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Bezig met laden... Voltaire's Calligrapher (2001)door Pablo De Santis
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. I wouldn't recommend it as the most fetching book of its kind, but you can find some interesting stuff here and there, if you look hard enough. For example I enjoyed the references to the antinomy between the old and the new, the caligraphy becoming obsolete and the modern, practical printed word. All in all I did not enjoy the tone and atmosphere of the book - where it should have been mysterious, it seemed to me just weird. I realized Voltaire was totally disposable for me in the book. I'm sure there were some cultural references somewhere but I missed them completely. Pablo De Santis' Voltaire's Calligrapher (Harper Perennial, 2010) reminded me a bit of some of Voltaire's stories (which is, I hope, what De Santis intended). The title character, young Dalessius, tells the story of how he came to be employed by Voltaire - as calligrapher, but also charged with much graver tasks as the great philosophe faces off against the anti-Enlightenment forces strongly aligned against him. De Santis' writing makes for good reading out loud, with its long, luscious descriptions of the calligrapher's craft, of bookstores and auctions, of strange characters who we may meet only briefly but whom I found myself thinking about long after I'd closed the book for the night. The plot meanders about, filled with twists and turns and dead ends, and the reader has no choice but to follow along, enjoying the journey. A short book, at under 150 pages, but one which rewards a close, lingering read. There's a tremendous amount of material hidden in each careful word. http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2012/03/book-review-voltaires-calligrapher.html Dalessius is a 20-year-old calligrapher who ends up working for the philosopher Voltaire in France during the Enlightenment. Interesting enough premise, but the plot never found its pace for me. It felt disjointed and confusing. There are automatons, secret messages written on naked women, a heart in a jar and other intriguing concepts, but they never mesh into a cohesive story. The book is only 150 pages and yet it felt like it was much longer. I found myself never wanting to pick it up and I can’t help but wonder if something was lost in translation. Maybe the plot makes more sense in its native language. I did really enjoy some of Santis’ descriptions of the people Dalessius meets on his journeys. Here’s one description of a watchmaker… “Her many years around clocks had given her words a regular beat, as if each syllable corresponded exactly to a fraction of time.” geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Onderdeel van de uitgeversreeks(en)Áncora y Delfín (938)
"Richly reminiscent of Umberto Eco, the headlong pace of this dark fantasy--combining elements of mystery, historical fiction, horror and the splinter genre clockpunk--will let readers swallow the entrancing story in a single gulp." --Kirkus Reviews Pablo DeSantis, the internationally acclaimed author of The Paris Enigma, is back with a wonderfully inventive, deliciously sinister thriller set in the chaos and opulence of 18th century Paris, where the malevolent remnants of the Dark Ages battle the progressive elements of the modern age. Anyone wondering where to turn after Neal Stephenson's Anathem and The Baroque Cycle or Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club will thrill for the exquisite language and deep intrigue of Pablo De Santis' Voltaire's Calligrapher. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)863.64Literature Spanish and Portuguese Spanish fiction 20th Century 1945-2000LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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The general idea is that the narrator, Dalessius, trained in calligraphy and employed as a copyist by the Sage of Ferney, finds himself acting as a kind of secret agent in a power-struggle between his boss and the Dominicans, who are (of course) plotting world-domination. There are also exploding sexbots, poison-pens, time-delay inks, a program-controlled bishop, and an overnight corpse delivery service involved in the story, inter alia.
A silly quibble that disturbed me throughout was the use of the word "calligrapher" as job-description for Dalessius. This word first appeared in English in the mid-18th century in line with the rise of interest in orientalism, and it was initially only used to describe artists producing decorative versions of handwritten texts for religious or display purposes in Islamic and Far Eastern cultures. The same applies to French calligraphe — unfortunately I haven't got a historical dictionary of Spanish to hand to check the history of calígrafo, but I assume it will be similar to French. The term calligraphy goes back about a century earlier.
The main action of the book is set between the Jean Calas case in 1762 and Voltaire's death in 1778. At that time, someone like Dalessius, whose job was the old-established one of making accurate, high-quality copies of legal and business manuscripts, would have used a term like clerk, copyist (both early-renaissance), scribe or scrivener (medieval). Obviously, there's no law against using an anachronistic word in a historical novel, particularly a non-realist one, but I find it odd when a writer — who presumably knows what he's doing — puts a word like that in the centre of the foreground and doesn't trouble to tell us why he is doing so. ( )