Simon Cleary
Auteur de The comfort of figs
Œuvres de Simon Cleary
The Comfort of Figs 1 exemplaire
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This was a great story about the building of the Story Bridge in brisbane, Australia and about the people working on the bridge.
A beautifully written book which deserves to be more widely read.
The Comfort of Figs is a fine story which links the dangers inherent in the building of Brisbane’s Story Bridge with present day violence and trauma. The relationship between Robbie, a young landscape gardener and his girlfriend Freya is put to the test in the aftermath of the kind of assault that occurs all too often in a modern city; he also has a fractured relationship with his father - who worked on the construction of the Story Bridge, the bridge that enabled Brisbane to grow from a country town into that city.
Visit ANZ LitLovers to see my review
http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2010/05/02/the-comfort-of-figs-by-simon-cleary...… (plus d'informations)
The Comfort of Figs is a fine story which links the dangers inherent in the building of Brisbane’s Story Bridge with present day violence and trauma. The relationship between Robbie, a young landscape gardener and his girlfriend Freya is put to the test in the aftermath of the kind of assault that occurs all too often in a modern city; he also has a fractured relationship with his father - who worked on the construction of the Story Bridge, the bridge that enabled Brisbane to grow from a country town into that city.
Visit ANZ LitLovers to see my review
http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2010/05/02/the-comfort-of-figs-by-simon-cleary...… (plus d'informations)
I was disapointed with this book and I did not finish reading it. I found it to be pretentiously written and the characters unrelatable. The modern-day male character (Robbie) meets his Canadian girlfriend by hanging about outside the pool where she swims and after they are together, he mopes about in the kitchen, eavesdropping, while she and her friends chat in the lounge room.
Robbie plants trees randomly in locations in Brisbane and gives his girlfriend bits of trees (leaves, twigs, etc) as little tokens of his affection. The girlfriend is a student at the University of Queensland, but instead of just saying that, the author instead says that she "goes to the one surrounded by trees".
It feels as though the author is flogging the reader about the head with his metaphors -- a kick in the behind would be more subtle!… (plus d'informations)
Robbie plants trees randomly in locations in Brisbane and gives his girlfriend bits of trees (leaves, twigs, etc) as little tokens of his affection. The girlfriend is a student at the University of Queensland, but instead of just saying that, the author instead says that she "goes to the one surrounded by trees".
It feels as though the author is flogging the reader about the head with his metaphors -- a kick in the behind would be more subtle!… (plus d'informations)
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 4
- Membres
- 36
- Popularité
- #397,831
- Évaluation
- 2.8
- Critiques
- 5
- ISBN
- 17
This is the blurb:
Entirely by coincidence, I read this novel contemporaneously with Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier which is also about a soldier with what we now call post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Both novels explore the impact on those who must deal with a damaged soul, but The War Artist penetrates more deeply into the minds of those who cannot leave the traumatic past behind.
Through Phelan and the flashbacks which lurch unbidden into his life as a civilian, the reader sees the events that haunt him. It reminded me a little of Mark Dapin's fine novel Spirit House which showed how an horrific past can bleed uncontrollably into the present. As I wrote in my review of that book:
For Phelan, his memory of Beckett's death is inexorable. He feels — and is accused of being — responsible for Beckett's death, and footage from the body camera gives the patrol ammunition to judge him harshly. Whereas Rebecca West had no need to describe the slaughter of WW1 for it to be ubiquitous in The Return of the Soldier, military deaths are so rare in modern warfare, especially in Australian deployments, that each death has an individuality denied to the overwhelming numbers of the Fallen of WW1. Their names cover vast stone memorials in our cities, capitals and towns, yet the tattoo-artist Kira can memorialise the casualties of the Australia's Afghan War on the torso of just one man.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/03/10/the-war-artist-by-simon-cleary/… (plus d'informations)