Klik op een omslag om naar Google Boeken te gaan.
Bezig met laden... Kraken (origineel 2010; editie 2010)door China Mieville
Informatie over het werkKraken door China Miéville (2010)
Books Read in 2016 (911) » 15 meer Books Read in 2017 (1,113) KayStJ's to-read list (180) Books Read in 2015 (2,053) Five star books (1,183) Books Read in 2011 (187) 2010s (19) At the Library (9) Biggest Disappointments (520) 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. This is a great story: The imagination of China Miéville is enormous and the story is in a good way totally out of control. So many different magical things and creatures. It took me quite a while to get used to them, but it really was worth it. Wow. ( )
Kraken utilises Miéville’s common setting of London, albeit a strange London. This otherness beside the familiar is a strand in his work evident from King Rat and Un Lun Dun through to THE CITY AND YTIC EHT. This one started out as if it may have been written with a film or TV adaptation in mind - one with a potentially light-hearted take - but soon veers off down strange Miévillean byways which may be unfilmable. For these are the end times and cultists worshipping all manner of weird gods abound. It begins with a kind of locked room mystery as a giant squid, Architeuthis, has been stolen - formalin, tank and all - from its stance in the Darwin Centre, a natural history museum where Billy Harrow is a curator. He helped to prepare the squid for show and is thought to hold the knowledge that might allow all those interested in its recovery to find it. The police fundamentalist and cult squad, the FSRC, is called in to help investigate the disappearance which becomes more involved when Billy discovers a body pickled (in too small a jar) in the museum’s basement. And these are merely the first strangenesses to be encountered in this book. We also have the consciousness of a man embedded within a tattoo, a tattoo which moves and speaks. Then there is the double act of Goss and Subby - two shapeshifting baddies from out of time (they shift other people’s shapes) - and weird sects, cults and mancers of all sorts. Never short of incident and brimming with plot the novel is probably a bit too convoluted, with too many characters for its own good, and its one-damn-strange-thing-after-another-ness can verge on overkill. But this is an unashamed fantasy, a form to which I am antipathetic when it is taken to extremes; and Miéville is not one for restraint. While Kraken sometimes skirts along the edge of comedy it never fully embraces it. There are too many killings and acts of violence for comedy to sit comfortably. I might have liked the novel better if it had. Its main fault is that it never manages to settle on which sort of book it is meant to be, straddling various narrative stools such as police procedural, one man against the odds, woman in search of the truth about her vanished lover, etc. Miéville has done what all great science-fiction has done—and great so-called literary fiction, when it gets around to it—provide a nuanced, highly imagined critique of the zeitgeist, dressed up in a crackerjack story. ""... "Kraken" is, no mistake, a literary work. The hint is in the subtitle, "An Anatomy," because Miéville is exploring the gap between the prosaic squid and the mythic Kraken, between the mundane ground of everyday life and the sacred. What precisely turns a fish into a god? What is the anatomy of a legend? And how do gods manifest themselves in our world? ...Miéville's best work since "Perdido Street Station." Onderdeel van de uitgeversreeks(en)Bastei Lübbe Fantasy (20560) PrijzenOnderscheidingenErelijsten
Fantasy.
Fiction.
Literature.
Science Fiction.
HTML:With this outrageous new novel, China Miville has written one of the strangest, funniest, and flat-out scariest books you will read thisor any otheryear. The London that comes to life in Kraken is a weird metropolis awash in secret currents of myth and magic, where criminals, police, cultists, and wizards are locked in a war to bring aboutor preventthe End of All Things. In the Darwin Centre at Londons Natural History Museum, Billy Harrow, a cephalopod specialist, is conducting a tour whose climax is meant to be the Centres prize specimen of a rare Architeuthis duxbetter known as the Giant Squid. But Billys tour takes an unexpected turn when the squid suddenly and impossibly vanishes into thin air. As Billy soon discovers, this is the precipitating act in a struggle to the death between mysterious but powerful forces in a London whose existence he has been blissfully ignorant of until now, a city whose denizenshuman and otherwiseare adept in magic and murder. There is the Congregation of God Kraken, a sect of squid worshippers whose roots go back to the dawn of humanityand beyond. There is the criminal mastermind known as the Tattoo, a merciless maniac inked onto the flesh of a hapless victim. There is the FSRCthe Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unita branch of Londons finest that fights sorcery with sorcery. There is Wati, a spirit from ancient Egypt who leads a ragtag union of magical familiars. There are the Londonmancers, who read the future in the citys entrails. There is Grisamentum, Londons greatest wizard, whose shadow lingers long after his death. And then there is Goss and Subby, an ageless old man and a cretinous boy who, together, constitute a terrifyingyet darkly charismaticdemonic duo. All of themand othersare in pursuit of Billy, who inadvertently holds the key to the missing squid, an embryonic god whose powers, properly harnessed, can destroy all that is, was, and ever shall be. BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from China Mivilles Embassytown.. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
Actuele discussiesGeenPopulaire omslagen
Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)823.914Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
Ben jij dit?Word een LibraryThing Auteur. |