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Bezig met laden... The Death of the Heart (origineel 1938; editie 2021)door Elizabeth Bowen (Auteur)
Informatie over het werkThe Death of the Heart door Elizabeth Bowen (1938)
» 8 meer 20th Century Literature (1,027) 1930s (182) Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. How sharply and poignantly the writing cuts. This book is a gorgeous vessel full of poison and (mostly) despicable people. There is a keen reading pleasure to be had, though, despite the cruelty. Oh, those polite conversations over tea – fine china, scones, crumpets, it’s all there. There are gaping maws underneath all that polish, and they will swallow you whole if you are not careful. “One thing one must learn is, how to confront people that at that particular moment one cannot bear to meet.” “In that airy vivacious house, all mirrors and polish, there was no place where the shadows lodged, no point where feeling could thicken.” Even when the object is Eddie (=let me teach you everything you need to know about abusive relationships, and aren’t you a darling to let me, aren’t you sweet…), I do like things Bowen has to say about love. “One solid pleasure of love is to check up together on what has happened.” As soon as Portia appears on the page for the first time, you know that she will break, that she will dissolve – the question is only of how, not if and when. Bowen has no mercy for anyone. Portia puts sharp knives of her clear-eyed innocence into the empty people around her, and they cannot take it. It is so right that this novel should end with a door opening. P.S. I should definitely read more Bowen, being careful not to overdose. There's a bit in one of Eddie Izzard's comedy shows where she describes a genre of British film that she calls A Room with a View with a Staircase and a Pond films, where all the acting is very good but the dramatic tension consists of people opening doors meaningfully and making mundane statements that are nonetheless supposed to be highly if cryptically fraught. I thought of that bit more than once while reading this book, where feelings are almost always intimated and suggested and charged and obscured. Written in the late '30s, The Death of the Heart is about a naive 16-year-old called Portia who, recently orphaned, goes to live in London with her well-off and much older half-brother and his wife. Neither brother nor sister-in-law are happy to have her there. Portia plainly wants to have them like her, but can't understand that she's seen as a bit of an embarrassment and an obstacle in their rather jaded lives—she clearly reminds them that they're unhappy. Elizabeth Bowen has some beautifully observed character moments throughout the book, some deliciously mean one-liners too, and I could believe in many (though not all) of her characters as real people. Yet where The Death of the Heart didn't work for me—apart from the too-abrupt ending—was in how Bowen had the characters relate to one another. It's not that I don't believe that people can be cynical and petty in how they dealt with one another. There was just something about the register in which Bowen conveyed their interactions, something about the why behind their actions, that struck me as just a bit too... well, A Room With a View with a Staircase and a Pond. Is verkort inHeeft als studiegids voor studentenErelijsten
Het zestienjarige weesmeisje Portia Quayne verhuist naar Londen om bij haar halfbroer te gaan wonen en wordt verliefd op diens vriend. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)823.912Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1901-1945LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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The discovery of a sentimental teenage diary catalyzes the plot of The Death of the Heart. Once it's discovered that recently orphaned Portia analyzes her feelings and is susceptible to sincere love, the adults in her life seek to "socialize" her by inuring her to feeling anything at all. In lieu of processing trauma, her brother and his wife advocate a sort of anaesthetization to any emotion rising above pique. Portia's free sincerity is meant to be constrained, folded under. Any loss or pain is meant to be "glozed over" with a varnish of falsity. But Bowen shows us that by editing certain facts from our memory and hiding the truth from ourselves and others we turn our lives into a fiction—a mere pantomime of life—which inevitably results in a sort of existential atrophy. That is, a death of the heart. ( )