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Chargement... A livre ouvert (2002)par William Boyd
Chargement...
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Any Human Heart is actually a highly ordered and controlled encounter with that classic French literary form, the journal intime. Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh are Boyd's true ancestors. Both writers appear in Any Human Heart . Powell is "affable"; Waugh, or a drunken man at a party who Logan thinks is Waugh, "stuck his tongue in my mouth". Logan's true secret sharer, the real tongue in his mouth, is Boyd himself, of course. From his 1981 debut, A Good Man in Africa, onwards, he seems constantly to have been searching for a unifying identity across different fictions, trying to make sense of a life comprising a brutal public-school education, Africa in wartime, Oxford (where he did a PhD on Shelley), literary London and New York glamour: to a large degree, the plot of Any Human Heart . So when all is said and done, the heart the novel tries to dissect is the author's own. It is, as ever, an enjoyable spectacle for his readers. Any Human Heart, a novel, purports to be the compendious collected diaries of the fictional Mountstuart, and comes complete with little introductions by the author, footnotes and an index. It is not clear whether it was conceived originally as an extension of the spoof, or already had a life of its own, but the result is a distinctly odd book: a late-arriving lead balloon to the nicely timed punchline of Nat Tate. The narrative is made up of half-a-dozen diaries, which are devoted to different periods of Mountstuart's life of ambition and failure: schooldays, war years, dotage and so on. It ranges across the world - the novelist is born in Uruguay, raised in Birmingham and lives subsequently in London, New York, the Bahamas, Switzerland, Africa and the South of France - and takes in the century. It comes from a similar impulse in Boyd as The New Confessions, a novel in which he also tried to gain the form and pressure of our times through one life, though if Rousseau was the loose inspiration there, here it is Montaigne who skulks in the margins. Mountstuart himself, on the other hand, remains strangely insubstantial. He does things and meets people, but it’s hard to get much sense of his temperament; his observations on Fleming apply to himself, too: ‘I can’t put my finger on his essential nature . . . He’s affable, generous, appears interested in you – but there’s nothing in him to like.’ Mountstuart’s flimsiness as a novelistic character is supposed to make the book more realistic by acknowledging that personality is nebulous in itself. In practice, though, it has the opposite effect. His inconsistencies are a matter of convenience – an excuse for him to meet Hemingway, Joyce, Woolf and all the rest – and for too much of the time, Mountstuart is revealed for what he is: a device allowing Boyd to write about 20th-century celebrities in the pastiche idiom of a contemporary observer. Boyd hustles you through to the end despite all this, but it’s hard not to wonder if it was really worth making the journey. Appartient à la série éditorialePenguin Celebrations (16) Prix et récompensesDistinctionsListes notables
Fiction.
Literature.
Historical Fiction.
William Boydâ??s masterful new novel tells, in a series of intimate journals, the story of Logan Mountstuartâ??writer, lover, art dealer, spyâ??as he makes his often precarious way through the twentieth 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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Au final que vaut cet exercice ? Tout d'abord on peut dire sans conteste qu'il est bien réalisé même si on ne peut raisonnablement pas croire qu'il s'agisse d'un vrai journal. En étant un peu observateur on s'apercevra même que l'auteur ménage son lecteur en lui permettant de suivre le fil de ce journal sans difficulté. Ce qui serait bien moins le cas pour un vrai journal. Il est tout de même agréable de suivre les aventures de ce personnage dans les habits duquel tout un chacun pourrait se glisser. Je veux dire par là que le personnage en question n'est pas quelqu'un d'extrême et d'incompréhensible et ses réactions face aux différents événements de la vie pourraient être celles du lecteur. Cette technique me fait penser à celle parfois utilisée en BD qui consiste à créer un personnage lisse et au physique passe-partout (Tintin par exemple) afin que le plus grand nombre puisse s'identifier à lui.
Malgré ces bons côté et la qualité indéniable de ce roman, ma curiosité s'est assez vite émoussée à tel point que j'ai laissé tomber la lecture au bout d'environ 200 pages — le livre est assez long et je ne me voyais pas aller au bout sans piquer du nez de nombreuses fois. Attention il s'agit d'un jugement personnel car je ne doute pas un instant de l'intérêt que peut revêtir ce livre pour d'autres lecteurs et les nombreux commentaires enthousiastes que l'on peut trouver sur Internet sont là pour en témoigner. http://www.aubonroman.com/2013/08/a-livre-ouvert-par-william-boyd.html ( )