"Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice Marianne is strange and friendless. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. And this relentless insistence, despite a certain banality and naivete, ends by conveying a honest and despairing conviction of reality.Ī young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up-sorry, can't tell you how it ends! As the characters talk endlessly about their passion and the pain, they reveal a staggering collection of the less commonplace griefs of our time. Neither the style nor the thought is particularly brilliant.
It is a curiously juvenile book for a man who has done so much writing. The ending is a tragic and inconclusive general dissolution in which truth destroys love. All these people are hopelessly involved in each other, and with themselves, and search for love in each other generally in physical ways: at one point Vivaldo even has an affair with Eric. A white couple, Cass and Richard, start to break up when Richard becomes a successful writer and Cass has an affair with a homosexual, Eric, who loved Rufus, and is now in love with a French boy, Yves. Vivaldo, an Irish-Italian, unsuccessful writer, who was fond of Rufus, begins a stormy affair with Rufus' sister, Ida. Rufus, a Negro boy, has a tragic affair with a Southern white girl she ends in the madhouse, he becomes homosexual and kills himself. Its subject is tormented love: love between men and women, homosexuals, whites and Negroes, shown through various shifting relationships in a group of friends.
Never one to shy away from taboos, Baldwin gives a eloquent and nuanced study of the complexities of interracial relationships, queerness, and non-monogamy in mid-century America.This novel about love, by a well-known Negro author, has received a good deal of advance publicity and will probably be widely read. Another Country paints a vivid depiction of bohemian life in 1950s New York, following a year in the lives of eight very different protagonists. SCARCE FIRST EDITION of the third novel from one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Dust-jacket unclipped and remains distinct and colourful, with some small chips and minor shelf-wear Very Good in Very Good dust-jacket. Clean, square, tight copy with no inscriptions or annotations.
Very slight fading to cloth on top board-edges and split to end paper at inner front hinge, tooling bright. Original cream publishers' dust jacket with bold midnight-blue and maroon text, designed by Paul Bacon crimson red endpapers. Publishers' original black cloth, white spine titles, and Baldwin's signature tooled in white on upper board.
0 kommentar(er)
