AccueilGroupesDiscussionsPlusTendances
Site de recherche
Ce site utilise des cookies pour fournir nos services, optimiser les performances, pour les analyses, et (si vous n'êtes pas connecté) pour les publicités. En utilisant Librarything, vous reconnaissez avoir lu et compris nos conditions générales d'utilisation et de services. Votre utilisation du site et de ses services vaut acceptation de ces conditions et termes.

Résultats trouvés sur Google Books

Cliquer sur une vignette pour aller sur Google Books.

Chargement...

Shadow Country (2008)

par Peter Matthiessen

Autres auteurs: Voir la section autres auteur(e)s.

Séries: Watson Trilogy (4)

MembresCritiquesPopularitéÉvaluation moyenneMentions
1,2493915,494 (3.96)125
Fiction. Literature. HTML:NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER ?  ??Altogether gripping, shocking, and brilliantly told, not just a tour de force in its stylistic range, but a great American novel, as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in our literature.???Michael Dirda, The New York Review of Books
Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man??s River, and Bone by Bone??Peter Matthiessen??s great American epic about Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson on the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century??were originally conceived as one vast, mysterious novel. Now, in this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has marvelously distilled a monumental work while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. 

Praise for Shadow Country

??Magnificent . . . breathtaking . . . Finally now we have [this three-part saga] welded like a bell, and with Watson??s song the last sound, all the elements fuse and resonate.???Los Angeles Times

??Peter Matthiessen has done great things with the Watson trilogy. It??s the story of our continent, both land and people, and his writing does every justice to the blood fury of his themes.???Don DeLillo

 ??The fiction of Peter Ma­­tthiessen is the reason a lot of people in my generation decided to be writers. No doubt about it. Shadow Country lives up to anyone??s highest expectations for great writing.? ??Richard Ford 
??Shadow Country, Matthiessen??s distillation of the earlier Watson saga, represents his original vision. It is the quintessence of his lifelong concerns, and a great legacy.???W. S. Merwin 

??[An] epic
… (plus d'informations)
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.

» Voir aussi les 125 mentions

Affichage de 1-5 de 39 (suivant | tout afficher)
Extravagantly geographical, symbolic, multilayered, masterful, definitely a classic. I found it tough going, but it's possible that if I'd read it in parts instead of all at once, it would have fared better. Still, I'm not fool enough to fail to recognize how good it is, nor ignore the true love of writing and craft that went into it (read about how Matthiessen got it re-written and be impressed.) ( )
  amandrake | Apr 17, 2024 |
This book was originally published as a trilogy, although Mathiessen had always seen it as one novel, so he rewrote it to become this one very long book he has envisioned in the beginning.
It is a story of Ed Watson, a pioneer at the turn of the 19/20th century who tried to settle on the west coast of Florida in the heart of the Everglades. I really like local history and as I live in Florida I was eager to read this book. It does give you an insight of how remote and isolated that part of Florida was, only 100 years ago. It also portrays it as a lawless, "wild west" place with many hardships and lives were cheap, particularly people of color.
Because it was 3 books in one I found it became very repetitious, but difficult to follow. It is not a consecutive story, but tends to jump around in the story of the main character, Ed Watson. In the first hundred pages (out of 900) he is shot, so you kind know the ending and the rest of the book is fill in. There were endless characters, particularly at the beginning were not fully developed, so it was hard to relate to who they were and the relationship to the main character. Having said all that, it was beautifully written, with wonderful descriptions of the area and phrases that were poetic. ( )
  annebraseby | Jul 1, 2021 |
A long novel. Same story told three times from three different perspectives. Main character, E. J. Watson, is a really bad guy that you really want (almost) to like. This is a third iteration of this story. The first try was a single novel of over 1,500 pages that didn’t get published. Next try: published as three separate novels. Third try: recomposed as a single novel, whittled down to approximately 900 pages, and wins the Pulitzer Prize. I liked reading about E.J. Watson. I have always enjoyed reading about those I don’t admire and don’t feel I agree with morally almost as much as the opposite. The magic of E.J. Watson is that he is never one thing or another. After 900 pages you still don’t have a firm handle on who he is.

The three different perspectives were well done. They overlapped but there was enough different each time that you didn’t feel you were reading the same story. You learned different pieces of the story in each retelling. In fact, the biggest challenge of the novel was reconciling the three different perspectives given they were separated by so many pages. I also enjoyed reading about the Wild, Wild West era of Florida; the description of Florida reminded me of The Yearling. Ultimately, what detracted from the story was its length. It could have been and needed to be tighter and more concisely delivered. ( )
1 voter afkendrick | Oct 24, 2020 |
This gripping, violent tale explores the death of E J Watson in 1910. Based on true events, the imagining of a life and the aftermath of a death is a must read for history buffs and those who enjoy a deeply felt exploration into the social issues prevalent in the South after the Civil War. ( )
  Chrissylou62 | Aug 1, 2020 |
I'm calling this read but I had to put it down about halfway through. Having read the first three iterations I not only found the protagonist's fixation on Mr. Watson depressing and unexplainable. It doesn't surprise me his next book was set in the holocaust and then he died.
I don't know who writes these unattributed introductory blurbs but the one for this book I'm pretty sure is factually incorrect. The origin plan was to write one book, not three. And this book is not a synopsis or condensation of the previous three as anyone who has read the four will know.
The NYT Sunday magazine had a story about Matthiessen years ago. Matthiessen was driving the journal through the Everglades to meet some of Watson's descendants in the Thousand Islands and he points out a tree and says that species was not here in Watson's time. The journalist also noted that Watson's descendants didn't seem to be nearly as interested in Watson as Matthiessen was.
Admittedly I didn't finish the book but it seems most of the reviews here are failing to mention the narrator's voice in this book. It starts more or less in the present, Ted Bundy, referred to only in passing as Bed Tundy, has just been executed and then the narrator, now an old man, reminisces about his research of Watson in the 1920s.
I found the first book the best and with each subsequent book, the novelty wore off more and more. I would recommend starting with the first book but would be interested to know how it was if a different sequence was followed. ( )
  JoeHamilton | Jul 21, 2020 |
Affichage de 1-5 de 39 (suivant | tout afficher)
To sum it up in a few words is impossible since its interest lies in the ambition of storytelling and inevitability of story.
 

» Ajouter d'autres auteur(e)s (10 possibles)

Nom de l'auteurRôleType d'auteurŒuvre ?Statut
Peter Matthiessenauteur principaltoutes les éditionscalculé
Heald, AnthonyNarrateurauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
Vous devez vous identifier pour modifier le Partage des connaissances.
Pour plus d'aide, voir la page Aide sur le Partage des connaissances [en anglais].
Titre canonique
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais. Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Titre original
Titres alternatifs
Date de première publication
Personnes ou personnages
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais. Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Lieux importants
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais. Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Évènements importants
Films connexes
Épigraphe
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais. Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without so much a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundre-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before. -- Jacob Riis
Dédicace
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais. Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
With love to my brother Carey and my ever dear Maria
Premiers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais. Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Sea birds are aloft again, a tattered few.
Citations
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais. Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Plume hunters shoot early in the breeding season when egret plumes are coming out real good. When them nestlings get pinfeathered, and squawking loud cause they are always hungry, them parent birds lose the little sense God give 'em. They are going to come in to tend their young no matter what, and a man using one of them Flobert rifles that don't snap no louder than a twig can stand there under the trees in a big rookery and pick them birds off as fast as he can reload. . . . A broke-up rookery, that ain't a picture you want to think about too much. The pile of carcasses left behind when you strip the plumes and move on to the next place is just pitiful, and it's a piss-poor way to harvest, cause there ain't no adults left to feed them young and protect 'em from the sun and rain. let alone the crows and buzzards that come sailing and flopping in, tear 'em to pieces. A real big rookery like that one the Frenchman worked up on Tampa Bay had four-five hundred acres of black mangrove, maybe ten nests to a tree. Might take you three-four years to clean it out but after that them birds are gone for good. . . . It's the dead silence after all the shooting that comes back today, though I never stuck around to hear it; I kind of remember it when I am dreaming. Them ghostly trees on dead white guano ground, the sun and silence and dry stink, the squawking and flopping of their wings, and varmints hurrying in without no sound, coons, rats, and possums, biting and biting, and the ants flowing up all them white trees in their dark ribbonds to eat at the scrawny things that's backed up to the edge of the nest, gullets pushing and mouths open wide for the food and water that ain't never going to come. Luckiest ones will perish before something finds 'em, cause they's so many young that the carrion birds just can't keep up. Damn vultures set hunched up on them dead limbs so stuffed and stupid they can't hardly fly.

truth don’t count for much after all these years cause folks hangs on to what it suits ’em to believe and won’t let go of it.
Derniers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais. Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
(Cliquez pour voir. Attention : peut vendre la mèche.)
Notice de désambigüisation
Directeur de publication
Courtes éloges de critiques
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais. Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Langue d'origine
DDC/MDS canonique
LCC canonique

Références à cette œuvre sur des ressources externes.

Wikipédia en anglais (2)

Fiction. Literature. HTML:NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER ?  ??Altogether gripping, shocking, and brilliantly told, not just a tour de force in its stylistic range, but a great American novel, as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in our literature.???Michael Dirda, The New York Review of Books
Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man??s River, and Bone by Bone??Peter Matthiessen??s great American epic about Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson on the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century??were originally conceived as one vast, mysterious novel. Now, in this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has marvelously distilled a monumental work while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. 

Praise for Shadow Country

??Magnificent . . . breathtaking . . . Finally now we have [this three-part saga] welded like a bell, and with Watson??s song the last sound, all the elements fuse and resonate.???Los Angeles Times

??Peter Matthiessen has done great things with the Watson trilogy. It??s the story of our continent, both land and people, and his writing does every justice to the blood fury of his themes.???Don DeLillo

 ??The fiction of Peter Ma­­tthiessen is the reason a lot of people in my generation decided to be writers. No doubt about it. Shadow Country lives up to anyone??s highest expectations for great writing.? ??Richard Ford 
??Shadow Country, Matthiessen??s distillation of the earlier Watson saga, represents his original vision. It is the quintessence of his lifelong concerns, and a great legacy.???W. S. Merwin 

??[An] epic

Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque

Description du livre
Résumé sous forme de haïku

Discussion en cours

Aucun

Couvertures populaires

Vos raccourcis

Évaluation

Moyenne: (3.96)
0.5 1
1 4
1.5 1
2 8
2.5 3
3 33
3.5 5
4 47
4.5 19
5 58

Est-ce vous ?

Devenez un(e) auteur LibraryThing.

 

À propos | Contact | LibraryThing.com | Respect de la vie privée et règles d'utilisation | Aide/FAQ | Blog | Boutique | APIs | TinyCat | Bibliothèques historiques | Critiques en avant-première | Partage des connaissances | 204,811,167 livres! | Barre supérieure: Toujours visible