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Old Filth: From the Orange Prize shortlisted author de Jane Gardam

Old Filth: From the Orange Prize shortlisted author: Waterstones Reading the 21st Century

Autor Jane Gardam
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 6 feb 2014

Reținem, înainte de orice, vocea narativă a lui Jane Gardam, care reușește să transforme viața unui judecător octogenar într-o cronică fascinantă a unui secol apus. În „Old Filth”, nu avem parte de o simplă biografie ficționalizată, ci de o explorare a „schelăriei sentimentale” care susține un om atunci când lumea sa exterioară se prăbușește. Sir Edward Feathers, personajul central, întruchipează destinul imperiului: o fațadă impecabilă, construită pe fundamentele fragile ale unei copilării traumatice în Malaya. Credem că forța acestui roman rezidă în contrastul dintre rigoarea profesională a lui Feathers și vulnerabilitatea sa interioară, pe care o descoperim pe măsură ce bătrânețea îi forțează porțile memoriei. Imaginați-vă tensiunea socială și atenția la detaliu din The Book of Life de C. H. B. Kitchin, mutată într-un decor care pendulează între atmosfera umedă a Dorsetului și efervescența juridică din Hong Kong. Spre deosebire de alte lucrări ale autoarei, precum volumul de povestiri The Stories, unde Gardam explorează momente de metamorfoză cotidiană, „Old Filth” este o lucrare de o amploare arhitecturală. Este un studiu despre cum succesul profesional poate deveni o mască pentru o viață interioară aridă. Proza este una de o precizie chirurgicală, fără a cădea în sentimentalism, oferind o perspectivă lucidă asupra modului în care istoria mare modelează destinele individuale. Stilul este unul de o eleganță sobră, punctat de un umor discret și amar, specific elitei coloniale care a supraviețuit propriei epoci.

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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780349139494
ISBN-10: 0349139490
Pagini: 272
Dimensiuni: 126 x 196 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.22 kg
Editura: Little Brown
Colecția Abacus
Seria Waterstones Reading the 21st Century

Locul publicării:London, United Kingdom

De ce să citești această carte

Recomandăm acest roman cititorilor care apreciază proza britanică rafinată și studiile psihologice de profunzime. Veți câștiga o perspectivă nuanțată asupra declinului Imperiului Britanic, văzută prin ochii unui om care și-a trăit viața între două lumi. Este o lectură despre demnitate, regrete și reconcilierea cu trecutul, ideală pentru cei care au îndrăgit stilul lui Julian Barnes sau Kazuo Ishiguro.

Despre autor

Jane Gardam este considerată una dintre marile doamne ale literaturii engleze contemporane, fiind singura autoare recompensată de două ori cu prestigiosul premiu Whitbread Costa pentru cel mai bun roman al anului. Cu o carieră ce cuprinde numeroase romane și volume de proză scurtă, Gardam a fost, de asemenea, finalistă la Orange Prize. Opera sa este celebrată pentru combinația rară de erudiție, eleganță stilistică și un spirit critic ascuțit. Trilogia începută cu „Old Filth” și continuată cu The Man in the Wooden Hat și Last Friends reprezintă apogeul creației sale, fixând-o definitiv în canonul literar actual.

Descriere

'It's a cliche to compare novelists to Jane Austen, but in the case of Jane Gardam it happens to be true. Her diamond-like prose, her understanding of the human heart, her formal inventiveness and her sense of what it is to be alive - young, old, lonely, in love - never fades' Amanda Craig'I love Jane Gardam, especially Old Filth' Nina Stibbe'Her work, like Sylvia Townsend Warner's, has that appealing combination of elegance, erudition and flinty wit' Patrick Gale'One of the finest writers around. Old Filth has stayed with me for years...Can't think of anyone who achieves so much with so few words' Sathnam SangheraSir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (Failed In London, Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the bar.

Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and emotionally hollow childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the demands of his work and the sentimental scaffolding that has sustained him throughout his life. He slips back into the past with ever mounting frequency and intensity, and on the tide of these vivid, lyrical musings, Feathers approaches a reckoning with his own history.

Not all the old filth, it seems, can be cleaned away. Jane Gardam has written a literary masterpiece that retraces much of the twentieth century's torrid and momentous history. Feathers' childhood in Malaya during the British Empire's heyday, his schooling in pre-war England, his professional success in Southeast Asia and his return to England toward the end of the millennium, are vantage points from which the reader can observe the march forward of an eventful era and the steady progress of that man, Sir Edward Feathers, Old Filth himself, who embodies the century's fate.

Recenzii

'Sharp, humane, generous and wonderfully funny, she is one of our very finest writers' Hilary Mantel
'A magnificent, deeply moving and compassionate portrait of an era and a sentimental education. Please read it'
Daily Mail
FILTH, in his heyday, was an international lawyer with a practice in the Far East. Now, only the oldest QCs and Silks can remember that his nickname stood for Failed In London Try Hong Kong.
Long ago, Old Filth was a Raj orphan - one of the many young children sent 'Home' from the East to be fostered and educated in England. Jane Gardam's novel tells his story, from his birth in what was then Malaya to the extremities of his old age. In doing so, she not only encapsulates a whole period from the glory days of the British Empire, through the Second World war, to the present and beyond, but also illuminates the complexities of the character known variously as Eddie, the Judge, Fevvers, Filth, Master of the Inner Temple, Teddy and Sir Edward Feathers.
'Beautiful, vivid and defiantly funny'
The Times
'This novel is surely Gardam's masterpiece. On the human level, it is one of the most moving fictions I have read for years'
Guardian
'Magnificent'
Sunday Times
'Beautifully written and strangely moving'
John Mortimer, Spectator

Superb... quiet beauty, sly wit and heartbreaking humanity... the author has poignantly distilled a life less ordinary into 259 unforgettable pages
I was really moved by it and know that I will cry all over again when I re-read it
Beautiful, vivid and defiantly funny
This novel is surely Gardam's masterpiece... On the human level, it is one of the most moving fictions I have read for years... This is the rare novel that drives its reader forward while persistently waylaying and detaining by the sheer beauty and inventiveness of its style... her cunning wit, moving deftly between scenes and eras, displays the tragedy of a vintage world forever passing away
Sharp, humane, generous and wonderfully funny, she is one of our very finest writers
It's a cliché to compare novelists to Jane Austen, but in the case of Jane Gardam it happens to be true. Her diamond-like prose, her understanding of the human heart, her formal inventiveness and her sense of what it is to be alive - young, old, lonely, in love - never fades
Jane Gardam's work is rich and diverse and she writes beautifully... She's a treasure of contemporary English writing
One of the finest writers around... Old Filth has stayed with me for years... Can't think of anyone who achieves so much with so few words
Her work, like Sylvia Townsend Warner's, has that appealing combination of elegance, erudition and flinty wit
I recommend it wholeheartedly for its economy, breadth of narrative, and its insight, humour and pathos
The last great book I read
I can't say I've read anything else like Old Filth, which stands out for me as a singular, opalescent novel, a thing of beauty that gives immense gratification to its lucky readers
A magnificent, deeply moving and compassionate portrait of an era and a sentimental education
What a spiky brilliant sledgehammer of a novel is Jane Gardam's Old Filth
Excellent and compulsively readable... Old Filth belongs in the Dickensian pantheon of memorable characters
Like Samuel Beckett, Gardam continually explores the corrosive loneliness of being alive and the courage it takes to continue... Readers will relish Old Filth for its compassionate wisdom, its comprehension of the way we lived then and live now, and for its absolute mastery of authorial tone - the product of a lifetime of experience and craft... It is a Rembrandt portrait of a novel... Don't miss it
Excellently observed and quietly moving... Gardam invents an apparently composed character, and then disassembles him into pieces which - on closer inspection - look jagged and in poor repair
Gardam pulls off the near-impossible trick of great emotional depth delivered with wingtip lightness... Her characters are drawn with rich humour, and Old Filth himself is a marvellous, moving creation whose company you find yourself sad to leave
Told with compassion and great style, Gardam seems to get better as she gets older
Sparkles with Gardam's wit, sensibility and poignancy and it deservedly earned an Orange Prize nomination... a fictional life of absorbing, emotional sophistication about memory, loss and the vestiges of empire... a beautiful, melancholy novel which captivates, saddens and delights
Will bring immense pleasure to readers who treasure fiction that is intelligent, witty, sophisticated and - a quality encountered all too rarely in contemporary culture - adult
Beautifully written and strangely moving
A novel of great perception and quietly killing prose
With superb skill and economy, Jane Gardam encapsulates the long lifetime of Sir Edward Feathers... Witty, humane, wise - this end-of-Empire tragicomedy is a masterclass in conducting shifting empathies
Darkly funny, huge of heart and socially fearless in its reach. Virtually perfect
Jane Gardam, once shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is one of our finest novelists yet her work has yet to reach a wide readership. Like Samuel Beckett, she continually explores the corrosive loneliness of being alive and the courage it takes to continue...Readers will relish Old Filth for its compassionate wisdom, its comprehension of the way we lived then and live now, and for its absolute mastery of authorial tone - the product of a lifetime of experience and craft. It is a Rembrandt portrait of a novel. Don't miss it.
This novel is surely Gardam's masterpiece. On the human level, it is one of the most moving fictions I have read for years...This is the rare novel that drives its reader forward while persistently waylaying and detaining by the sheer beauty and inventiveness of its style. One must savour every phrase. The marriage of quirky eccentricity and psychological authenticity is a Gardam technique, but here her cunning wit, moving deftly between scenes and eras, displays the tragedy of a vintage world forever passing away
Typical excellence and compulsive readability...the miracle of "Old Filth" is that its hero eludes sociological or psychological pigeonholing. If he is a characteristic Raj orphan, he is also triumphantly his own man

Notă biografică

Jane Gardam has twice won the Whitbread Award, for The Hollow Land, and Queen of the Tambourine. She is also the author of God on the Rocks, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and most recently, Faith Fox.