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Chargement... The Glass Pearls (Faber Editions): 'A wonderful noir thriller and tremendous rediscovery' - William Boyd (édition 2022)par Emeric Pressburger (Auteur)
Information sur l'oeuvreThe Glass Pearls par Emeric Pressburger
   Books Read in 2022 (2,945) Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre.  john257hopper | Feb 25, 2024 |   Karl Braun is a piano tuner living in London approximately 20 years after WW II ended. He is an apparent refugee from Germany. We soon learn that he is biding his time, having heard that the German government had declared a 20 year statute of limitations on prosecuting Nazi war criminals. When he hears that the statute of limitations has been extended he begins to fall apart. He is suspicious of everyone, and he expects to be arrested at any moment. But are the various people Karl suspects are about to arrest him merely figments of his paranoid imagination? The introduction to this short novel calls it a "troubling study in spiritual corruption." The author is Jewish and lost his mother and many close relatives at Auschwitz, yet he tells the story from the pov of one of the perpetrators of these evils, which is perhaps a bit puzzling. Is he pointing out that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were not necessarily inhuman aberrations, but that what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil" is what allowed the Holocaust to happen? I'm not sure, but this was an interesting read. Recommended 3 1/2 stars (  ) arubabookwoman | Sep 9, 2023 |
 In this tense thriller from the screenwriter Emeric Pressburger – he of the legendary British film-making duo Powell and Pressburger (The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus) – a fugitive Nazi moves into a boarding house over a stationery shop in London’s Pimlico. We learn that Karl Braun, who arrives “hatless, with a bow tie, greying hair, slight in build”, is in fact one Dr Otto Reitmüller, a former surgeon who has been in hiding from authorities for 20 years and who is wanted for conducting medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. A gifted violinist, Braun now works as a piano tuner and spends his evenings at the opera or attending classical concerts with his beau, the newly divorced Mrs Taylor. But beneath the cultured exterior is a man who frets about who might be following him and is plagued by dreams of being arrested and put on trial. The narrator is actor Mark Gatiss, who performs Braun as a softly spoken introvert, a contrast to his louder, jollier neighbours, Strohmayer and Kolm, both German émigrés who fled the Nazis, with whom he strikes up uneasy friendships. Braun shows little remorse for the suffering he inflicted, though he is not without emotions, as evidenced by his sadness over the deaths of his wife and child in the allied bombing of Hamburg. First published in 1966, The Glass Pearls doesn’t go so far as to root for Braun, though it nonetheless puts us in the unusual position of looking at the world through the eyes of a quietly charismatic war criminal. Appartient à la série éditoriale
London, June 1965. Karl Braun arrives as a lodger in Pimlico: hatless, with a bow tie, greying hair, slight in build. His new neighbours are intrigued by this cultured German gentleman who works as a piano tuner; many are fellow migrs, who assume that he, like them, came to England to flee Hitler. That summer, Braun courts a woman, attends classical concerts, dances the twist. But as the newspapers fill with reports of the hunt for Nazi war criminals, his nightmares worsen...A forgotten classic by the film-maker of Powell and Pressburger fame, The Glass Pearls (1966) is not only a thrilling feat of Hitchcockian noir but a haunting dissection of guilt, paranoia and moral ambiguity--book flap. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
Discussion en coursAucunCouvertures populaires
 Google Books — Chargement...GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)823.914Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne: (3.96)
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The book was a very good read, and also gave a good feel for the England of the time, two decades after the war, but before what we usually think of as the 1960s had really taken hold. The ending was certainly dramatic, with a twist in the resolution. My only criticism is that I think it might have been slightly better had the reader not become aware almost at the start of Karl Braun's true background, but come to realise it more slowly as clues emerge. He is certainly clever and cunning and could have deceived the reader for longer, as he does the characters he interacts with, especially Helen Taylor, his (sort of) girlfriend. But this was an excellent read. (