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Chargement... Voyage Along the Horizonpar Javier Marías
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. A slim exercise book on emulating Calvino without needing to be brazen or effective. I read this four years ago, I recall it being a gift from The Believer. I wasn't that impressed, think Cortazar's The Winners sans any charatcers or action; that experience has made me cautious about marias to this day. ( ) I am still puzzling over this book after finishing it a few days ago, because it is essentially composed of stories about people inside a "novel" called Voyage along the Horizon which is inside this novel of the same title. What is Marías trying to say? (The "Eight Questions for Javier Marías," included at the end of my edition, don't shed much light on this!) The novel starts when the narrator meets a man and a woman at a party: the man is trying to promote a manuscript by a friend of his, Voyage along the Horizon, which features the story of one Victor Arledge, a writer, and may shed light on his fate; the woman has written her thesis on Arledge and is fascinated by him. The man agrees to read the manuscript to her the following day, and the narrator is invited along. The reading of the novel takes two days, and the woman fails to show up for the second day, creating another mystery. Voyage along the Horizon (the "novel" within the novel) tells the tale of an sailing ship that left from Marseille, ostensibly to bring a group of apparently largely English scientists, artists, musicians, and writers on an expedition to Antarctica. There is a prequel of sorts in which one of those musicians either was or wasn't abducted and imprisoned for a few days in Scotland, and Arledge becomes obsessed, on the journey, with trying to find out what really happened to the musician. They spend weeks, if not months, traveling around the Mediterranean (i.e., never heading towards Antarctica), and spend some time in Alexandria while an investigation of the mysterious death of the boatswain proceeds. Throughout the "novel," the characters interact with each other, mostly failing to connect, and other tales interrupt the narrative of the journey. For example, there is a long story about the second in command of the ship, Kerrigan (an American), after he, in a drunken violent rage, throws a woman overboard (she is rescued) and attacks the captain, gravely injuring him. The story involves his past as a somewhat shady owner of a business in the far east, and his subsequent signing on with a pair of millionaires (and one of their wives) trying to find a south sea island to buy. I enjoyed this book, although much of it mystified me. For example, is the "novel" the "true" tale of a really weird expedition, or is it made up by the novelist even though it includes at least one "real" person, Victor Arledge? Marías started the novel at the age of 19, and finished it at 21; it is accomplished for someone so young, but perhaps Marías is a little too entranced by the idea of being mysterious. Nevertheless, he is a wonderful story teller. And, as he says in response to the last of the eight questions addressed to him at the end: What counts the most -- and what we remember the most -- is the atmosphere, the style, the path, the journey, and the world in which we have immersed ourselves for a few hours or a few days while reading a novel or watching a movie. What matters then is the journey along the horizon -- in other words, the journey that never ends." p. 182 Bouyed by my reading this week of Bernhard's worthwhile, early "On the Mountain," I decided to tackle the earliest prose work available in English by another of my favorite writers. Written during the span of his 19th to his 21st year, this exciting and playful novel only occasionally reveals the immaturity that I'd like to imagine most people have at that tender age, but only occasionally. Surprisingly, despite a plot that largely falls apart, and some clumsy paragraphs that fail at elegant explication, the elaborate syntax and sly observations on the nature of fiction and storytelling--most of the ingredients, in other words, that make mature the Marías such a pleasure to read--are here intact. Didn't Bolaño speak highly of "Dominions of the Wolf"? If it's anywhere near as accomplished as this, I hope it's translated soon. Marías may not have emerged fully-formed, but there's a lot to enjoy here. Sinopsis: Al igual que en las grandes novelas de aventuras que se escribían a finales del XIX, y a las que Travesía del horizonte rinde cariñoso y también burlón homenaje, esta novela, publicada a los veintiún años, tiene como hilo conductor una atrevida expedición: el capitán Kerrigan, millonario y excéntrico, ha organizado un viaje a la Antártida para hombres de letras y científicos. Pronto adivina el lector que esa travesía no es más que una excusa, o uno de los muchos hilos con los que está tejida esta trama. Construida según el modelo del relato-dentro-del-relato, Travesía del horizonte añade a la aventura marítima de Kerrigan otras historias y personajes no menos novelescos, en deliberada parodia de ciertos maestros del género que van desde Joseph Conrad hasta Henry James pasando por Conan Doyle; y entre pintorescos secuestros y manuscritos misteriosos, señoritas eduardianas y paisajes de navegación, se va desplegando un torbellino narrativo servido por un estilo paradójicamente pausado. Del mismo modo, Javier Marías aprecia tanto el enigma que termina por menospreciar la solución; valora tanto la incertidumbre que llega a preguntarse si no será mejor ignorar para siempre la verdad y contentarse con su figuración y su sombra, en un insólito alarde de osadía narrativa. Al igual que en las grandes novelas de aventuras que se escribían a finales del XIX, y a las que Travesía del horizonte rinde cariñoso y también burlón homenaje, esta novela, publicada a los veintiún años, tiene como hilo conductor una atrevida expedición: el capitán Kerrigan, millonario y excéntrico, ha organizado un viaje a la Antártida para hombres de letras y científicos. Pronto adivina el lector que esa travesía no es más que una excusa, o uno de los muchos hilos con los que está tejida esta trama. Construida según el modelo del relato-dentro-del-relato, Travesía del horizonte añade a la aventura marítima de Kerrigan otras historias y personajes no menos novelescos, en deliberada parodia de ciertos maestros del género que van desde Joseph Conrad hasta Henry James pasando por Conan Doyle; y entre pintorescos secuestros y manuscritos misteriosos, señoritas eduardianas y paisajes de navegación, se va desplegando un torbellino narrativo servido por un estilo paradójicamente pausado. Del mismo modo, Javier Marías aprecia tanto el enigma que termina por menospreciar la solución; valora tanto la incertidumbre que llega a preguntarse si no será mejor ignorar para siempre la verdad y contentarse con su figuración y su sombra, en un insólito alarde de osadía narrativa
Whereas in Marías’s later creations, a reader is traveling in wholly uncharted territory, the universe of “Voyage” is all technique, and borrowed from a half-dozen other writers at that... If you want to care about characters, this is not your book. If you enjoy literary play for its own sake, you might have fun Appartient à la série éditoriale
Voyage Along the Horizon revolves around an intrepid expedition: the eccentric, wealthy Captain Kerrigan, an attractive man with a shadowy past, organizes a trip to Antarctica for a select group of writers, artists, and scientists. Amid sudden kidnappings, torrid manuscripts, Edwardian spinsters, and lethal duels, this seafaring tale is also a narrative of psychology, obsession, the writer's craft, and human nature, all of which Marías has wrapped up in an evocative, nostalgic novel that is both witty and dark. Fascinated by the question of uncertainty, Marías eschews the solution and prefers to revel in the narrative process itself, and asks the reader to consider the possibility that the truth as we know it isn't nearly as interesting as its own shadow. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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