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Bezig met laden... The Deluge (editie 2023)door Stephen Markley (Autore)
Informatie over het werkThe Deluge door Stephen Markley
   Books Read in 2023 (188) 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.  leoslittlebooklife | Jan 30, 2023 | 
“The Deluge” is long on ambition. It’s also long, weighing in at nearly 900 pages — baggy, restless, immersive. Centrifugal forces threaten to tear it apart, but Markley soldiers on, in hyper-real mode. A kind of metanovel floats just above the surface of “The Deluge,” satire that reads like a darker, dissonant riff on Joe Klein’s “Primary Colors,” unfolding in collages of tabloid headlines, Vanity Fair profiles and opinion pieces by the likes of Al Gore, interspersed among the chapters. The author’s just as fascinated with the sausage-making of legislation as with greenhouse gases.... Markley’s eye is on the near future, but he’s also preoccupied with the near past, relitigating recent traumas: a Washington in lockdown, N.Y.P.D. teams fanning across Lower Manhattan and a Trump 2.0 who makes the original look like a stroll in the park. The Covid pandemic seems “long ago.” This is fiction on an impossibly grand scale. We struggle to wrap our arms around it.... Markley’s right to peer forward, though: defiant, Cassandra-like, screaming into the void. Novelists often preen as moralists, but he’s the genuine article. As humanity hurtles needlessly toward catastrophe, the powerful make and break the rules, dodging accountability and sucking up resources. Meanwhile, it’s getting hot in here, and there, and everywhere. Stephen Markley’s new climate-change epic, “The Deluge,” is a lot. A lot of characters, a lot of politicking and a lot of devastation, filling a lot of pages. But a lot of it is entertaining, and its length is purposeful: A realistic projection of the collapse of civilization as we know it takes some easing into. As one character puts it: “One must be careful in the handling of difficult realities. People cannot hear bad news all at once.” ... For all its well-researched details about methane hydrates and carbon sequestration, and all the weather calamities it depicts, “The Deluge” isn’t just concerned with climate change. Another major theme is something else it posits as an immediate risk: identity politics, which in this novel leads to divisive, distracting tribalism, exacerbates white supremacism and shifts our focus away from the radical change required to fix our most existential problems. That’s an extremely debatable point, but you can see why Markley includes it. He’s tried to write a big, unifying novel that has something for everyone — fans of horror, thrillers, science fiction, literary fiction and more. So it’s only natural that he’d play to both sides of the political aisle. He’d make room for hobbits and wizards if he realistically could. This novel might try to do the impossible; but as with the climate, so with novels: Why not try? Ahyper-realistic, alarming vision of the world destabilized by climate change. This sprawling novel, about 900 pages long, covers three decades of American life, beginning in 2013, as partisan divisions widen and the effects of rising global temperatures become more pronounced, and extending to a cataclysmic near future marked by social and ecological collapse.... This is an exhaustively researched book, crammed full of commentary and speculation on contemporary trends: widening wealth gaps, political polarization, the inefficacy of reformist measures to address environmental threats, the blinkered resistance of conservative forces, the inevitability of violent assaults on scapegoats as currents of irrationality pulse through the nation. There are intriguing surprises in this chronicle of accelerating disorder and anomie, and the conclusion rewards those who persevere through the thickets of character development, though overall the novel has difficulty sustaining narrative momentum, and its extraordinary length seems, at last, rather unjustified.... This is an exhaustively researched book, crammed full of commentary and speculation on contemporary trends: widening wealth gaps, political polarization, the inefficacy of reformist measures to address environmental threats, the blinkered resistance of conservative forces, the inevitability of violent assaults on scapegoats as currents of irrationality pulse through the nation. There are intriguing surprises in this chronicle of accelerating disorder and anomie, and the conclusion rewards those who persevere through the thickets of character development, though overall the novel has difficulty sustaining narrative momentum, and its extraordinary length seems, at last, rather unjustified. In this brilliant dystopian epic from Markley (Ohio), spanning from 2013 to 2040, a range of characters attempt to avert catastrophic climate change, sometimes at great personal risk, and with varying degrees of success....Markley makes this anything but didactic; his nuanced characterizations of individuals with different approaches to the existential threat make the perils they encounter feel real as they navigate cover-ups and lies. It’s a disturbing tour de force. PrijzenOnderscheidingen
"This book is, simply put, a modern classic. If you read it, you'll never forget it. Prophetic, terrifying, uplifting." --Stephen King From the bestselling author of Ohio, a masterful American epic charting a near future approaching collapse and a nascent but strengthening solidarity. In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters--a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come. From the Gulf Coast to Los Angeles, the Midwest to Washington, DC, their intertwined odysseys unfold against a stark backdrop of accelerating chaos as they summon courage, galvanize a nation, fall to their own fear, and find wild hope in the face of staggering odds. As their stories hurtle toward a spectacular climax, each faces a reckoning: what will they sacrifice to salvage humanity's last chance at a future? A singular achievement, The Deluge is a once-in-a-generation novel that meets the moment as few works of art ever have. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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 Google Books — Bezig met laden...GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.6000Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde: (3.84)
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3
The Deluge is a brick of a book but I kept turning those 900 pages and I was once again in awe of Markley’s writing. This one has a large, sprawling plot with lots of diverse and inclusive characters: female, male, black, white, gay, straight, non-binary. I loved the way Markley just brings them on the stage without talking about their coming out, endured racism or anti feminism. They just are there and they are naturally who they are.
This is a story with a message, and one of the utmost importance and urgency: climate change and what it can do to us.
Markley shows us how society can unravel within a decade from now due to the changing climate itself and the way people react to it. They do here, in both violent and nonviolent ways. It is a warning and I’m going to say something I never did before but here goes: you should read this book. To get shaken up and realize what’s happening to our world.
The Deluge is a highly political and activist novel and Markley uses his talent as a novelist to step into the discussion and he does so in a loud and urgent way, which is I believe the only way that works. The New York Times wrote about him: “novelists often preen as moralists, but he’s the genuine article.”
The style Markley uses is very interesting. Chapters are now and then written as newspaper or magazine articles, notes appear in boxes within the text. He excels though when he writes about his characters. There I see his compassion for them and also the magnificence of Markley as a novelist, just like in Ohio. I have the feeling that he will turn into one of the important writers of our time.
Read this book!