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Bezig met laden... Monastery (2014)door Eduardo Halfon
   2014 to read. (19) 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. 1   labfs39 | Jul 20, 2022 |   The book begins with our narrator flying with his brother to Tel Aviv for his sister’s wedding to an orthodox man…. (I should note that the narrator and family are Guatemalan Jews) but then he meets Tamara, an old flame…. Eduardo Halfon is a wonderfully clever storyteller. This small book is basically a running narration of a chain of short stories, some linked, some not. There are titled chapters, which serve several purposes, for one, it allows the reader a stopping point should they have other responsibilities to tend to. Our narrator takes us on an amazingly journey in this little book. Here is a first line of one of the stories: On a different trip, in a different city; bundled up in a woman’s pink coat, I had also touched the last remnants of what had once been the wall of the Warsaw ghetto… One of my favorite stories is his tale about trying to get across the border from Guatemala into Belize where he is expected to give a lecture. It becomes a pig pile of mishaps and strange events. Halfon is brilliant and often funny. His writing is wonderful and the reader feels like he or she is listening to the story, rather than reading. (  )1 avaland | May 27, 2022 | Author Halfon writes beautifully in this travelogue. He is a Guatemalan Jew, and his eight vignettes provide background on his family and the recent histories of both Guatemala and Jews. Funny at times, poignant at others. For me anyway, the choices about where to stop each story and the lengths were perplexing. (  ) skipstern | Jul 11, 2021 |  ) juan1961 | Mar 29, 2020 | scalavera | Apr 10, 2018 | geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Prijzen
"In Monastery, the nomadic narrator of Eduardo Halfon's critically-acclaimed The Polish Boxer returns to travel from Guatemalan cities, villages, coffee plantations, and border towns to a private jazz concert in New York's Harlem, a former German U-Boat base on the French Breton coast, and Israel, where he escapes from his sister's Orthodox Jewish wedding into an erotic adventure with the enigmatic Tamara. His passing encounters are unforgettable; his relationships, problematic. At once a world citizen and a writer who mistrusts the power of language, he is pursued by history's ghosts and unanswerable questions. He is a cartographer of identity on a compelling journey to an uncertain destination. As he draws and redraws his boundaries, he confronts us with the limitations of our own. Eduardo Halfon was named one of the best young Latin American writers by the Hay Festival of Bogota and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the prestigious Jose; Maria de Pereda Prize for the Short Novel. The Polish Boxer, his first book to appear in English, was a New York Times Editor's Choice selection and finalist for the International Latino Book Award. Halfon currently lives in Nebraska and frequently travels to Guatemala. "-- Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
Deelnemer aan LibraryThing Vroege RecensentenEduardo Halfon's boek Monastery was beschikbaar via LibraryThing Early Reviewers.  Actuele discussiesGeenPopulaire omslagen
 Google Books — Bezig met laden...GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)863.7Literature Spanish and Portuguese Spanish fiction 21st CenturyLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde: (4.13)
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5
Beautifully written vignettes, the stories are almost plotless and capture snapshots of life. As the author writes in Prologue at Saint-Nazaire,
I watch a group of children running around on the roof of the submarine base. An outing from some French school, I think, and I think about the word trivial, about the importance of the trivial in art, in literature. Isn't the trivial, after all, the raw materials of the short story writer? Aren't anecdotes that seem trivial—that is to say, insignificant—the very clay with which the short story writer carries out his craft and shapes his art? All of life, I think, is codified in these trivial, minuscule, transparent details—details that seem not to contain anything of importance (a leaf of grass, wrote Walt Whitman, is no less than the journey-work of the stars). A great short story writer, I think as the children play on the old submarine base, knows how to make something immense of the brief, something transcendent of the insignificant, knows how to transform nothing at all into a few pages that contain everything...
Although I don't think it necessary to have read [The Polish Boxer] in order to enjoy [Monastery], I will seek it out simply to enjoy more of Halfon's trivial transcendences. (