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Chargement... Painter of Silencepar Georgina Harding
  
Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre.   ) neal_ | Apr 10, 2020 |   ) GaylaBassham | May 27, 2018 | ) gayla.bassham | Nov 7, 2016 | Augustin is born to a peasant mother who cooks at a large house in rural Romania. It gradually becomes clear the child cannot hear, but unfortunately not before it is too late to try to teach him. As he reaches pubescence his work ethic and kind heart have carved out a niche for him on the estate. Then the war comes and the household splinters; Augustin, nicknamed Tinu ends up relocated and finally imprisoned by the new Communist authorities. As luck would have it, he ends up in a hospital and one of the nurses is from the family he used to serve. She struggles to bring him out of his shell, and is helped by others on the staff. Tinu touches all he meets; people open up to him in these troubled times and reveal their innermost selves. He becomes a receptacle not only of what people tell him, but of the experiences of the entire country. And through it all, Ms. Harding’s prose contains gift after wondrous gift. A sample from early in the book: “Dusk was falling across the garden, the hills, the view of the village. In the river, darkening scraps of colour grew sodden and began to sink unseen. The boy walked home across the grey fields. All colour was gone now; the plank fence about the yard, the barns, the woodpile reduced to a smudged charcoal blackness.” Another, two thirds through, to show a brilliant image achieved by the author: “The deaths and the processions press and tangle in his memory. No pattern to them, no chronology either. There are tanks, men, horses, lines of men, dressed in the colours of the soil, of mud and dust; and if they were stripped of their clothes they would be pale and bare like pale stalks that should be concealed beneath the ground, covered over again with soil.” This stunning image mixes in Augustin’s mind with the figures he has seen on the walls of the churches: “… pale lines of naked men marching up and down the scenes of judgement.” So the war’s all-encompassing devastation takes on the appropriate magnitude: Judgment Day. Obviously no further judgment on the Second World War was needed, nor on the repressive impulses of the Eastern European regimes that followed it, but Painter of Silence’s contribution is a unique one. It places a young, defenseless man at the center of the storm, and he suffers through it with his unique handicaps and strengths. He accretes a more universal role in his suffering, and the author accomplishes all her grand ambitions in somber, beautiful, even-keel language that suits the subject perfectly. This book is exceptionally artful, a complete joy to anyone who appreciates deep purposeful prose and lofty ambition. Take this beauty up. http://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2014/10/painter-of-silence-by-georgina-hardin... ( ) LukeS | Oct 29, 2014 | the language was gorgeous as written, but was even lovelier due to an excellent narrator - the characters were 3 dimensional, the storyline engrossing though slow and deep, and the relationship between the two was very tender - a book to reflect on and appreciate (  ) njinthesun | Jun 25, 2014 |
 Harding’s writing has a careful, lilting fluency which nourishes a slow-burning momentum. Although there ought to be a law against the now ubiquitous present tense, the post-war scenes in which Harding employs this technique are not entirely egregious, and do add a certain urgency. There are problems with using Tinu’s point of view – when soldiers come to Poiana, we don’t know what they’re there for, which is a little perplexing for the reader. His ability to parrot words also lands him in trouble; which seemed a perfect parable for the chaos of war in which all signs and symbols gain and lose their meanings at a turn of the wheel. And what more salutary message could there be in these days, when a tweet in jest can land you a prison sentence in earnest? Harding’s book is an adroit examination of our need for a home, and the terrible consequences of its loss. She is a writer to watch.  Painter of Silence insists on being recommended because of its unassertive orginality, its sense of history, its knowledge of the unsaid and the unsayable, and - not least - its delightfully surprising ending. Painter of Silence has recently been longlisted for the Orange prize, an accolade it richly deserves. Harding writes with exquisite restraint, capturing the grim greyness of the communist city with as much delicate tenderness as the idyllic landscape of Poiana. Her deceptively simple prose gives a startling beauty to the ordinary, and evokes great depth of suffering. It is a challenge for any writer to conjure the world of the wordless through words and in this Harding triumphantly succeeds, exploring through her silent protagonist profound questions of identity and attachment, of the inadequacy of language and the baffling inconsistencies of humankind. ....– Andrei, the young man with the green car, is a frustratingly sketchy character, while the improbable neatness of the ending undermines the novel's subtle complexity – but these are decisively outweighed by its pleasures. Prix et récompenses
Fiction.
Literature.
Historical Fiction.
HTML: It is the early 1950s. A nameless man is found on the steps of the hospital in Iasi, Romania. He is deaf and mute, but a young nurse named Safta recognizes him from the past and brings him paper and pencils so that he might draw. Gradually, memories appear on the page: the man is Augustin, the cook's son at the manor house at Poiana where Safta was the privileged daughter. Born six months apart, they had a connection that bypassed words, but while Augustin's world stayed the same size, Safta's expanded to embrace languages, society, and a fleeting love one long, hot summer. But then came war, and in its wake a brutal Stalinist regime, and nothing would remain the same.Georgina Harding's kaleidoscopic new novel will appeal to readers of Anne Michaels, Michael Ondaatje, and Sandor Marai. It is as intense and submerging as rain, as steeped in the horrors of our recent history as it is in the intimate passions of the human heart. .Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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 Google Books — Chargement...GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)823.92Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 2000-Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne: (3.77)
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