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Bezig met laden... What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire? (2001)door António Lobo Antunes
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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. Well, it was a battle, but I did finish it. Antunes's novel is more like a very long stream-of-consciousness prose poem, where the present, past, and maybe the future are all mixed together. Snippets of conversation mingle with in the innermost thoughts of a variety of characters, along with what I guess would describe as kind of mini-vignettes. Probably the most difficult book I've ever read (I tend to like at least fairly realistic fiction or fantasty-ish lit along the lines of Calvino and Borges), but the often beautiful prose made it worth it in the end, even if much of time it was hard to know exactly what was going on. Ok, maybe that's not the best endorsement, but it really is like being inside someone's memory, I think that's the best way to put it. ( ) Reviewers (including one in the NYT Sunday book review) compare Antunes to Faulkner and other modernists, because the action takes places at all times simultaneously; his characters say things they've said long before, or won't actually say for a long time to come, because Antunes is conjuring a young man's feverishly intense imagination, which echoes and re-echoes with things he's experienced and with the campy cast of characters he grew up with. But all that is not really relevant. It would be possible to read this for insight into the world of drag queens in Portugal, and it is impossible not to read it as a late modernist experiment, flawed by its familiarity but redeemed by its funny energy and glamorous despair. I don't think it is really about either of those things. It is about the author's inability to create the kind of incantatory theatricality that is, to him, a sensitive and even profound representation of his imaginative world. I was only convinced by the echoing voices on one or two pages. The rest seemed far too loosely composed. He hopes that collages create expressive effects, but they seldom do. The real difference between Faulkner and Antunes is that Faulkner's novels are tight, tight, tight, and Antunes's are loose, loose, loose. The book flaps and flutters and does not persuade. Bad craftsmanship. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
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The razor-thin line between reality and madness is transgressed in this Faulknerian masterpiece, António Lobo Antunes's first novel to appear in English in five years. What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire?, set in the steamy world of Lisbon's demimonde--a nightclub milieu of scorching intensity and kaleidoscopic beauty, a baleful planet populated by drag queens, clowns, and drug addicts--is narrated by Paolo, the son of Lisbon's most legendary transvestite, who searches for his own identity as he recalls the harrowing death of his father, Carlos; the life of Carlos's lover, Rui, a heroin addict and suicide; as well as the other denizens of this hallucinatory world. Psychologically penetrating, pregnant with literary symbolism, and deeply sympathetic in its depiction of society's dregs, Lobo Antunes's novel ventriloquizes the voices of the damned in a poetic masterwork that recalls Joyce's Ulysses with a dizzying farrago of urban images few readers will forget. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)869.342Literature Spanish and Portuguese Portuguese Portuguese fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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