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Bezig met laden... Our Country Friends (2021)door Gary Shteyngart
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. It stands to reason that the pandemic will inspire a lot of fiction. I had very high hopes for this one, but couldn't quite get into it. The characters were almost universally off-putting (with the exception of Natash) and there is a section near the end where the author really lost me, to the point where I was mentally begging for it to stop. I appreciated the satire (and there has been so very much to satirize) and the bittersweet last scene, but overall, a disappointment. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
"It's March 2020 and a calamity is unfolding. A group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next few months new bonds of friendship and love will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge among this unlikely cast of characters, each richly drawn and achingly human: a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a young flame-thrower of an essayist, originally from the Carolinas; and a movie star, The Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family"-- Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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While the outside menace, both viral and human, hovers in the background and occasionally intervenes directly, it’s really the comic and pathetic interactions of this group of people that dominate the novel up until the final pages. They lust and ache for each other in ways physical, fraternal, spousal, and parental. They are petty and they are generously warm hearted. Shteyngart very funnily sends himself up as the character of Sasha Senderovsky, aka “the landowner”, once a successful novelist but now a struggling screenwriter known as “Return to Sender” by his would-be benefactor because of all the unsatisfactory scripts he sends in.
In the end it’s not a great Shteyngartian satire or the Great Pandemic Novel as much as it is a surprisingly humane (and comic, yes) novel about people, which is pretty much my favorite kind of novel.
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