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Chargement... The Peregrine (1967)par J. A. Baker
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. I struggled my way through a lot of this, but by the end I felt myself immersed in the world he portrays. He has a really beautiful way of depicting birds and talking about them. My issue is that I'm bad at picturing imagery so the detailed descriptions of how birds look and fly often felt quite difficult for me even when I struggled over them. But the way he talks about bird behaviours and the experience of being around them, how they make you feel... every time it's perfect. ( ) J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine is a difficult bastard to review. The content is monotonous, dense and at times overwhelmingly pedantic. It calls for a reading experience that is excruciating slow, with each diary entry requiring multiple sweeps to fully substantiate the images Baker weaves together. Brian Eno’s album Ambient 4 is an absolute must for background music, and reading out loud is preferable (while gesticulating excessively and animating your voice with some truly Shakespearean heft and gusto - take up as much space as possible and strut the stage of your bedroom like Orson Welles). You’ll have to push yourself to get to the end, but once you’ve surveyed the landscape you can easily come back and give each passage the necessary closer scrutiny it cries out for. Also, make sure not to watch Herzog talk about it (of course the paradox is you’ll have to watch Herzog talk about it if you want to read the bloody thing in the first place, I’m fairly certain that the majority of this book’s contemporary audience was introduced to it through him) because he reads out all of the best passages - once you get to the places he has already read you’ll internally don his Bavarian breathlessness and feel like you are merely regurgitating already conquered/mastered flights of fancy. The Peregrine, published in 1967, has become something of a cult classic among aficionados of nature writing. The book follows the author’s intensely personal observations of a pair of Peregrin hawks in eastern England from mid-October to early April. [The observations in question actually took place over a ten year period, but the book telescopes them into a single hunting season for purposes of presentation.] We learn that the term falcon applies only to the female of the species; her male counterpart, who is considerably smaller, is known as a tercel. All peregrines are fierce, efficient predators whose principal prey consists of other birds, which the hawks usually kill in mid flight. They are extremely fast fliers, equipped with lethal talons and beaks. The book has remained popular largely because of the high quality of the writing. I opened the book at random, and the first paragraph I encountered contained the following: “They sailed overhead, three hundred feet up, canting slowly round on still and rigid wings. With feathers fully spread, and dilated with the sustaining air, they were wide, thick-set, cobby-looking hawks. The thin intricate mesh of pale brown and silver-grey markings overlaying the buff surfaces of their underwings contrasted with the vertical mahogany-brown streaks on the deep amber yellow of their chests. Their clenched feet shone against the white tufts of their under-tail coverts. The bunched toes were ridged and knuckled like golden grenades.” The author is also adept at denominalization (changing a noun into a verb) and other forms of anthimeria, i.e., using one part of speech as another. But there is a problem with this level of description—after 50 pages or so, it begins to cloy; and after 190 pages, it becomes nearly unbearable. Another problem with the book is that it has virtually no narrative arc. The “story” consists of the author going out each day to observe birds. Sometimes he sees a peregrine, or sees that other birds (described in fine detail) see a peregrine. Sometimes he sees the remains of a bird the peregrine has killed. The next day is the same, as is the next day, and on it goes. Admittedly, there is some (very modest) progression in that as we get deeper and deeper into the book, the author is able to approach the peregrines more and more closely. But nothing else happens. I would recommend that readers of the book take it a soupcon at a time. Teachers of English or creative writing can analyze randomly chosen passages as examples of virtuoso composition. But for me, the book as a whole is a little too much of a good thing. (JAB)
And that’s the plot: man goes out, man watches falcon and other birds, man goes home. You’d think that this narrative, continued over 190 pages, would be boring. It’s not, for it’s sustained by the gorgeous prose and Baker’s unique way of seeing. Prix et récompenses
J. A. Baker's extraordinary classic of British nature writing was first published in 1967. Greeted with acclaim, it went on to win the Duff Cooper Prize, the pre-eminent literary prize of the time. Luminaries such as Ted Hughes, Barry Lopez and Andrew Motion have cited it as one of the most important books in twentieth-century nature writing. Despite the association of peregrines with the wild, outer reaches of the British Isles, The Peregrine is set on the flat marshes of the Essex coast, where J. A. Baker spent long winters looking and writing about the visitors from the uplands - peregrines that spend the winter hunting the huge flocks of pigeons and waders that share the desolate landscape with them. This new edition of the timeless classic, published to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its first publication, features an afterword by one of the book's greatest admirers, Robert Macfarlane." tour de force ... what can I do except praise writing which involves all the senses? This book goes altogether outside the bird-book into literature. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)598.96Natural sciences and mathematics Zoology Birds Raptors, birds of prey Falcons, KestrelsClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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