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Bezig met laden... Wild Child: and Other Stories (2010)door T.C. Boyle
Top Five Books of 2013 (1,158) 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. Good collection of short stories. Glad I stumbled across T.C. Boyle, he's a very talented writer. ( ) Confident but facile writing. Boyle comes up with one perfect sentence after another, each anchored with a clever simile, or well-oiled line of dialog, or dazzling verb, or sometimes all three. Whether any of these well-crafted sentences fit the needs of the story or not seems beside the point. The first-person stories all sound like exactly the same voice: cynical, unpleasantly selfish, and ridiculously perceptive of tiny details. It's completely the same voice, no matter who the narrative character is. The stories themselves left an unpleasant residue in my mind. The exception to all of the above is the first story of the collection, Balto, which captured a believable perspective of a young girl being raised by an alcoholic father. My first read of anything by T. C. Boyle and I liked it. Unfortunately my library copy only had the title novella and there were no other accompanying short stories. It would have been good to have other stories to balance the feel of this particular story. I was put in mind a little of the story of - The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser - in that the reader is introduced to a feral child with no language, no education, no self-awareness, no shame, no family, and so on. The story - based on the early 19th century true story of Victor of Aveyron - tells of how one man of inexhaustible patience attempts to 'civilise' a 'savage' child. Abandoned by a parent who bungled their attempt to slit the child's throat, Victor had grown up alone in woodlands, living in nature, eating uncooked vegetables, fruits, and occasional tastes of raw meat. Eventually, as rumours of occasional sightings grew in number, the boy is captured and taken in to post-revolutionary French life. What follows is a catalogue of incidents, some progressive, some regressive, which retell how he is passed from one institution to the next until he eventually arrives into the care of a young and ambitious academic at the National Institute for the Deaf in Paris. Efforts to impart some form of belated education on Victor are largely unsuccessful, although there are momentary breakthroughs. It is an interesting and ultimately tragic tale. The writer narrated my audiobook and that was a big plus. I'd certainly like to read other stories by T. C. Boyle.
At his best Mr. Boyle gives us strobe-lit documentaries of these crucial moments in his characters’ lives, as they clamber up the steps to the circus high wire, put one foot on the tightrope, take a deep breath and push off. Of course, there will be some who find Boyle's palette garish, his characters cartoonish, his narrative fireworks mere antics of a strutting virtuoso. But Boyle is the closest thing we have to a modern-day Washington Irving, that American storyteller par excellence who found a perfect balance between art and pop, and who lived and worked not far from Boyle's own boyhood home along the Hudson River. In most of these stories, Boyle seems interested in doing little more than hammering together a setup, sporting with it for a page or two, then pinching things off before his characters can spit the bits from their mouths and take things in directions of their own uncalculated choosing. In an assortment of tales concerned with nature’s wondrous insurgencies, it’s hard not to feel let down that Boyle largely refuses to let his stories jump the corral and take off running for the big dark woods beyond. Bevat
With trademark imagination, T.C. Boyle presents a collection of fourteen short stories. In the volume's title story, Victor, a feral boy in Napoleonic France, is captured and is introduced to civilization for the first time. However it is the child't captors that end up learning the most about humanity and civility. 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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