there isn’t. So I drink. So I drank. And on all those other evenings, drink has trotted in and softened worries, charmed away internal repetitions of unpleasant facts and lifted my attitude those few vital degrees which prevent everybody from dragging their past behind them like a corpse, while bolting forward through a suicidal haze.” I have felt this exactly but could not express it as accurately as Kennedy does here. She is unclean, uncomfortable, doesn’t understand, suicidal. And she compares this to how she was when she was a little girl, clean, happy, untainted, with her brother and parents, when there was love, health, beauty, and a future. I normally do not give a book five stars. There have only been a few. But this one well deserves it. The writing is just phenomenal. I don’t know why this book is not as well known as Henry Miller’s "Tropic of Cancer". It is that good. It also reminds me a little of "The White Hotel" by D. M. Thomas, especially the surreal nightmarish train ride at the end with all of the sexual undertones – a train ride itself is a sexual innuendo, hills being the mounds of flesh, trees being pubic hairs, the train slicing through... I almost didn’t mention this next part but I feel I should because it is important to me. The book also had a physical effect on me, I guess because I so strongly identified with it. I don’t drink coffee. I hate the taste. Always have. But in one scene, on the train, she is in a bar and the bartender gives her coffee and it is the best coffee she has ever had and with each new mug it tastes even better. That night I dreamed I made myself coffee and I remember tasting it and enjoying how good it tasted. I actually remember, can feel, the taste. This next part is extremely strange. In one point of the book she is walking with her father. She accidentally steps on a board with a nail and the nail punctures her foot. The next morning I woke up with a huge bruise on the bottom of my right foot. Fortunately it wasn’t cut but there was, and still is, a huge bruise. I have no memory of stepping on anything. I don’t know what this means. I should probably talk to a therapist about it… But as you can see, the book did have multiple effects on me. It is a dangerous book to someone like myself; like looking in a mirror and seeing the real horror of life reflected back at me. Beautiful, astonishing, mad horror. nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione
Premi e riconoscimentiElenchi di rilievo
The breakthrough novel by Best-of-Young-British novelist Hannah Luckraft knows the taste of paradise. It's hidden in the peace of open country, it's sweet on her lover's skin, it flavours every drink she's ever taken, but it never seems to stay. Almost forty and with nothing to show for it, even Hannah is starting to notice that her lifestyle is not entirely sustainable: her subconscious is turning against her and it may be that her soul is a little unwell. Her family is wounded, her friends are frankly odd, her body is not as reliable as it once was. Robert, a dissolute dentist, appears to offer a love she can understand, but he may only be one more symptom of the problem she must cure. From the north-east of Scotland to Dublin, from London to Montreal, to Budapest and onwards, Hannah travels beyond her limits, beyond herself, in search of the ultimate altered state: the one where she can be happy - her paradise. Incapable of writing a dull sentence, or failing to balance the grim with the hilarious, the tender with the shocking, A.L. Kennedy has written an emotional and visceral tour-de-force. A compelling examination of failure that is also a comic triumph, a novel of dark extremes that is full of the most ravishing lyrical beauty, Paradise is the finest book yet by one of Britain's most extraordinarily gifted writers. Author Biography: A.L. Kennedy has published three previous novels, two books of non-fiction, and three collections of stories, most recently Indelible Acts in 2002. She lives in Glasgow. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Classificazione LCVotoMedia:
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A painful, but often grimly funny, book that doesn’t take any prisoners. As someone else said here “horrible in a totally amazing way” (to put it another way: very Scottish). I didn’t much enjoy reading it, and I doubt whether it really adds anything tangible to an outsider’s view of alcohol addiction, but it certainly has some fine writing in it. ( )