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Chargement... The Lost Librarypar Walter Mehring
   Aucun Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre.  razorsoccam | Jan 30, 2017 |   This isn't a book about that library, nor is it a memoir or collection of pensees. I suppose it's best called a book of reflections, one skirting around, touching upon scattered subjects.. Mehring was a dadaist and knew Rilke, Joseph Roth, and Ernst Weiss and has pertinent things to say about writers and early 20th-century artistic movements. And when he discusses writing, he's often delightful: 'Every verse in his [Shakespeare's] monologues sounds like the last words of a dying man.' (of the bordello in Ulysses:) 'And who would want to kiss a mouth that performs linguistic feats with every endearment?' Mehring writes in a tone that is wonderfully dispassionate without for an instant falling into the affectation of a stiff upper lip. And so it's all the more powerful when, near the end, he does express his fury: '. . .the streets were black with the devil's minions, howling, obscene, reptilian creatures rearing up on the hind legs, spitting the devil's slogans and roaring: Heil, Satan!' The book is difficult to put aside; I opened it one evening when I was far too tired to read anything but a bit of undemanding fiction, intending to skim the first few pages only, and closed it that night when I was halfway through it. 1  bluepiano | Nov 30, 2016 | aucune critique | ajouter une critique
Appartient à la série éditorialeHeyne-Buch (924)
Born in Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century, Walter Mehring inherited both his father's respect for the civilizing power of literature and his formidable library of thousands of books. Like his father, believed that books and reading were essential to progress, mutual understanding, and contentment. After having served in World War I, Mehring spent the years between the world wars as part of the exhilarating avant-garde coffeehouse culture of Europe's capitals; he himself was a poet, cabaret lyricist, and founder of the Dadaist movement in Berlin. But with the rise of fascism, Europe became a dangerous place for free-thinking artists. Mehring never envisioned that the culture of books celebrated in his father's library would be rejected by the sudden rise to prominence of the Nationalist Socialist Party. Soon, even his own books were burned by the Brownshirts and Mehring was forced to roam Europe as a literary fugitive. From a precarious exile in Vienna, he arranged for his father's books to be smuggled out of Germany, but their fate would be worse than his--while Mehring managed to slip out of Austria and avoid capture, his library was confiscated and destroyed by the Nazis in 1938. In The Lost Library: The Autobiography of a Culture, translated by Richard and Clara Winston and presented in paperback for the first time, Mehring takes the reader with him as he unpacks the crates of books in his mind, and in the process recalls what each book meant to him and his father. Writing with wit and insight, Mehring successfully compares the humanism of his father's era with the chaos of Europe at war, using his father's library as a metaphor for how the optimism of nineteenth-century progress gave way to the disorder and book-burning of the twentieth. It is with love and not a little bitterness that the author touches on the various tomes of his father's library [and through them] on the history of man's ideas, on the magnificence of our cultural progress, . . . and on the eventual destruction of the beauty and ideals that man had been able to create. REVIEWS: Beautifully conceived and beautifully executed. -- The Atlantic Whoever cares for books will love this book about books. -- New York Times The Lost Library cannot be read without profit. -- Times Literary Supplement Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
Discussion en coursAucunCouvertures populaires
 Google Books — Chargement...GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)809Literature By Topic History, description and criticism of more than two literaturesClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne: (3.63)
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Maar Mehring schildert met zo’n losse hand, en met zoveel vage verwijzingen, halve citaten en tongue-in-cheecks, bewandelt bovendien zoveel zijwegen, dat je als lezer gaandeweg alle houvast ontnomen wordt, en meer nog dan verveling is het vermoeidheid die je het boek tenslotte doet wegleggen. (Ik werd herinnerd aan de cryptische zinnen van Lacans Televisie.) Enkel wanneer Mehring de kasten zelf omschrijft, en de boeken, de verwondering van het kind en het geloof van de vader in de vooruitgang, en wanneer je de noten van de vertaler even ongemoeid kan laten (voetnoten die, zo merk je gauw, zoveel uitgebreider nog hadden kunnen en misschien wel moeten zijn) voel je ook daadwerkelijk het gewicht van al die boeken.
Het boek doet een beetje denken aan (een kladversie van) De wereld van gisteren van Zweig. Maar in de van spanning bolstaande woorden van Mehring (alsof de angst om te vergeten hen op de hielen zit) voel je als het ware hoe de pen zijn gedachten vooruitschiet, de bladzijden schudden en springen van thema naar thema, van boek naar boek, van naam naar naam, dat alles met moeite bijeengehouden door een handvol grofmazige hoofdstukken. Zelfs al heb je als lezer enig idee waar of over wie Mehring het over heeft, dan wordt dat benul bij het volgende citaat alweer ondergraven of op de proef gesteld …
Er wordt teruggekeken, er worden verbanden gelegd, maar amper stilgestaan. Nog maar net heeft hij een nieuw thema aangeroerd, of hij is er al weer vandoor. Op de vlucht … tromgeroffel … voor een verloren bibliotheek … (