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Chargement... Le temps des cendres (2006)par Jorge Volpi
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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. Ce roman commençait plutôt bien avec l'explosition de Tchernobyl - thème rare -, le mélange de personnages, leur histoire et leurs relations. Très vite par contre, Volpi se lance dans le menu détail de l'histoire de la fin du XXe, utilisant ses personnages comme simple prétexte pour étaler sa vaste connaissance. Qui plus est, la fin se termine par la mort de trois personnages (somme toute mineurs dans l'ensemble du roman) mais on entend plus parler de Tchernobyl et des grands courants historiques qui ont suivi. Décousu, très long pour ne pas dire lent, ce roman finit en pétard mouillé. Décevant. ( )
This, in broad outline, is the world of Season of Ash, published in Spanish in 2006 as the final installment of the historical trilogy that began with In Search of Klingsor, and just released here in a translation by Alfred Mac Adam for the generally excellent press Open Letter. The failure of communism, the collapse of the Soviet Union--and with it that strange and stubborn ghost, ideology--is apparently so crucial to Volpi that it must be marked repeatedly. The novel begins with a brief dramatization of the Chernobyl disaster, the USSR's first symbolic death. The giant concrete sarcophagus in which the nuclear plant's reactor is eventually sealed off, Volpi writes, is the "final legacy of communism." But it lives on to die again three years later, when the last Russian soldier retreats from Afghanistan, and again in 1990, when the first McDonald's opens in Moscow and one character announces to his wife, "We are witnessing the end of the planned economy and therefore of the Soviet Union itself!" Then one last time on New Year's Eve 1991, just after the Supreme Soviet really has dissolved itself, the couple's brooding daughter writes a letter to Anna Akhmatova: "Today is the last day of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, the last day of Communism, the last day of our era." A few pages later, in case the corpse wasn't dead enough, Volpi incinerates it. His narrator opines that--like Latin American literature--"The worst thing about the Soviet Union is that it had never existed." “Season of Ash” is about nearly everything that has happened over the last 50 years: Chernobyl, the collapse of Communism, the rise of biogenetics and environmental terrorism. Other, equally significant events make their way into the narrative as well. Hello, Challenger explosion. Greetings, AIDS. Salaam, Soviet war in Afghanistan. Wassup, W.T.O. riots. Volpi is a leading member of the so-called Crack group, an upstart literary movement of Mexican writers understandably bored by the devices and expectations of magical realism. Until one actually reads it, “Season of Ash” looks poised to become a foundational repudiation of everything one has come to expect from the literature of the Spanish-speaking Americas. From his novel’s first sentence (“Enough rot, howled Anatoly Diatlov”), Volpi attempts to be the first great Russian novelist who is not actually Russian. Instead, he has written “Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’: A Novel.” For too long, the word nerd has been misused to describe the videogame-playing and Buffy-obsessed men and women of this world. That's geek culture. For a proper definition, look no further than Jorge Volpi's Season of Ash, which, in its depth (it spans the years 1929 to 2000), breadth (it crisscrosses from Zaire to Berlin and Pittsburgh to Siberia) and bookish preoccupations (scientific advancements in genetic research, artificial life and biochemistry), is unapologetically nerdy. But it's quality airplane reading, too. Volpi's sweeping story, about three brilliant women and the way their lives connect to the sociological chaos of the 20th century, is told from the perspective of a man who, it's revealed early on, has murdered one of them. Volpi is the author of the internationally best-selling In Search of Klingsor, and he writes like a young Michael Crichton, but with twice the IQ and a historical perspective. Nerd. Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash is the kind of novel that reminds me why I read novels in the first place, but it’s also the kind that makes me wonder why I bother to write. Before the end of this review, I am going to try to convince you that Volpi is a genius, that you have to buy this book, and that he’ll end up with the Nobel Prize in Literature if there is any justice in the world (which there might not be…)—but before I attempt all that, you should know who Jorge Volpi is, as he is not yet well-known to North American readers. Prix et récompensesListes notables
"Jorge Volpi will be one of the stars of Spanish literature of this century."--Carlos Fuentes The Soviet biologist Irina Granina has experienced the worst of Communism, struggling to free her husband from the gulag for years. Following the rise of Gorbachev, her husband finally emerges a changed man, but then Irina is forced to witness the worst of capitalism, as her daughter Oksana disappears into the newly rapacious consumer society and she loses her husband again, this time to greed and a lust for power. In the West, Jennifer Moore, the scion of blue-blooded American wealth, takes a high-ranking job at the International Monetary Fund, where she hopes to bring the tough love of the free market economy to the unenlightened masses the world over. But she also has to deal with a philandering husband, Jack Wells, whose pharmaceutical company is a market wonder built on a house of cards, and her sister Allison, a free-spirited anti-globalization activist. Jorge Volpi'sSeason of Ash puts a human face on earth-shaking events of the late twentieth century: the Chernobyl disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Soviet communism and the rise of the Russian oligarchs, the cascading collapsing of developing economies, and the near-miraculous scientific advances of the Human Genome Project. A scientific investigation, a journalistic exposé, a detective novel, and a dark love story, Season of Ash is a thrilling exploration of greed and disillusionment, anda clear-eyed examination of the passions that rule our lives and make history. Jorge Volpi is the author of nine novels, includingIn Search of Klingsor, for which he won the Spanish Premio Biblioteca Breve prize and the French Deux-Océans-Grizane-Cavour Prize. Volpi is one of the founders of the "Crack" group--a prestigious Mexican literary movement. Alfred MacAdam is a professor of Latin American literature at Barnard College and the translator of novels by Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, José Donoso, Juan Carlos Onetii, and Julio Cortázar, among others. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
Critiques des anciens de LibraryThing en avant-premièreLe livre Season of Ash de Jorge Volpi était disponible sur LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Discussion en coursAucunCouvertures populaires
Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)863.64Literature Spanish and Portuguese Spanish fiction 20th Century 1945-2000Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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