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Bezig met laden... Een vreemdsoortig onheil (2006)door Ken Kalfus
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. Blech. Awful people doing awful things to each other in the midst of a divorce amid the backdrop of NYC during and after 9/11. ( ) The idea of this book was really good: we see a married couple in a bad divorce, with 9/11 in the background. However, for me the divorce and 9/11 stayed two separate story lines, both of which were not executed very well. The fighting is at times ridiculous, and makes the husband and wife unsympathetic, because they completely ignore their kids in this. You can feal some of the despair of 9/11, but that is overshadowed by the divorce. All in all, it would have been better if there was more focus on one thing in this book. A dark, biting satire that combines a particularly hostile divorce with the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath, this book starts off laugh-out-loud funny and slowly deteriorates into the absurd. I recognize what the author is trying to accomplish, pointing out both the banality and the horror of life in New York at this time but he didn't quite succeed, perhaps because, for me, the book was marred by what I think is a glaring historical inaccuracy early in the book, as well as by one chapter from a five-year-old's point of view that I think was much too sophisticated for a child of that age, and by the same names being used for two sets of minor characters.
Promising though it seems, the symbolic value of this amusingly wretched setup is undermined by a lack of emotional layering, a failure to provide much insight into Joyce and Marshall’s mutual wish for destruction. Though Kalfus tracks them through familial events (Joyce’s sister’s wedding) as well as national crises (the anthrax scare; the buildup to the Iraq invasion), he doesn’t help us to understand the roots of his central characters’ hatred, which keeps the novel’s emotional tenor brittle. Given how vile they are (humiliating each other in private and public; scheming to destroy relations with friends and family; installing an eavesdropping device on the telephone) and how unable or unwilling they are to protect their children from the conflict, neither Harriman garners much sympathy, however much we may recognize their despair. PrijzenErelijsten
Joyce and Marshall each think the other is killed on September 11--and must swallow their disappointment when the other arrives home. As their bitter divorce is further complicated by anthrax scares, suicide bombs, and foreign wars, they suffer, in ways unexpectedly personal and increasingly ludicrous, the many strange ravages of our time. In this astonishing black comedy, Kalfus suggests how our nation's public calamities have encroached upon our most private illusions. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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