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Sto caricando le informazioni... Barren Islanddi Carol Zoref
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. I was really skeptical about this book and it took me a while to get into it, but once I did I couldn't put it down. The writing itself is merely serviceable, but I was really drawn in by the main character. It's not a very plotty novel, but Marta is so engaging that you won't mind spending a few hours reading about her life, especially if you are interested in 1930s Jewish history. ( ) Set on a tiny (fictitious) island, Barren Shoal, near New York City, the story focuses around Marta Eisenstein's growing up time in the 20's and '30's. For decades the remains of dead animals (mostly horses) from the city have been sent to be stripped and rendered and burned here. The Eisensteins are one of a group of families living in 'company' houses. The men work at the plant and the women do everything else. Many never leave the island, most leave only rarely. While the island is fictional nothing else, including the presence of factories like this one, is. Zoref researched the period exhaustively enough to enter fully into the lives of her characters. This is a rare story, full of meticulous detail (from Greek cuisine to shoe-making) but combined with a large cast of characters, all distinct, all people to care about, all entirely believable. The book is told in the first person, which often grates me, but did not at all in this case. Marta narrates the story from the vantage point of old age, she's in her eighties, and that too, works brilliantly. Zoref fully deserves this year's AWP award for the novel. ****1/2 nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione
Premi e riconoscimenti
How does one remember a world that literally no longer exists? How do the moral imperatives to do so correspond to the personal needs that make it possible? Told from the point-of-view of Marta Eisenstein Lane on the occasion of her 80th birthday, Barren Island is the story of a factory island in New York's Jamaica Bay, where the city's dead horses and other large animals were rendered into glue and fertilizer from the mid-19th century until the 1930's. The island itself is as central to the story as the members of the Jewish, Greek, Italian, Irish, and African-American factory families that inhabit it, including those who live their entire lives steeped in the smell of burning animal flesh. The story begins with the arrival of the Eisenstein family, immigrants from Eastern Europe, and explores how the political and social upheavals of the 1930's affect them and their neighbors in the years between the stock market crash of October 1929 and the start of World War II ten years later. Labor strife, union riots, the New Deal, the World's Fair, and the struggle to save European Jews from the growing threat of Nazi terror inform this novel as much as the explosion of civil and social liberties between the two World Wars. Barren Island, finally, is a novel in which the existence of God is argued with a God that may no longer exist or, perhaps, never did. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClassificazione LCVotoMedia:
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