new york review of books aug 2022 (5 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - ''My poems are flecks of salt clinging ambivalently to a horse's back,' Wang Yin writes. Selected Poems, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter, is the first comprehensive collection of this important Chinese poet's work to appear in English. Readers can follow the full arc of the poet's career, from the early, surrealist and Deep Image-influenced work of the 1980s, when he made his debut as a post-Misty poet, through the turn toward the rawer, more immediate poetry of the nineties, and on to the existential and ineffable weavings of his more recent work. Wang Yin's sensibility is both cosmopolitan and lyrical, and his poetry has a subtlety and beauty that contrasts with the often physically painful imagery with which he depicts psychological reality, a reality expressed as various states of mind struggling against the suppression of memory. Shanghai winters, a winter in Katowice, a summer day with ghosts, blue shadows, petals in the darkness, an 'empty lane lit up by moonlight'--the poems of this extraordinary volume illuminate the inner life as a singular encounter between physical and spiritual realms'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A story of displacement and resistance during the early days of the Nazi occupation of France.Last Times, Victor Serge's epic novel of the Fall of France is based--like much of his fiction--on first-hand experience. The author was an eyewitness to the last days of Paris (June 1940) and joined the chaotic mass exodus south to the unoccupied zone on foot with nothing but his manuscripts. He found himself trapped in Marseille under the Vichy government, a persecuted, stateless Russian, and participated in the early French Resistance before escaping on the last ship to the Americas in 1941.Exiled in Mexico City, Serge poured his recent experience into a fast-moving, gripping novel aimed at an American audience, and it was published in New York in 1946. Along with sharply drawn characters, dramatic scenes, and physical action, the novel presents a compelling evocation of the atmosphere of that time and place, based on keen observation and an enormous talent for description. It's a near-forgotten classic of the era.Serge creates a haunting panorama of a near-deserted Paris abandoned by the government. The reader follows his protagonists, anti-fascist refugees, through the last days of Europe's deserted cultural capital as the sound of gunfire moves into the suburbs. With them, the reader joins the flood of Belgian and French refugees fleeing south on foot, in cars loaded with household goods, on bikes, pushing carts and prams under the strafing Stukas.Serge next brings to life wartime Marseille, its great harbor closed by the war, with its undergrounds, rackets and prostitution, its Vichy officialdom and fascist Militias, its collaborationists, its early resisters, its crowds of desperate refugees competing for the last visa and the last berth on the last--hoped-for--ship to the new world.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'A Very Old Man collects five linked stories, parts of an unfinished novel that the great Triestine writer Italo Svevo wrote at the end of his life, when the international success of Zeno's Conscience in 1923 had put an end to decades of literary neglect and set his imagination free. Here Svevo revisits with new vigor and agility themes that fascinated him from the start--aging, deceit, and self-deception, as well as the fragility, fecklessness, and plain foolishness of the bourgeois pater familias--even as memories of the recent, terrible slaughter of World War I and the contemporary rise of Italian fascism also cast a shadow over the book's pages. It opens with 'The Contract,' in which Zeno's manager, the hard-headed young Olivi expresses, like the war veterans who were Mussolini's early followers, a sense of entitled born of fighting in the trenches. Zeno, by contrast, embodies the confusion and paralysis of the more decorous, although sleepy, way of life associated with the one-time Austro-Hungarian Empire which for so long ruled over Trieste, but has now been swept away. As always, Svevo is attracted to the theme of how people fail to fit in, whether at the office or at home. Absurd as such people may appear to others, and often to themselves, it is they, he suggests, who offer a recognizably human countenance in a world ravaged by the ambitions and fantasies of its true believers. Frederika Randall's new translation of A Very Old Man allows readers of English to encounter the final masterpiece of one of the twentieth century's most original imaginations'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Children is a masterpiece not only of the nineteenth century but of the whole of Russian literature, a book full to bursting with life. It is a novel about the relations between the young and the old, about love, families, politics, religion, about strong beliefs and heated disagreements, illness and death. It is about the clash between liberals and conservatives, revolutionaries and reactionaries. At the time of its publication in 1862, the book aroused indignation in its critics who felt betrayed by Turgenev's refusal to let his novel serve a single ideology; it also received spirited defense by those who saw in his diffuse sympathies a greater service to art and to humanity. Fathers and Children is not a practical manifesto but a lasting work of art and a timely book for our present age, newly and ably translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater'.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Telluria is set in the future, when a devastating holy war between Europe and Islam has succeeded in returning the world to the torpor and disorganization of the Middle Ages. Europe, China, and Russia have all broken up. The people of the world now live in an array of little nations like puzzle pieces, each cultivating its own ideology or identity, a neo-feudal world of fads and feuds, in which no one power dominates. What does, however, travel everywhere is the appetite for the special substance tellurium. A spike of tellurium, driven into the brain by an expert hand, offers a transforming experience of bliss; incorrectly administered, it means death. The fifty chapters of Telluria map out this brave new world from fifty different angles, as Sorokin, always a virtuoso of the word, introduces us, among many other figures, to partisans and princes, peasants and party leaders, a new Knights Templar, a harem of phalluses, and a dog-headed poet and philosopher who feasts on carrion from the battlefield. The book is a immense and sumptuous tapestry of the word, carnivalesuqe and cruel, and Max Lawton, Sorokin's gifted translator, has captured it in an English that carries the charge of Cormac McCarthy and William Gibson'.