Notes from the Cévennes: Half a Lifetime in Provincial France
Autor Adam Thorpeen Limba Engleză Paperback – 16 mai 2019
In more recent writing Thorpe has explored the Cévennes, drawing on the legends, history and above all the people of this part of France for his inspiration. In his charming journal, Notes from the Cévennes, Thorpe takes up these themes, writing about his surroundings, the village and his house at the heart of it, as well as the contrasts of city life in nearby Nîmes.
In particular he is interested in how the past leaves impressions - marks - on our landscape and on us. What do we find in the grass, earth and stone beneath our feet and in the objects around us? How do they tie us to our forebears? What traces have been left behind and what marks do we leave now?
He finds a fossil imprinted in the single worked stone of his house's front doorstep, explores the attic once used as a silk factory and contemplates the stamp of a chance paw in a fragment of Roman roof-tile. Elsewhere, he ponders mutilated fleur-de-lys (French royalist symbols) in his study door and unwittingly uses the tomb-rail of two sisters buried in the garden as a gazebo. Then there are the personal fragments that make up a life and a family history: memories dredged up by 'dusty toys, dried-up poster paints, a painted clay lump in the bottom of a box.'
Part celebration of both rustic and urban France, part memoir, Thorpe's humorous and precise prose shows a wonderful stylist at work, recalling classics such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes.
Preț: 49.64 lei
Preț vechi: 68.15 lei
-27%
Puncte Express: 74
Preț estimativ în valută:
8.79€ • 10.27$ • 7.64£
8.79€ • 10.27$ • 7.64£
Carte disponibilă
Livrare economică 31 ianuarie-14 februarie
Livrare express 20-24 ianuarie pentru 38.29 lei
Preluare comenzi: 021 569.72.76
Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781472966315
ISBN-10: 1472966317
Pagini: 256
Ilustrații: Integrated black and white illustrations
Dimensiuni: 128 x 196 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.22 kg
Editura: Bloomsbury Publishing
Colecția Bloomsbury Continuum
Locul publicării:London, United Kingdom
ISBN-10: 1472966317
Pagini: 256
Ilustrații: Integrated black and white illustrations
Dimensiuni: 128 x 196 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.22 kg
Editura: Bloomsbury Publishing
Colecția Bloomsbury Continuum
Locul publicării:London, United Kingdom
Cuprins
1 Gossamer Threads
2 The Poppet
3 Coming Into Shot
4 Wartime Shrines
5 Our Baker is Missing
6 Reprisal in the Oxbow
7 The Psychological Castle
8 Taking the Postman Hostage
9 Resident Tombs
10 A Flat Above the Cafe
11 All that Rough Muskc
12 Erudition
13 A Local Custom
14 Disaster Area
15 Martins in the Roof
16 A Visit from the City Police
17 Arches and Bulls
18 Defending Wolves
19 A Catastrophe
20 Floodwaters
21 The Ballot
22 Paws, Fingers and Thighs
23 Taking Our Tread
24 Epilogue
Footprints
Acknowledgements
2 The Poppet
3 Coming Into Shot
4 Wartime Shrines
5 Our Baker is Missing
6 Reprisal in the Oxbow
7 The Psychological Castle
8 Taking the Postman Hostage
9 Resident Tombs
10 A Flat Above the Cafe
11 All that Rough Muskc
12 Erudition
13 A Local Custom
14 Disaster Area
15 Martins in the Roof
16 A Visit from the City Police
17 Arches and Bulls
18 Defending Wolves
19 A Catastrophe
20 Floodwaters
21 The Ballot
22 Paws, Fingers and Thighs
23 Taking Our Tread
24 Epilogue
Footprints
Acknowledgements
Recenzii
In an altogether different class ... beautifully written, full of wisdom about the balance struck by humanity and the natural world ... Adam Thorpe, a self-described "curator of time", has written a grand little book. I might have added that no holidaymaker this year in France, or further afield, should be without it. But why wait until July or August? Don't postpone the treat. Buy now; this book is a real joy.
A marvellously astute, wry and affectionate account of France and the French - mercifully free of whimsy - and, moreover, written in pitch-perfect English prose. A delight.
Part history and part memoir, Notes from the Cévennes is a marvellous evocation of the forgotten Languedoc, and an affectionate portrait of a country and a people.
A powerful story of cooperation and conflict, both between ourselves and Nature. Living in two places, the ancient pastoral retreat of the Cévennes, and the Roman cosmopolitanism of Nimes, Adam has all the gifts of novelist, correspondent, historian and poet.
His novels are concerned with how the past and the present, reality and fiction elide into each other, particularly through landscape; and Thorpe, in this series of tightly controlled, involving vignettes, finds evidence of this everywhere he looks . Gleaming with polished insights, this sensitive book is both a warning, plea and salutary reminder that even the tiniest action affects the universal. France profonde, indeed.
Erudite and beguiling
Thorpe has dizzying range as well as style
[A] deeply engaging book, part chatty memoir, part profound perception of the evidence of previous human existences ... He has, in short, lived a life to which he was not born but which he has taken up and made his own, something many people dream about but few are able to emulate
Thorpe's memoir is not part of any herd. Nor does it belong in the fast-and-loose category of potboilers about swapping English life for continental idylls . It is erudite, firmly embedded in its own soil and yet evasive . affectionate, appreciative and perceptive
Beautifully written and produced, a pure pleasure: learned and attentive and rich in description and full of humour that is genuinely affectionate without being remotely patronising
By turns comic and pensive, Notes from the Cévennes is an absorbing and beautifully composed collection of vignettes, recording Adam Thorpe's encounters, adventures and meditations over half a lifetime in France . Mr Thorpe captures so well the dark history of France, the conflict of religion, politics and land
This absorbing book is written in prose as bright and bracing as the waters of the rivers in which Thorpe loves to swim. Despite the warts-and-all picture, it made me want to pack my bags and head south.
Thorpe allows a sense of folk magic to permeate, and his characters feel rustic in a timeless way because he transmits a real appreciation of the wild and how humans justify our interactions with other beasts . A gentle homage to rural life.
A marvellously astute, wry and affectionate account of France and the French - mercifully free of whimsy - and, moreover, written in pitch-perfect English prose. A delight.
Part history and part memoir, Notes from the Cévennes is a marvellous evocation of the forgotten Languedoc, and an affectionate portrait of a country and a people.
A powerful story of cooperation and conflict, both between ourselves and Nature. Living in two places, the ancient pastoral retreat of the Cévennes, and the Roman cosmopolitanism of Nimes, Adam has all the gifts of novelist, correspondent, historian and poet.
His novels are concerned with how the past and the present, reality and fiction elide into each other, particularly through landscape; and Thorpe, in this series of tightly controlled, involving vignettes, finds evidence of this everywhere he looks . Gleaming with polished insights, this sensitive book is both a warning, plea and salutary reminder that even the tiniest action affects the universal. France profonde, indeed.
Erudite and beguiling
Thorpe has dizzying range as well as style
[A] deeply engaging book, part chatty memoir, part profound perception of the evidence of previous human existences ... He has, in short, lived a life to which he was not born but which he has taken up and made his own, something many people dream about but few are able to emulate
Thorpe's memoir is not part of any herd. Nor does it belong in the fast-and-loose category of potboilers about swapping English life for continental idylls . It is erudite, firmly embedded in its own soil and yet evasive . affectionate, appreciative and perceptive
Beautifully written and produced, a pure pleasure: learned and attentive and rich in description and full of humour that is genuinely affectionate without being remotely patronising
By turns comic and pensive, Notes from the Cévennes is an absorbing and beautifully composed collection of vignettes, recording Adam Thorpe's encounters, adventures and meditations over half a lifetime in France . Mr Thorpe captures so well the dark history of France, the conflict of religion, politics and land
This absorbing book is written in prose as bright and bracing as the waters of the rivers in which Thorpe loves to swim. Despite the warts-and-all picture, it made me want to pack my bags and head south.
Thorpe allows a sense of folk magic to permeate, and his characters feel rustic in a timeless way because he transmits a real appreciation of the wild and how humans justify our interactions with other beasts . A gentle homage to rural life.