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A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong Amanda and Clay head out to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter, and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they've rented for the week. But a late-night knock on the door breaks the spell. Ruth and G. H. are an older couple-it's their house, and they've arrived in a panic. They bring the news that a sudden blackout has swept the city. But in this rural area-with the TV and internet now down, and no cell phone service-it's hard to know what to believe. Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple-and vice versa? What happened back in New York? Is the vacation home, isolated from civilization, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one other? Suspenseful and provocative, Rumaan Alam's third novel is keenly attuned to the complexities of parenthood, race, and class. Leave the World Behind explores how our closest bonds are reshaped-and unexpected new ones are forged-in moments of crisis.… (plus d'informations)
Alors voilà. le genre de mots qui font peur. Enfin, qui font peur à moi. Apocalyptique, post-apocalyptique, encore et encore classer les romans (ou pire, les écrire) dans un genre bien défini, comme si l'item qui lui correspondait devait correspondre à son écriture et non l'inverse. Bon ben tant mieux, parce qu'ici vous pouvez oublier les zombies et autres créatures, de même que toute effusion de sang ou même un brin d'action stimulante. Ce qui ne veut pas die que la lecture n'est pas addictive ; c'est même tout le contraire. On est là dans en présence d'un texte d'une minutie rare, emplie de détails qui pourraient sembler secondaires voire carrément inutiles alors que, tous, absolument tous, font leur part du gâteau ; NOUS SOMMES ces détails. NOUS SOMMES cette accumulation de faits et micro-faits, précisément. Et, plus que tout, la question se pose de savoir QUI nous sommes, donc, lorsque ces détails n'ont plus lieu d'être ou ne peuvent plus se concrétiser. Je parle de détails, mais jamais ils n'ont été aussi importants, aussi éprouvants ; nous sommes là dans un texte d'une qualité qui se situe dans un hybride de DON DELILLO et, disons, un RICK MOODY. L'horreur n'est pas celle du sang. Elle peut être celle d'un bruit. L'épouvante ne naît pas de nos moyens de survie, mais des questions qu'on se pose, souvent, trop souvent, sans avoir de réponses. Et puis, je l'ai dit plusieurs fois, mais quand même : accumuler cette multitude de faits sur les uns et les autres est aussi signifiant qu'on peut l'imaginer du rôle de l'écrivain. L'observateur, celui qui regarde, ne juge pas, ne condamne pas, mais regarde VRAIMENT avant de retransmettre le monde tel qu'il est aujourd'hui. ( )
Started very strong but soon got self-satisfied. Hypersexualized. Vague. The more you read, the slower it gets…. it’s trying too hard from a writer talented enough to offer better, much better. Good writing, unsatisfactory nonetheless.
Leave the World Behind was written before the coronavirus crisis and yet it taps brilliantly into the feeling of generalised panic that has attached itself to the virus and seems to mingle fears about the climate, inequality, racism and our over-reliance on technology. As the reader moves through the book, a new voice interjects, an omniscient narrator who begins to allow us gradual access to the terrifying events taking place across America.
In cutting detail, Alam moves between all the characters’ private thoughts on race, privilege, class and survival, revealing the lies they tell each other both to encourage a sense of calm and to protect their own insecurities.... There’s a dark comfort to engaging with these stories, a sense that living in uncertainty does not necessarily mean we are alone—and that knowing the future won’t help prevent it. I felt a particular isolation in the immediate aftermath of the storm; I feel it every day in the coronavirus era. Resolution will come later. Knowing that is enough for now. “Understanding came after the fact,” Alam writes of his characters. “You had to walk backward and try to make sense. That’s what people did, that’s how people learned.”
Alam doesn’t dwell in the specificity of apocalypse, which has been the obsession of writers since the Flood. Instead he lobs a prescient accusation: Faced with the end of the world, you wouldn’t do a damn thing... “Leave the World Behind” teeters on that seesaw-edge question in horror fiction: to reveal the monster or not? Ultimately it totters too far to one side, but there is still the primal nail-biting need to know what-the-hell-is-going-on. This propulsion, which drives much of the characters’ decisions, likewise drives the reader onward to a breathless conclusion that, if not altogether satisfying, is undeniably haunting.
Where other practitioners of the genre revel in chaos—the coarse spectacle of society unravelling—Alam keeps close to his characters, who, like insects in acrylic, remain trapped in a state of suspended unease. This, he suggests, is the modern disaster—the precarity of American life, which leaves us unsure, always, if things can get worse.... In the book’s final pages, as the tension suddenly ratchets up, Amanda thinks to herself, “They were equipped to handle certain fears. This was something else. It was hard to remind yourself to be rational in a world where that seemed not to matter as much, but maybe it never had.”
“Leave the World Behind” is the perfect title for a book that opens with the promise of utopia and travels as far from that dream as our worst fears might take us. It is the rarest of books: a genuine thriller, a brilliant distillation of our anxious age, and a work of high literary merit that deserves a place among the classics of dystopian literature.
Like Stephen King’s 1980 novella The Mist, Leave the World Behind expertly illustrates the horror of the unknown, the almost painful humanity we feel when facing down the end and, of course, human nature under duress. During an era of plague, racism, hatred, and division, this tale of a vacation gone awry is terrifyingly prescient.
The omniscient narrator occasionally zooms out to provide snapshots of the wider chaotic world that are effective in their brevity. Though information is scarce, the signs of impending collapse—ecological and geopolitical—have been glaringly visible to the characters all along: “No one could plead ignorance that was not willful.” This illuminating social novel offers piercing commentary on race, class and the luxurious mirage of safety, adding up to an all-too-plausible apocalyptic vision.
As they search for answers and adjust to what increasingly appears to be a confusing new normal, the two families—one Black, one White; one older, one younger; one rich, one middle-class—are compelled to find community amid calamity, to come together to support each other and survive. As he did in his previous novels, Rich and Pretty (2016) and That Kind of Mother (2018), Alam shows an impressive facility for getting into his characters’ heads and an enviable empathy for their moral shortcomings, emotional limitations, and failures of imagination. The result is a riveting novel that thrums with suspense yet ultimately offers no easy answers—disappointing those who crave them even as it fittingly reflects our time. Addressing race, risk, retreat, and the ripple effects of a national emergency, Alam's novel is just in time for this moment.
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Love goes on like birdsong, As soon as possible after a bomb.
--Bill Callahan, "Angela"
Dédicace
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for Simon and for Xavier
Premiers mots
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Well, the sun was shining.
Citations
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
There was no real structure to prevent chaos, there was only a collective faith in order.
Sometimes distance showed a thing most clearly.
Amanda wasn’t magnanimous. The call was a relief. She wanted her colleagues to need her as God wants people to keep praying.
He sat on the front lawn in the shade of a tree and smoked. He should feel bad about this, but tobacco was the foundation of the nation. Smoking tethered you to history itself! It was a patriotic act, or once had been, anyway, like owning slaves or killing the Cherokee.
Clay was diligent but also (he knew it) a little lazy. He wanted to be asked to write for the New York Times Book Review but didn’t want to actually write anything.
“What did it say?” Ruth wanted more information. She’d seen it with her own eyes but knew nothing. “Did it say why?”
Ruth had learned only one thing from the current reality, and it was that everything held together by tacit agreement that it would. All it took to unravel something was one party deciding to do just that. There was no real structure to prevent chaos, there was only a collective faith in order.
G.H.’s business was money’s preservation. Actual spending was so abstract to him that he did as the contractor said. Danny was one of those men other men didn’t want to seem a fool in front of. He had a power over men that was almost sexual, in the way that sex always ends up being about power. You’d do what he said, and maybe in your worst moments you’d worry that Danny was laughing at you. Their checks had certainly paid for Danny’s daughter’s year at private school. That’s why they rented: to recoup.
You never know when a time is the last time, because if you did you could never go on with life.
Years ago, Ruth was asked to help out in the school office. Dalton wanted to increase diversity. Now Ruth was immune to kids’ germs and mostly impervious to their charms.
Nothing matters to children but themselves, or perhaps that is the human condition.
Whatever they thought they’d understood was not wrong but irrelevant.
Their bodies knew what their minds did not. Children and the very old have this in common. Born, you understand something about the world. That’s why toddlers report conversing with ghosts and unnerve their parents. The very old begin to remember it, but can rarely articulate it, and no one listens to the very old anyway.
Trees marked their lives in rings that can’t be seen; people, in the garbage they left everywhere, a way of insisting on their own importance.
“Let’s eat something. I’m going to take a shower, and then we should eat something. I think that will help.” No, that wasn’t quite it. “I can’t think of anything else to do.”
Parenthood was never knowing what was going to hurt your kids, but knowing only that something, inevitably, would.
You told yourself you’d be attuned to a holocaust unfolding a world away, but you weren’t. It was immaterial, thanks to distance. People weren’t that connected to one another. Terrible things happened constantly and never prevented you from going out for ice cream or celebrating birthdays or going to the movies or paying your taxes or fucking your wife or worrying about the mortgage.
Home was just where you were, in the end. It was just the place where you found yourself.
Clay could feel his wife tense up. She preferred that they eat healthily (especially Rose). He could pick up her disapproval like sonar. It was like the swell that presaged an erection. They'd been married sixteen years.
Clay found a baseball game on the radio, though he did not care about baseball. He thought the description comforting, the play-by-play like being read a bedtime story.
She said "Fine" the way adolescents learn to pronounce it, with all the fervor of any four-letter word.
Rose turned the secret of the deer over and over, as you would a hard candy on your tongue.
The sickness in the ground and in the air and in the water was all a clever design. There was a menace in the woods and Rose could feel it, and another child would have called it God. Did it matter if a storm had metastasized into something for which no noun yet existed? Did it matter if the electrical grid broke apart like something built of Lego? Did it matter if Lego would never biodegrade, would outlast Notre Dame, the pyramids at Giza, the pigment daubed on the walls at Lascaux?
They couldn't know that the silence that seemed so relaxing in the country seemed so menacing in the city, which was hot, still, and quiet in a way that made no sense.
G.H. would have pointed out that the information had always been there waiting for them, in the gradual death of Lebanon's cedars, in the disappearance of the river dolphin, in the renaissance of cold-war hatred, in the discovery of fission, in the capsizing vessels crowded with Africans. No one could plead ignorance that was not willful.
Maybe they should feel only awe at life's mysteries, as children did.
They both were and were not alone. Fate was collective but the rest of it was always individual, a thing impossible to escape. They lay that way for a long time. They didn't talk because there was nothing to discuss. The sounds of their sleeping children were relentless as the ocean.
Archie shivered the way you might when you walk into a spiderweb, the way you might if you saw a spider dart from beneath your pillow and lose itself in your mosaic-printed bedsheets, the way you might if a spider crept from your shoulder up your neck and nestled into the comforting cave of your ear, the way you might if a spider dropped from the ceiling and landed on your hair and then picked its way forward carefully down the slope of your nose so you could barely see it with your wide-set eyes, the way you might if a spider started and bit you and then became a part of you, inextricable as your DNA, the thing that made you.
Ruth didn't believe in prayer, so she thought of nothing.
The youngest child was used to not being noticed.
Rose knew what the noise was, but no one had asked her. It was the sound of fact. It was the change they'd pretended not to know was coming. It was the end of one kind of life, but it was also the beginning of another kind of life.
Was this a test of faith? It affirmed only their faith in their ignorance.
It took unimaginable courage to kill your children.
None of those forty mourned those dead even one bit. They were bad men, they told themselves, not knowing how little it mattered whether you'd spent your life being good or bad.
Derniers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
If they didn't know how it would end—with night, with more terrible noise from the top of Olympus, with bombs, with disease, with blood, with happiness, with deer or something else watching them from the darkened woods—well, wasn't that true of every day?
Références à cette œuvre sur des ressources externes.
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▾Descriptions de livres
A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong Amanda and Clay head out to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter, and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they've rented for the week. But a late-night knock on the door breaks the spell. Ruth and G. H. are an older couple-it's their house, and they've arrived in a panic. They bring the news that a sudden blackout has swept the city. But in this rural area-with the TV and internet now down, and no cell phone service-it's hard to know what to believe. Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple-and vice versa? What happened back in New York? Is the vacation home, isolated from civilization, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one other? Suspenseful and provocative, Rumaan Alam's third novel is keenly attuned to the complexities of parenthood, race, and class. Leave the World Behind explores how our closest bonds are reshaped-and unexpected new ones are forged-in moments of crisis.
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(3.42)
4
Bon ben tant mieux, parce qu'ici vous pouvez oublier les zombies et autres créatures, de même que toute effusion de sang ou même un brin d'action stimulante. Ce qui ne veut pas die que la lecture n'est pas addictive ; c'est même tout le contraire.
On est là dans en présence d'un texte d'une minutie rare, emplie de détails qui pourraient sembler secondaires voire carrément inutiles alors que, tous, absolument tous, font leur part du gâteau ; NOUS SOMMES ces détails. NOUS SOMMES cette accumulation de faits et micro-faits, précisément. Et, plus que tout, la question se pose de savoir QUI nous sommes, donc, lorsque ces détails n'ont plus lieu d'être ou ne peuvent plus se concrétiser.
Je parle de détails, mais jamais ils n'ont été aussi importants, aussi éprouvants ; nous sommes là dans un texte d'une qualité qui se situe dans un hybride de DON DELILLO et, disons, un RICK MOODY. L'horreur n'est pas celle du sang. Elle peut être celle d'un bruit. L'épouvante ne naît pas de nos moyens de survie, mais des questions qu'on se pose, souvent, trop souvent, sans avoir de réponses.
Et puis, je l'ai dit plusieurs fois, mais quand même : accumuler cette multitude de faits sur les uns et les autres est aussi signifiant qu'on peut l'imaginer du rôle de l'écrivain. L'observateur, celui qui regarde, ne juge pas, ne condamne pas, mais regarde VRAIMENT avant de retransmettre le monde tel qu'il est aujourd'hui. (