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Bezig met laden... Dept. of Speculation (origineel 2014; editie 2014)door Jenny Offill (Auteur)
Informatie over het werkVerbroken beloftes door Jenny Offill (2014)
  
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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.  Els04 | Oct 11, 2021 | 
Offill’s brief book eschews obvious grandeur. It does not broadcast its accomplishments for the cosmos but tracks the personal and domestic and local, a harrowed inner space. It concentrates its mass acutely, pressing down with exquisite and painful precision, like a pencil tip on the white of the nail.  Dept. of Speculation is a riposte to the notion that domestic fiction is humdrum and unambitious. From the point of view of an unnamed American woman, it gives us the hurrahs and boos of daily life, of marriage and of parenthood, with exceptional originality, intensity and sweetness. [...] Dept. of Speculation is a shattered novel that stabs and sparkles at the same time. It is the kind of book that you will be quoting over and over to friends who don't quite understand, until they give in and read it too. Offill is a smart writer with a canny sense of pacing; just when you want to abandon the fragmented puzzle pieces of the novel, she reveals a moment of breathtaking tenderness ... especially engaging when it describes new motherhood ... For better or worse, this is not so much a book about their marriage; it is a book about the wife’s marriage. It would be interesting to read the other story to this marriage, to know more of the husband, the father — but Offill still makes it seem as if the wife’s version of the marriage is story enough and, perhaps, the only story that matters. From deep within the interiors of a fictional marriage, Offill has crafted an account of matrimony and motherhood that breaks free of the all-too-limiting traditional stories of wives and mothers. There is complexity to the central partnership; Offill folds cynicism into genuine moments of love. It may be difficult to truly know what happens between two people, but Offill gets alarmingly close. Jenny Offill's novel Dept. of Speculation, which weighs in at 192 pages soaking wet and includes a fair amount of white space, is extremely short for a novel. It's an unusual book not only in terms of its size, but also its form. Make no mistake, this is an experimental novel. By which I mean that the narrative isn't a series of flowing scenes that keep you reassuringly grounded in plot, but a collection of vignettes, observations and quirky details that are sometimes pulled from real life.... Offill has successfully met the challenge she seems to have given herself: write only what needs to be written, and nothing more. No excess, no flab. And do it in a series of bulletins, fortune-cookie commentary, mordant observations, lyrical phrasing. And through these often disparate and disconnected means, tell the story of the fragile nature of anyone's domestic life. Onderdeel van de uitgeversreeks(en)PrijzenOnderscheidingenErelijsten
"Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all. Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband, postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes--a colicky baby, bedbugs, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions--the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it, as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art. With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation can be read in a single sitting, but there are enough bracing emotional insights in these pages to fill a much longer novel. "-- 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: (3.71)
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Ik dacht dat het om een nieuw boek ging maar het is een heruitgave van Verbroken beloftes uit 2015. Dat geeft niet, ik heb het voor de tweede keer met veel enthousiasme gelezen. Nog meer zelfs dan de eerste keer want toen was het een boek van de bib en daarin kon ik niets onderlijnen. Nu onderlijnde ik veel.
Of je houdt van Offill, of je vindt haar maar niets. Ik denk dat er geen weg tussen is. (Ik kan me eigenlijk niet voorstellen dat er veel mensen zijn die niet van haar houden.) Ze schenkt enkel de koffie, puur. Dus zonder melk, suiker, koekje. Haar zinnen zijn kaal, haar alinea’s zijn kort, net als haar hoofdstukken. Ze springt van idee naar wijsheid naar dagboekachtig fragment. En toch krijg je het hele verhaal mee. Misschien zelfs beter dan in een goedgevuld boek van 500 pagina’s. Alles komt harder binnen, er is niets dat verhult.
De geluidvolle verliefdheid, het schreeuwerige moederschap, het niet-weten, het wel-weten, het geverfde rode haar zoals zij het vroeger had, de wakkere nachten, de sterren op het platteland.
Ze schrijft vanuit de ik-persoon, totdat hét gebeurt en ze vanuit de ‘echtgenote’ begint te schrijven. Hoewel dat etiket, die handschoen steeds minder en minder goed past. Offill illustreert het contrast. In weinig woorden, maar zo waarachtig, zo krachtig.
Ik was fan van haar stijl, ik blijf fan. En wacht vol ongeduld op een nieuw boek. (