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Sto caricando le informazioni... Death Is a Lonely Business (originale 1985; edizione 1986)di Ray Bradbury (Autore)
Informazioni sull'operaLa morte è un affare solitario di Ray Bradbury (1985)
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Sto caricando le informazioni...
![]() Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. I didn't plan it this way, but for me the turning of the year was bookended by two Ray Bradbury titles. I started Death Is a Lonely Business (1985) near the end of December because it was available on my Kindle and I was stuck lying down, nursing a sore back. It ended up being my final book of 2017. I hadn't read a Bradbury novel in decades and had him pretty much lodged in my mind as a writer of pulp sci-fi short stories--a more than competent one, to be sure, but for me not the stuff of a steady diet. So I was taken by surprise by the depth and complexity of the novel, from its predominant theme of death and its agents to the delicate, wavering balance between illusion and consensual reality accomplished by locating the imaginative flights in the mind of the first-person narrator, whose name we never learn. Thematic elements, lush evocation of time and place, and quirky characters that stop short of grotesquerie by virtue of their humanity round out the quasi-detective story with its backdrop of Los Angeles neighborhoods. Bradbury was 65 when he wrote it, and that's not too young to be pondering the transitory nature of things. From LibraryThing I learned that this book is the first of three so-called Crumley Mysteries. Detective Lieutenant Crumley does have a role to play, but he is present more as a catalyst than as a major actor. It is not first of all a detective story but rather an almost mystical meditation on death and life and how people's lives intertwine. And so when I ran out of pages in Death Is a Lonely Business, I downloaded the second, A Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of Two Cities (1990), which became my first completed work of 2018. Discovering this dimension of Bradbury after so long is a refreshing surprise and a bright spot at the start of a perilous year. nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione
Appartiene alle SerieAppartiene alle Collane Editorialidetebe (21774) Gallimard, Folio (2281) Le porte [Fazi] (58) È contenuto in
Ray Bradbury, the undisputed Dean of American storytelling, dips his accomplished pen into the cryptic inkwell of noir and creates a stylish and slightly fantastical tale of mayhem and murder set among the shadows and the murky canals of Venice, California, in the early 1950s. Toiling away amid the looming palm trees and decaying bungalows, a struggling young writer (who bears a resemblance to the author) spins fantastic stories from his fertile imagination upon his clacking typewriter. Trying not to miss his girlfriend (away studying in Mexico), the nameless writer steadily crafts his literary effort--until strange things begin happening around him. Starting with a series of peculiar phone calls, the writer then finds clumps of seaweed on his doorstep. But as the incidents escalate, his friends fall victim to a series of mysterious "accidents"--some of them fatal. Aided by Elmo Crumley, a savvy, street-smart detective, and a reclusive actress of yesteryear with an intense hunger for life, the wordsmith sets out to find the connection between the bizarre events, and in doing so, uncovers the truth about his own creative abilities. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
Discussioni correntiNessunoCopertine popolari
![]() GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classificazione LCVotoMedia:![]()
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Another main character is the setting which brilliantly evokes the rundown former glamour of an area now starting to be demolished. Being Bradbury, the writing is colourful, vivid, slightly sentimental but not overdone. I realised after finishing the book that the protagonist is probably based on his youthful self.
The only thing that held this book back from a full five stars is that the ending is not quite satisfying enough. There were a few candidates for the (what would now be termed serial) killer and I thought it would have been a great twist if it had turned out to be a less obvious one. But other than that I can't fault the book and so it has a well-deserved 4 stars.
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