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Chargement... Reality and Dreams (1996)par Muriel Spark
Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. A confusing novel, not nearly as good as others I have read of hers. There's a theme of redundancy that runs through the first half of the book but peters out. The missing daughter aspect seems an introduced contrivance to restart the story and the finale is poor. Best avoided if you enjoy reading. As another reviewer has pointed out, this is worth reading because it is Muriel Spark, and there are moments of brilliance. But the insouciance Spark is known for in her writing becomes slap dash and careless in too many places. There is almost a postmodern disdain for character here which reminds me of Pynchon (Slothrop qua Slothrop), but really it's less a stylistic choice than a carelessness on Spark's part. She seems fascinated by the concept of "redundancy" but treats the theme with shallow disdain. So, all in all read it, since it's so short, but don't expect to be blown away. Spark's touch in her later works is sometimes so light that she never quite touches the ground, and you start to wonder whether there was anything there at all, or whether you just imagined that you'd read another Spark novel... In this one, written when Spark was in her late seventies, a well-known film director is put out of action for a while by an accident on set. Spark sets out on a hunt to find out what is behind the key concept of the Thatcher years for a lot of middle-class people, "redundancy". Are people - men especially - really so defined by "what they do" that they are entitled to fall apart if someone pays them to stop doing it? But she seems to get bored with this quite quickly and shifts to celebrity culture and the absurdities of the film industry, where actors and directors like to pretend they are producing aesthetically relevant work but all the decisions are taken by accountants and insurers. And there's a vague recurrence of the "rogue female" plot-thread from The only problem, so faintly pencilled-in that it almost isn't there. Worth reading because it's Spark and there are gems of unexpected thought tucked away even in this, and it only takes an hour or two of your life anyway, but probably not one of her best. Il confine tra vita reale e cinema, tra verità e sogni. Il casting cinematografico di un regista donnaiolo intrappola, come in una rete, una serie di persone costrette a confrontarsi con il ruolo assegnato dal film. Libro in cui la spietatezza nell'indagare l'animo umano si traveste di leggerezza, come negli altri scritti della Spark e proprio per questo geniale. Spark has a transcendent knack for creating stories that ride a razor's edge between being funny and being very serious commentary on modern-day life. This book, about a movie director and his family may not be her best book, but it still shines very brightly. Deceptively easy to read, her novels are gems to be sipped at and savoured.
Muriel Spark ist eine Satire über die Medienwelt gelungen, die das große Problem unserer Zeit meisterhaft leicht und unbeschwert thematisiert: die Arbeitslosigkeit. Sie verändert die Menschen, aber sie verändert sie nicht grundlegend. Im Grunde genommen bleiben sie gleich, ihre Rollen sind, so scheint es, nur umgeschrieben. The important thing about a new Spark novel is hardly ever the plot or even the characters, but rather that inimitable authorial tone: crisp, assured, utterly unsentimental but always full of delicious surprises. Her hero in the present refreshingly slim volume is Tom, an elderly British film director who, as the story opens, is in hospital, having fallen off a crane during the filming of his latest movie. After various title changes and corporate shenanigans while he is hors de combat, the film is eventually resumed-as is his life with his charming, wealthy and all-forgiving wife, Claire, their ungainly and rather sinister daughter, Marigold, and Cora, his beautiful daughter by an earlier marriage. All of them are endlessly unfaithful, but their lives are shadowed far more by constant "redundancies," in the hideous English euphemism for lost jobs, than by any sense of marital or romantic betrayal. Marigold finds it necessary to disappear to work on her secret life, and the mystery of her vanishing gives the book its principal plot line-and one that is resolved rather neatly by another accident with a movie crane at its conclusion. The spirit of the book is sprightly and faintly acidic, rather as if a bunch of 18th-century French courtiers were at frolic in contemporary London. And needless to say, there are countless divine Spark moments ("Not only am I old enough to be your father, I am your father. You should listen to me").
"Sleek and suggestive . . . [Reality and Dreams] is so smart and seductive that you fail to notice how completely you've accepted a world gone utterly awry." --Kirkus Reviews British film director Tom Richard won acclaim for his moments of pure creative inspiration. But when Richard is hospitalized after toppling from a crane during a shoot, he awakes not knowing what is real and what is not--and with no idea who to trust. Soon his wife, children, and friends are all undergoing crises of their own, from the breakup of a marriage to the loss of a job. As Richard fights to regain his health and stay centered amid the swirling chaos of his personal life, he must also wrest control of his film--his most prized pursuit--from those who seek to take it away. Witty andengrossing, Reality and Dreams is a whiplash ride through the highs and lows of the creative process. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Muriel Spark including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author's archive at the National Library of Scotland. 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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