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Chargement... There But For The (2011)par Ali Smith
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This book is full of word play and puns, which I have a hard time enjoying. Folks who really enjoy word play should love this one. The story follows a very clever little girl named Brooke, who is a bit of a nuisance, mostly because she asks a lot of questions and makes awkward observations and comments all the time. She has no clue really how irritating she is, and despite being so smart her parents deal with somewhat frequent complaints from her teachers. The book is also about a man who shows up at a house as a houseguest, shuts himself into a guest bedroom, and refuses to leave. Underlying the story is a theme of things that are implied but never said, like the word 'the' when it is left out in titles or colloquial speech. If you like Kafka and Lewis Carroll, and Alexander McCall Smith, you might enjoy this book. ( ) this book is about a man who locks himself into a stranger's guest bedroom. It's about the most excruciating dinner party you've (n)ever been too, captured in loving and spiteful detail. It's about a mother who never accepted the fact that her daughter died young. It's about the small, everyday moments of humanity that pass us all by, yet that all add up to something profound. Momentum is what's important in this book: Ali Smith structures her four parts in order of least accessible to most accessible, and if you take a break in the middle, it's very hard to get back into the world you've left behind. But it's a stunning work of loss and connection and going on with life, and shouldn't be missed. This starts with a dinner party and a man shutting himself in the spare bedroom. The 4 different chapters are then told from the persepctive of 4 different people who knew Miles, over the course of his life. They knew him as a teenager, most recently and they met hiom at the dinner party. They all reveal something about him, but not why he shut himself up in someone else's spare bedroom. In once sense it is a fascinating story, each person giving a different perspective of Miles and who he might be. The third is the most revealing in this regard. The story I want to read is the one that Miles gives Brooke and she pastes into the history she writes... For some reason I just couldn't get into this one. Maybe it was just not a good before-bed-reading book, I don't know. But it never quite held my attention. I'll give it another try sometime. Smith's delightful wordplay normally draws me right into her narratives, so I'm not sure what it was about this one that failed to grab me. An odd book, with an interesting premise. A man (a friend of a friend) goes to a dinner party and locks himself in a bedroom and appears to have no intention of ever leaving. Might have ended up completely unsatisfied with the book if it was not for all the clever word play. I am a sucker for that and was tempted to give the book 4 stars because of it.
This lively, moving narrative is filled with such details, with historical and musical lore and, above all, with puns. All the likable characters in “There but for the” enjoy a good verbal game, most happily with someone else. It is as though playing with language is what enables them to make their way through a complicated world. It’s a knack that might also be picked up, most enjoyably, by reading Ali Smith. This is why I … hmm … ruminate. In dragging out this tedious, dated conversation – our only insight into Miles’s actions – is Smith trying to make the reader feel what Miles felt? Is it satire? Are the other guests merely symbolic of the world’s evils? Smith is a deeply moral writer who can’t always resist moralizing, but the truth is the job of revealing truth is better done with rounded, surprising characters, such as Michael Smart in The Accidental – the student-bonking professor who teaches a seminar on cliché – and not these wearying stereotypes. But everything else I expect from Ali Smith, and love, is here: the helium quality of her prose, its playful grab-bagginess (it includes a pair of cryptic stories separate from the main narrative, as well as instructions from the author to the typesetters), how she manages to write so lightly about subjects that are by no means trivial – time, memory, history and their relationship to language. And also what perhaps sums up her whole oeuvre, from her novels to her many collections of highly inventive short stories, the long answer to this short question: “What’s the point of human beings? I mean, what are we for?” In her new novel, There but for the, Ali Smith deploys the conceit to satirise contemporary culture – and to ask difficult questions about history, time, epistemology and narrative. The result is a playfully serious, or seriously playful, novel full of wit and pleasure, with some premeditated frustrations thrown in for good measure. Symbol alert! Ali Smith’s new novel opens with a perplexing prologue: a story within a story about a man on an exercise bike whose eyes and mouth are covered by what look like mailbox flaps....The plot borrows a device Ms. Smith, a Scottish author who has been shortlisted for both the Orange and Booker prizes, used in an earlier novel, “The Accidental,” in which a stranger invites herself along on a family’s summer vacation...Yet there is a thematic point to all this showing off, or to most of it, anyway. “There but for the” is ultimately a book about loss and retention: about what we forget and what we remember, about the people who pass through our lives and what bits of them cling to our consciousness. Appartient à la série éditorialeOtavan kirjasto (244) Prix et récompensesDistinctionsListes notables
At a dinner party in the posh London suburb of Greenwich, Miles Garth suddenly leaves the table midway through the meal, locks himself in an upstairs room, and refuses to leave. An eclectic group of neighbors and friends slowly gathers around the house, and Miles' story is told from the points of view of four of them: Anna, a woman in her forties; Mark, a man in his sixties; May, a woman in her eighties; and a ten-year-old named Brooke. The thing is, none of these people knows Miles more than slightly. How much is it possible for us to know about a stranger? And what are the consequences of even the most casual, fleeting moments we share every day with one another? Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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