Fai clic su di un'immagine per andare a Google Ricerca Libri.
Sto caricando le informazioni... A Way of Life, Like Any Otherdi Darcy O'Brien
Sto caricando le informazioni...
Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. > Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/OBrien-Une-vie-comme-une-autre/673136 > UNE VIE COMME UNE AUTRE, par Darcy O'Brien (10/18 - 2016, Poche, 216 pages). — Présentation de l'éditeur "Casa Fiesta"' : une magnifique villa à Malibu qui porte bien son nom. Dans cette maison toujours pleine d'amis et de martinis, une famille en apparence parfaite : un père acteur qui tourne des westerns avec John Ford, une mère comédienne et diaboliquement belle et un jeune enfant capable de distraire les invités à coup de lectures de sonnets de Shakespeare. Mais le bonheur, tout comme le cinéma muet, ne dure pas. Le couple se sépare dans une ambiance électrique et la mère de partir avec son fils s'installer à Los Angeles. Profondément instable, alcoolique et manipulatrice, elle va l'entraîner dans les tourments de sa vie amoureuse, sans rien lui épargner. Il va ainsi se retrouver avec sa mère et son amant de sculpteur grec, Anatol, dans un atelier empli à ras-bord d'oeuvres licencieuses - telle cette statue de Syrinx faisant une fellation à Pan - sur les hauteurs de Hollywood. Et puis, un beau jour, elle décide de partir vivre en Italie. Dès lors, notre jeune narrateur s'installe avec sa grand-mère, une vieille méthodiste acariâtre, et son père, qui n'est désormais que l'ombre de lui-même. Son appartement est un taudis, son aura évanouie, sa nostalgie inextinguible. Mais sa mémoire est inépuisable, et ses souvenirs, puissants. Il va alors l'entraîner avec lui dans ce passé de gloire, de beauté et de rêve. Entre ces deux êtres déchus que constituent une mère fantasque et égoïste et un père aimant mais faible, notre narrateur arrêtera d'essayer de choisir pour se tourner vers l'avenir : les filles, l'université, la promesse d'une vie comme une autre. Darcy O'Brien nous entraîne avec délectation dans les coulisses d'un Hollywood en noir et blanc fantasmé et désormais révolu qui revit ici à travers des personnages hauts-en-couleurs. D'une écriture acérée et aérienne, il dépeint l'admiration et la déception causées par ceux qu'il faut savoir quitter pour grandir, ceux-là même qui nous ont mis au monde. Un premier roman d'initiation drôle et décalé sur les travers d'une société américaine ravagée par le poids de l'image. Un petit grand roman. —Johnny Gimenez (Culturebox) "My father was as constantly constant as a rock and my mother as constantly inconstant as the sea", 2 May 2016 This review is from: A Way of Life, Like Any Other (Hardcover) Highly entertaining short (150p) novel, narrated by the son of a Hollywood showbiz couple. From the luxurious early years on the family ranch, things soon go downhill; mother takes to drink and a succession of unsuitable lovers, becoming ever more maudlin and selfish. Father, meanwhile, lives in the past, hankering for his wife and the long-gone glory years, and the son has to look out for himself... Frequently laugh-out-loud funny, but sad too, as the reader experiences the death of family ties - the close childhood relationship with his mother culminating in "I had come to wish her dead." Part Holden Caufield, part bygone Hollywood tribute, the quirky coming of age of Darcy O'Brien, only son of two aging moving stars. While the young man emerges - a California film industry child bildingsroman- O'Brien gives us a wry look at the decline of each of his parents, and their earlier Hollywood world of the '40s. While the author's sympathetic portraits of mother's or father's circle of friends, industry types, and assorted personalities are funny and dead on, I found his later chapters, his own emergence as a teen and young man to be less engaging and somehow glum. nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione
Appartiene alle Collane EditorialiPremi e riconoscimenti
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML:This PEN/Hemingway Award winner about coming of age in Los Angeles is a "little gem of a novel . . . a masterwork of Hollywood fiction" (Salon). He's a child of 1940s Hollywood??specifically, Casa Fiesta, a ranch in the Malibu hills that he shares with his mother, a onetime Broadway headliner, and his father, a star of Westerns. But when his parents fall out of favor in Tinseltown, the narrator of this exquisitely crafted dark comedy loses his youthful idyll and accompanies his lovesick mother on a vodka-soaked international quest for romance and redemption. Meanwhile, his father lives in "diminished circumstances" in California, clinging to his silver-screen mementos, trusting that, someday soon, his ex-wife and his career will return. Tired of tending bar at his mother's parties and listening to his father's sad tales of former glory, the boy moves in with his best friend's family in Beverly Hills. But nothing in La-La Land is quite what it seems, and when his new home turns out to be just as dysfunctional as the last, our teenage hero must somehow learn to accept his parents while finding the courage to break free and become his own man. This award-winning novel, "a kind of Catcher in the Rye for the Cheap Trick generation" (GQ), was cited by the Guardian as one of the "ten best neglected literary masterpieces." Written by a New York Times??bestselling author who was a child of Hollywood movie stars himself, it has been praised for its "spectacularly deadpan humor" by the Atlantic Monthly and called "an insightful coming-of-age tale" by the Austin Chronicl Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
Discussioni correntiNessunoCopertine popolari
Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classificazione LCVotoMedia:
Sei tu?Diventa un autore di LibraryThing. |
The writing style feels detached and mannered, and Seamus Heaney in the introduction to my edition describes it as giving “a heightened, necessarily overdone picture of what his childhood and adolescence were like”. However, after the first few chapters I fell into the rhythm of the language and was moderately engaged, but the author seemed determined to intentionally undermine the emotional impact whenever created by his narrative. ( )