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Bezig met laden... Smile (2017)door Roddy Doyle
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. Liked the start. Hated the relationship with the ex-wife and wanted to punch the 2 characters at the end for their ridiculous, endless conversation. ( ) I would like to thank NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to review this book ahead of publication. With his latest novel, Roddy Doyle returns to form after a series of let-downs. While diverting enough, I did not really think much of The Guts and the Two Pints books. Smile is a much more serious and riskier effort, reminiscent of Paddy Clarke and The Woman Who Walked into Doors. Victor Forde is a minor radio personality who is recently separated from his celebrity chef wife Rachel. Back living in the old neighbourhood, he finds himself at the local pub trying to re-establish himself with a new circle of friends. One of the pub's regulars, Ed, accosts him and starts to remind him of their school days, but Victor cannot remember him. Ed's gibes awaken some bad memories for Victor, both of school and his life with Rachel. As always, Doyle excels in capturing the badinage and false bravado of middle-aged blokes in pubs, but this time he invests it with a darker edge: doubt, confusion, sadness and regret are heavily present. The thing that sets this book apart from Doyle's more usual fare is the quite unexpected ending. It delivers a sharp jolt to the reader's expectations and makes one re-evaluate all that went before. I think it will polarise readers, and I had my own doubts, but I'd much rather be surprised and challenged by a great writer than read yet another example of him ploughing the same old field. Ah. Well I thought it showed his two selves. His potential self and how his life might have been had he coped with his abuse as a child (by minimising it). Fitzpatrick was the self totally damaged by the serial abuse. However my reading is too kind to Doyle really because it doesn’t fit the facts. The less charitable reading is that he didn’t quite know how to shape his material. The bits which came to life for me were his school days very early on. His dying dad and his mum were never fully realised. And all the nights of drinking in the pub were repetitive and got nowhere and were peopled with guys who had none of the vitality of Doyle’s menfolk in his early novels. And then what was his whole relationship with Rachel about. Perhaps the nugget at the heart of the book was the image of a guy pretending to be a writer and never actually getting whatever it was he was meant to be writing completed. Hence his reference to the writer in The Shining who just types the same line again and again. I’d have been cross if I’d paid good money for the book. Can you tell I’m writing this from the settee?? geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
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"A breakout from the Booker-prize-winning novelist Roddy Doyle. A psychological suspense novel unlike any he's written before, about how we contend with the past, trauma, guilt and regret, and the uncertainty of memory. Who is unreliable? Just moved in to a new apartment, alone for the first time in years, Victor Forde goes every evening to Donnelly's pub for a pint, a slow one. One evening his drink is interrupted. A man in shorts and pink shirt brings over his pint and sits down. He seems to know Victor's name and to remember him from school. Says his name is Fitzpatrick. Victor dislikes him on sight, dislikes too the memories that Fitzpatrick stirs up of five years being taught by the Christian Brothers. He prompts other memories too--of Rachel, his beautiful wife who became a celebrity, and of Victor's own small claim to fame, as the man who says the unsayable on the radio. But it's the memories of high school, and of one particular Brother, that he cannot control and which eventually threaten to destroy his sanity. Smile has all the features for which Roddy Doyle has become famous: the razor-sharp dialogue, the humour, the superb evocation of adolescence--but this is a novel unlike any he has written before. When you finish the last page you will have been challenged to re-evaluate everything you think you remember so clearly."-- Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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