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Chargement... Still Life (2021)par Sarah Winman
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. This long book about love, friendship, and art is also an homage to Florence, Italy. The narrative begins in WWII Italy when Evelyn Skinner and Ulysses Temper meet during the liberation of Italy. During a brief leave in Florence, Ulysses saves the life of a man contemplating suicide. After the war, Ulysses returns to England and reunites with a cadre of old friends. In a few years time he learns that he has inherited the estate of the man whose life he saved. Ulysses and eventually of his cadre move to Florence where he (they?) run a pensione. The book is really about the relationships among these friends. A family constructed from love and caring rather than by blood. And it is a tribute to Florence, Italy. The story covers most of the 20th century in the city in a round about way. I read this book for our book discussion group. Left to my own devices, I would have given up after the first chapter. I did plug on and didn't really appreciate the book until after page 300. It's an okay story. I get what the author is trying to do. But there are two annoying things about this book: 1. there is no dialogue punctuation. This becomes really confusing to the reader when there are more than two people in the dialogue. 2. the book is 450 pages. It is written in a tiny typeface in relatively low contrast ink. I ended up purchasing the Kindle version just to keep from going blind while reading the book. Has ink gotten so expensive that we can't have dialogue punctuation, a decent size typeface, and dark ink on the page? aucune critique | ajouter une critique
Prix et récompenses
Fiction.
Literature.
Historical Fiction.
HTML:A Good Morning America Book Club Pick A Veranda Magazine Book Club Pick A captivating, bighearted, richly tapestried story of people brought together by love, war, art, flood, and the ghost of E. M. Forster, by the celebrated author of Tin Man. Tuscany, 1944: As Allied troops advance and bombs fall around deserted villages, a young English soldier, Ulysses Temper, finds himself in the wine cellar of a deserted villa. There, he has a chance encounter with Evelyn Skinner, a middle-aged art historian who has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the ruins and recall long-forgotten memories of her own youth. In each other, Ulysses and Evelyn find a kindred spirit amidst the rubble of war-torn Italy, and set off on a course of events that will shape Ulysses's life for the next four decades. As Ulysses returns home to London, reimmersing himself in his crew at The Stoat and Parotâ??a motley mix of pub crawlers and eccentricsâ??he carries his time in Italy with him. And when an unexpected inheritance brings him back to where it all began, Ulysses knows better than to tempt fate, and returns to the Tuscan hills. With beautiful prose, extraordinary tenderness, and bursts of humor and light, Still Life is a sweeping portrait of unforgettable individuals who come together to make a family, and a deeply drawn celebration of beauty and love in all its forms.& 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:
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This time (the right time) I found myself flooded-in (due to heavy rain) and ready for Sarah Winman to take me wherever she wanted. In part, this was because in the 1980s we'd been caretakers of a converted 9th century monastery in Tuscany and knew Florence and many of the towns around it, not quite as intimately as Sarah Winman but well enough to enjoy revisiting these haunts. Of course, the flood section resonated. In part also, she has a feel for dialogue, character and literary cross-references (Forster Violet Trefusis etc). Somehow, Claude the talking parrot took me back to Enid Blighton's Adventure series not to mention all the food and wine. By the time Arturo’s will appeared, I found myself looking back to the right side of the page where I remembered Evelyn’s mention of the Cockney landlady. It was page 7 and I was hooked. Isn’t it interesting how we can recall the physical position of texts if not the page?
As this story of love and loss and life unfolded, I was moved to tears more often than I'll record in this little reflection. Half-way through the book, it felt that everyone had lost something that completed them - just as the amazing Claude spontaneously lost feathers. There were several times I had to put the book down for tears.
In many respects the book ended and losses were resolved about 100 pages before the set piece All About Evelyn. I'm not complaining at all. The homage to A Room with a View seemed entirely appropriate to a book about the English in Florence.
This is a richly layered book in which the author reminds us of her presence and I liked her presence
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