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Sto caricando le informazioni... This Devastating Feverdi Sophie Cunningham
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Premi e riconoscimenti
Alice had not expected to spend the first twenty years of the twenty-first century writing about Leonard Woolf. When she stood on Morell Bridge watching fireworks explode from the rooftops of Melbourne at the start of a new millennium, she had only two thoughts. One was: the fireworks are better in Sydney. The other was: was the world's technology about to crash down around her? The world's technology did not crash. But there were worse disasters to come: Environmental collapse. The return of fascism. Wars. A sexual reckoning. A plague. Uncertain of what to do she picks up an unfinished project and finds herself trapped with the ghosts of writers past. What began as a novel about a member of the Bloomsbury set, colonial administrator, publisher and husband of one the most famous English writers of the twentieth century becomes something else altogether. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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It seems almost inevitable that a book which follows something as brilliant as Calvino's masterpiece, will be a disappointment. And yet This Devastating Fever held me captivated from beginning to end. I could not have chosen a better book to follow Invisible Cities. It is that good.
This Devastating Fever has two storylines which blur into each other. There is an author called Alice in the 21st century, who shares some personal and professional history with Cunningham herself; and there is Leonard Woolf in the 20th century, about whom Alice has been trying to write a book for twenty years.
Interspersed with other things, of course, because she has to earn a living. But she is also distractible. It is lockdown in Melbourne which makes her get on with it.
Leonard Woolf (1880-1969), is of course the husband of the eminent modernist author Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). Long ago I read her books but not his, and I have on the TBR a bio of Leonard (by Victoria Glendinning) but not of Virginia. Well, we all know about her, don't we? Or we think we do. Cunningham's extensively researched novel shows us otherwise.
Virginia Woolf was among the innovative women writers who pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a literary device in the early 20th century. Wikipedia says that her first novel The Voyage Out was published in the same year as Dorothy Richardson's Pointed Roofs (1915, Pilgrimage #1, see my unenthusiastic review) and that Woolf showed in this early novel, techniques used in later novels, including the gap between preceding thought and the spoken word that follows, and the lack of concordance between expression and underlying intention, together with how these reveal to us aspects of the nature of love.
Did I know that Cunningham was, in such a sophisticated way, channelling Woolf with that same technique when I shared the excerpt that depicted self-censoring in my Sensational Snippet? No, I did not. This Devastating Fever is a book that will bear re-reading, for sure. There is much to explore in a second reading: through the prism of Alice's fraught efforts to finish her stalled novel during the pandemic, Cunningham interrogates the past and the present. Through Leonard's time in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), she casts her perceptive eye over colonialism and its aftermath. She expresses her characters' fears about the world order during tumultuous geo-political times and what feels like the end of days in a looming catastrophe.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/07/30/this-devastating-fever-2022-by-sophie-cunnin... (