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Bezig met laden... Old God's Time: A Novel (editie 2023)door Sebastian Barry (Auteur)
Informatie over het werkOld God's Time door Sebastian Barry
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. Powerful novel built around the rape of children by priests and brothers. Ghosts are frequently encountered but it is not a ghost story. The ending is ambiguous because it is not clear which story is the "true" one. We're in Dublin in the 1990s, meeting the widowed and recently retired Tom Kettle, who had been a police detective, I immediately engaged with this novel, which lilted along in a strong Irish accent, and which I'd have happily read with no plot at all, for the sake of accompanying Tom Kettle through his retirement. But there is a plot. And it's not straightforward. It loops back and forth through memory, and I really don't want to give anything away except to say it does involve the sad, bad old story of sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy. Kettle is an unreliable narrator. Facts haze in and out, can be deliberately confusing. How difficult it is to tell a story rooted in a barely-remembered or understood past. But there is love, enduring love, underlying everything. A book to savour, despite the unappetising events that underpin it. It took the first 100 pages for me to fully get into this book, but so worth it. Tom Kettle is a retired policeman living near the Irish Sea in a rather remote apartment. Two younger policemen come to visit and references are made to the "priests" - an unpleasant memory but the reader is not sure why. A colleague of Tom's comes later and it seems he has been accused by a priest of killing another priest who is now accused of child molestation. Did Tom kill the first priest as an act of revenge due to the fact that the first priest had molested his wife June. Tom's childhood was terrible as an orphan living in an orphanage run by priests and nuns He joined the Army and became a sharpshooter in Malaysa which enabled him to join the police force. The book is beautifully written (with some strange similes at times), and the ending brought tears. Both of his children, Joe and Winnie, have died terrible deaths, his wife is gone, and how much of his memories are correct. This is truly a case of an unreliable narrator. Tom's entire life has been affected by tragedy, but he has survived. What memories are real, what are dreams. Ending brought tears.
This sublime study of love, trauma, memory and loss explores the legacy of childhood abuse in Ireland’s Catholic institutions....All of this could make a good story in another writer’s hands; what elevates this novel is Barry’s sustained, ventriloquial, impressionistic evocation of a unique, living consciousness, which at times takes flight into immersive transports of thought, feeling and memory in which nothing is fixed beyond the simple lodestar of Tom’s love for June. In terms of plot this serves a vital purpose, keeping the ground under our feet unsteady; on the level of emotion, it leads to an identification with Tom so close as to feel utterly, overwhelmingly true. The ending is a tour de force of transcendent power and complexity. I don’t expect to read anything as moving for many years. PrijzenOnderscheidingenErelijsten
"Recently retired policeman Tom Kettle is settling into the quiet of his new home, a lean-to annexed to a Victorian castle overlooking the Irish Sea. For months he has barely seen a soul, catching only glimpses of his eccentric landlord and a nervous young mother who has moved in next door. Occasionally, fond memories return, of his family, his beloved wife June and their two children, Winnie and Joe. But when two former colleagues turn up at his door with questions about a decades-old case, one which Tom never quite came to terms with, he finds himself pulled into the darkest currents of his past"-- Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)823.914Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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