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Bezig met laden... Zone One (2011)door Colson Whitehead
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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. Zombie post-apocalypse fiction. I found it a little hard to stay focused. Pandemic onset. Unclear origin or why or how it spreads? Story told out of order without a real gripe on the characters (since most people die) the main story being how one didn’t end up a skel or getting eaten (or does getting eaten make you a skel?) main character interesting, a B type. Average. Interesting discourse as to how this abets his survival (why anyone would want to survive is a seriously considered question—many do not). Story focuses around New York (with a funny digression in Northampton). The apocalypse will be bleak, man. Apologies for anyone who did like this — but I did not get on with it at all. Such a meagre plot. I found it slow-moving and dull. Maybe I'm less impatient than I used to be. I was really only reading at the end to make sure it was as bad as I thought. Not saying it's meritless — other people may well have got something worthwhile out of it. *Minor spoiler* Also annoyed that the one tiny innovation Colson introduced was of course a huge plot point at the end — a very obvious Chekhov's gun. I enjoy Whitehead's insight and evocation of NYC, but I've had too many apocalypses recently, and this just feeds into my most stressful thoughts. Additionally this zombie critique of culture has been done, many times, and it doesn't serve him here. I would rather re-read the excellent Intuitionist.
“Zone One” spares the form’s conventional reliance on summer-movie scares and chase scenes — though there’s plenty of those too — and instead turns an unsparing focus on the dark reality such a world-crumbling plague unleashes. ... At one point, Whitehead compares humanity’s shift to the ravenous undead as self-actualization for the secretly immoral or those too timid to chase their dreams. “I have always been like this,” Whitehead coldly observes in a mob of townspeople-turned-monsters. “Now I’m more me.” ... Linguistically cryptic military diagnoses, the PR churn of the war machine and a merciless city that fed on its own long before its citizens started feeding on one another still endure in Whitehead’s apocalypse, all the way to the bitter end. A literary novelist writing a genre novel is like an intellectual dating a porn star. It invites forgivable prurience: What is that relationship like? ... Colson Whitehead is a literary novelist, but his latest book, “Zone One,” features zombies, which means horror fans and gore gourmands will soon have him on their radar. He has my sympathy. Broad-spectrum marketing will attract readers for whom having to look up “cathected” or “brisant” isn’t just an irritant but a moral affront. These readers will huff and writhe and swear their way through (if they make it through) and feel betrayed and outraged and migrained. But unless they’re entirely beyond the beguilements of art they will also feel fruitfully disturbed, because “Zone One” will have forced them, whether they signed up for it or not, to see the strangeness of the familiar and the familiarity of the strange. ... There will be grumbling from self-appointed aficionados of the undead (Sir, I think the author will find that zombies actually . . .) and we’ll have to listen for another season or two to critics batting around the notion that genre-slumming is a recent trend, but none of that will hurt “Zone One,” which is a cool, thoughtful and, for all its ludic violence, strangely tender novel, a celebration of modernity and a pre-emptive wake for its demise. Cinematic in scope and nimble in its use of hard-core gore, it’s an absorbing read, crammed with thoughtful snapshots of the world the survivors have left behind... The implicit question: Have we all become zombies? Are 21st-century Americans wandering around in a stupor, drinking designer coffee from designer mugs, ordering the same modular sofas from the same big box retailers, standing in trances before copying machines in drab office buildings coast to coast? ... Whitehead’s answer appears to be “yes,” which can be problematic for the novel. As readers, we should be at liberty to mourn a civilization that appears to be gone for good — one with safer homes, loving families and, yes, flat screen TVs. But the book sometimes makes us feel naive, even foolish for courting these feelings, in the same way a smug New Yorker make a non-native feel like a hick. In the endless and in no way tedious debate between lovers of genre and lovers of whatever "literary" fiction is (we can't define it but we know it when we see it), consider this theory: a book is not a song. A book is the performance of a song... Whitehead isn't your usual zombie singer. He never overburdens the zombies with allegory or omits the requisite gore, but he does what all artists do: he observes, closely, and reports back what he sees... Whitehead does have a tendency to overwrite – sentences sometimes grow so rhythmical, you fail to take in their actual meaning as the words wash over you – but he achieves a kind of miracle of tone. A fragile hope permeates these pages, one so painful and tender, it's heartbreaking. From the very opening, Zone One sets itself as a novel about ideas, rather than people. The hallmarks of (recherché) postmodernism are ever present: temporal distortion, metafiction, pastiche, paranoia... This approach may work to great effect elsewhere, yet in a zombie novel, where pace and narrative urgency are of the essence, it falls sadly flat. On the odd occasion that the novel does begin to gain some momentum, the author has a tendency to embark on tiresome digressions which involve but are not limited to groceries, flossing, tog-count and yoga mats. As a result, the narrative shambles along at the pace of an emaciated skel... This is, without doubt, a dense, difficult book. In parts it is amusingly clever, yet it is also guilty of being too clever. The author’s use of temporal distortion, for instance, lacks the necessary control leaving the plot tangled, disoriented, and dull. Onderdeel van de uitgeversreeks(en)Stile libero [Einaudi] (Big) PrijzenOnderscheidingenErelijsten
Mark Spitz and his squad of three "sweepers" move through Zone One of lower Manhattan, a walled-off enclave scheduled for resettlement in the aftermath of a zombie plague. The great masses of the undead have been violently dispatched by a Marine detachment. It falls to Spitz and his fellows to take care of the handful that remain, as well as a second-tier of the infected known as "stragglers": zombies who have bypassed the cannibalistic urges of their more lethal fellows in favor of a hollow-eyed, eerily nostalgic repetition of some mundane act. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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