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Sto caricando le informazioni... Who Wrote the Book of Love?di Lee Siegel
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Who Wrote the Book of Love? is acclaimed novelist Lee Siegel's comedic chronicle of the sexual life of an American boy in Southern California in the 1950s. Starting at the beginning of the decade, in the year that Stalin announced that the Soviet Union had developed an atomic bomb, the book opens with a child's first memory of himself. Closing at the end of the decade, when Pat Boone's guide to dating, 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty, topped the bestseller list, the book culminates just moments before the boy experiences for the first time what he had learned from a book read to him by his mother was called "coitus or sexual intercourse or sometimes, less formally, just making love." Between the initial overwhelmingly erotic recollection and the final climactic moment, all is sex--beguiling and intractable, naughty and sweet. Who Wrote the Book of Love? is about the subversive sexual imaginations of children. And, as such, it is about the origins of love. Vignettes from the author's childhood provide the material for the construction of what is at once comic fiction, imaginative historical reportage, and an ironically nostalgic confession. The book evokes the tone and tempo of a decade during which America was blatantly happy, wholesome, and confident, and yet, at the same time, deeply fearful of communism and nuclear holocaust. Siegel recounts both the cheer and the paranoia of the period and the ways in which those sentiments informed wondering about sex and falling in love. "Part of my plan," Mark Twain wrote in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, "has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked." With the same motive, Lee Siegel has written what Twain might have composed had he been Jewish, raised in Beverly Hills in the 1950s, and joyously obsessed with sex and love. 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: (3)
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The structure of the book also belies a certain measure of artifice if not invention, in that it has five chapters (corresponding to the five chapters in the lyric of "Who Wrote the Book of Love" by the Monotones, as well as the five chapters of Miller's In the Beginning), each divided into two years, and thus perfectly spanning the integral decade of baby-boomer childhood.
Siegel's childhood takes place in a well-off Jewish enclave in Beverly Hills. His father is a physician and his mother is an actress, and he attends the curiously-named Ponce De Leon Elementary School until delivered to Beverly Hills High School in "Chapter Five, She Loves You, and All Your Dreams Come True." The confessions of a childhood quest for love and/or sex are complicated only slightly by Cold War paranoia and the vagaries of US mass culture. Siegel and his cigarette-smoking pals tutor each other ignorantly through puberty, the reader is introduced to each of the girls in the series of his infatuations, and the story culminates in the exposure of the erotic origins of his cacoethes scribendi.
I've previously read one other of Siegel's novels (Love in a Dead Language) and one volume of his scholarship (Net of Magic), and he has yet to disappoint.