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Chargement... Bird Cloud: A Memoir of Place (édition 2011)par Annie Proulx (Auteur)
Information sur l'oeuvreBird Cloud par Annie Proulx
   Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre.  grimm | Feb 21, 2014 | 
 Reading Ms. Proulx’s prose is like bouncing along rutted country roads in a pickup truck with no shock absorbers. Her books are packed with arcane flora and fauna and eccentrically named towns and characters. Many writers employ unusual verbs and adjectives; Ms. Proulx likes weird nouns. Her cluttered style is, in a kind of reverse way, as jewel-encrusted as Gustav Klimt’s. In “Bird Cloud” these qualities turn against her. She visually absorbs Wyoming’s long vistas and spits out data like a seed catalog.  There are three brilliantly researched and written chapters in Bird Cloud that construct a fine gallery interpreting the human and natural history of a wild stretch of Wyoming landscape. Unfortunately, they are the last three chapters and to get to them we have to make it through a meandering, overwrought and badly conceived foyer of “I-built-a-house” memoir, seven chapters long....For the reader, though, it also signals the disappointment of the first two-thirds of her book. We stand at a window Proulx created to provide a certain view, but in looking through it we wonder just what it was she wanted us to see
"Bird Cloud" is the name the author gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four hundred foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. She also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she wanted to build on it, a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character, a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen. Her first work of nonfiction in more than twenty years, this book is the story of designing and constructing that house, with its solar panels, Japanese soak tub, concrete floor and elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets. It is also an enthralling natural history and archaeology of the region, inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho and Shoshone Indians, and a family history, going back to nineteenth century Mississippi riverboat captains and Canadian settlers. The author here turns her lens on herself. We understand how she came to be living in a house surrounded by wilderness, with shelves for thousands of books and long worktables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials and maps, and how she came to be one of the great American writers of her time. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
Discussion en coursAucunCouvertures populaires
 Google Books — Chargement...GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne: (3.3)
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Bird Cloud n’est pas une nouvelle, ni un roman. C’est l’histoire de la maison que l’auteur s’est fait construire dans le Wyoming, avec force ennuis. Histoire de meubler, il y a aussi plusieurs chapitres sur sa généalogie, quelques anecdotes historiques et des chapitres consacrés à ses observations de la flore et de la faune. Il s’agit donc d’un livre fourre-tout pas vraiment palpitant et sans histoire à raconter.
Publishers Weekly a titré selon le quatrième de couverture « une ode intense à l’ouest majestueux ». Pour grandiloquent, le titre est assez juste. Annie Proulx écrit très bien, ses descriptions sont poétiques et c’est agréable à lire même quand le sujet n’est pas vraiment palpitant. Quant à l’Ouest majestueux, il est là, comme la couverture le vantait. On parle de flore et de faune, des aigles , des wapitis, etc… mais aussi du paysage sauvage et grandiose de cette région de l’Ouest des USA, à quelques pas (à l’échelle américaine) du célèbre parc de Yellowstone.
Donc un livre que je ne recommanderais pas, mais un auteur et un cadre qui donne envie d’y revenir.
Voir cet avis sur mon blog http://blogrimm.fr/?p=1465 (