Quicksand
Autor Steve Toltzen Limba Engleză Paperback – 10 mar 2016
Simțim, încă de la primele pagini, o neliniște efervescentă: suntem în prezența unei comedii negre care refuză să ofere consolare, preferând în schimb să disece absurdul existenței cu o precizie chirurgicală. Quicksand nu este doar o cronică a eșecului, ci o explorare exuberantă a modului în care ne transformăm suferința în narațiune. Îi urmărim pe Liam, un polițist care nu-și găsește locul în sistem, și pe Aldo, prietenul său a cărui viață pare un experiment continuu de reziliență în fața dezastrului. Relația lor, construită pe o dependență aproape simbiotică între muză și artist, devine vehiculul prin care Steve Toltz lansează o critică tăioasă la adresa ipocriziei contemporane.
Reținem densitatea stilistică a textului; fiecare frază pare șlefuită pentru a livra fie o revelație metafizică, fie o glumă amară. Ritmul este dictat de succesiunea de idei de afaceri ratate și catastrofe personale, însă sub acest strat de cinism se ascunde o întrebare profundă despre credință și loialitate. Cititorul care a apreciat dinamica prieteniei și explorarea eșecului în The Hack de Moses Yuriyvich Mikheyev va găsi aici o abordare similară a relației dintre mentor și discipol, dar într-un context mult mai dens din punct de vedere literar și filosofic.
Steve Toltz revine la temele care l-au consacrat în A Fraction Of The Whole — tatăl excentric, fiul rătăcit și revolta împotriva banalității — dar în Quicksand tonul este mai matur, mai așezat în propria sa disperare creativă. Dacă în Here Goes Nothing autorul se ocupa de viața de apoi, aici el ancorează satira în prezentul imediat, demonstrând că realitatea poate fi la fel de suprarealistă ca orice ficțiune despre moarte.
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Specificații
ISBN-10: 1473606071
Pagini: 448
Dimensiuni: 128 x 196 x 30 mm
Greutate: 0.31 kg
Editura: Hodder & Stoughton
Colecția Sceptre
Locul publicării:London, United Kingdom
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De ce să citești această carte
Recomandăm Quicksand celor care caută o literatură care să îi provoace intelectual fără a sacrifica umorul. Este o lectură pentru cei care preferă personajele complexe și imperfecte în locul eroilor convenționali. Cititorul câștigă o perspectivă unică asupra modului în care eșecul poate fi o formă de artă, totul într-o limbă engleză sclipitoare, care amintește de marii stiliști ai satirei contemporane.
Despre autor
Steve Toltz este un scriitor australian stabilit la New York, a cărui carieră a început sub auspicii excepționale. Romanul său de debut, A Fraction Of The Whole, a fost nominalizat la prestigiosul Man Booker Prize în 2008, transformându-l rapid într-o voce importantă a beletristicii actuale. Experiențele sale diverse de viață — de la cameraman și detectiv privat până la profesor de engleză în orașe precum Barcelona sau Paris — îi hrănesc proza cu o varietate de perspective și un simț acut al observației sociale. Stilul său este caracterizat de o inventivitate verbală rară și de o capacitate extraordinară de a extrage umor din cele mai sumbre situații umane.
Descriere
Wildly funny and unceasingly surprising, Quicksand is both a satirical masterpiece and an unforgettable story of fate, family and friendship.
Aldo Benjamin may be the unluckiest soul in human history, but that isn't going to stop his friend Liam writing about him. For what more could an aspiring novelist want from his muse than a thousand get-rich-quick schemes, a life-long love affair, an eloquently named brothel, the most sexually confusing evening imaginable and a brief conversation with God?
'What a joy to surrender oneself to a writer of such prodigious talent.'
Peter Carey
'Tremendous' Sunday Times
Recenzii
The funniest novel I've read in the last 12 months . . . Genuinely moving.
Quicksand is, if anything, even more hysterically funny [than A Fraction of the Whole] and quite, quite horrific . . . Linguistically, Toltz manages to find the perfect if unlikely word or phrase faultlessly. It is very rare for me to laugh on almost every page of a book; it is even rarer for that to be accompanied by exquisite melancholy. Toltz is writing like very few other authors: he seems like an Antipodean Thomas Bernhard in his unsparing, agonising comedies. I hope it is not seven years until his next novel.
Toltz is clearly talented, with a vivid satirical intelligence... tremendous.
Leaves you almost breathless. There is more heart, and joy and compassion and hard-earned wisdom in Quicksand than seems possible for a single novel; it is life, literature at its fullest.
A book shot through with mordant humour and sizzling inventiveness.... In Aldo, Toltz has created a magnificent character.
A relentlessly garrulous tragicomic saga about friendship, failure, creativity and endurance that is both brilliant and exhausting... Even in a book overflowing with solipsists and monomaniacs, would-be artists and theories about art, it remains a creative force to be reckoned with.
Highly original, entertaining and almost impossible to summarize, this is a high-octane, adrenaline-fuelled, frenetic tour de force of sustained brilliance. There is with, laugh-out-loud humour and linguistic dexterity on almost every page.
Toltz is incapable of writing a dull sentence.
If anything can go wrong, it will - and it inevitably does so in the vicinity of Aldo Benjamin, Quicksand's luckless protagonist. Toltz's first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, was shortlisted for the Booker in 2008; his funny, dark, formidable follow-up is a garrulous meditation on fate, religion and male misbehaviour.
Energetic and crackling with a fevered inventiveness
Trust me, it's very funny... every page has zingers that you'll want to read to other people. Steve Toltz is touched by comic genius.
For risque humour and razor-sharp wit, look no further . . . Think John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces.
Toltz throws in Raymond Chandler-style descriptions on every page of his densely wrought tale. Aldo, with his jumpy speech and unexpected thought patterns, offers the perfect vessel for Toltz's most hyperactive passages, a scatter-gun of observations and aphorisms, like a demented form of stand-up comedy. It takes a very good writer to pull off this style but Toltz is superbly capable. Quicksand may be a cry for help, but it's also a scream of triumph.
A new masterpiece that is at once an old-fashioned page-turner, a tragicomic lament for the digital age, and an aching howl at the intractable existential dilemmas of our poor species. Quicksand is the sort of book that refuses to sleep between its covers on your nightstand.
Steve Toltz is a verbal magician and lunatic storyteller. Quicksand is the work of a writer in full command of his many outsized gifts, not least of which is his humanity.
Steve Toltz's Quicksand - narrated by Aldo and Liam, two epic Aussie screw-ups and lifelong best friends - is one of the smartest, funniest, angriest novels I have ever read. But it's also a surprisingly touching meditation on friendship and family, on art and God, on law-breaking and law enforcement.. A brilliant piece of fiction, from a novelist who so clearly sees the outsized pleasures and terrors of our troubled time.
Quicksand crackles with such intensity it made me turn the pages with a harder snap, lean closer, want to gnaw the words. This is a novel of sneak-attack seriousness, so funny it fools you into letting down your guard-then knocks you upside the head with intense intelligence, probing thought, raw pain. For all the wit and wisdom in this book, all the pleasures contained in its raucous, furious, fearless pursuit of truths, the greatest thrill comes when it strikes you that you've never read anything quite like it before, that you just might have stumbled-startlingly, unsettlingly-on something close to genius in the writing of Steve Toltz.
There are more lines of genius on one page of Quicksand than in the entirety of many very respectable novels.
Brilliant, so fizzing with lucidity and comedy and horror and hard-nosed empathy... There is a superfluity of smarts on display. Characters back talk each other like Chinese table tennis champions; aperçus fly like sparks from the angle-grinder of the authorial imagination. Still, there is a feeling edge to all this dazzle, a sense that the torrential flow of wit is a cover for fear of the void....The real parent of 2008's A Fraction of the Whole and this new work is Saul Bellow...[Like] Philip Roth at his angriest and funniest[,] Quicksand is a similarly high-octane read; it recalls and updates the tradition of Jewish-American fiction in the same spirit as Gary Shteyngart or Jonathan Safran Foer....[Aldo Benjamin] is one of those rare characters who will live on in our collective literary imagination.
Steve Toltz's Quicksand proves to be the cherry on the cake - a beguiling novel that confounds and astonishes in equal measure, often on the same page...Part Chuck Palahniuk, part David Foster Wallace,...Quicksand has a thousand dazzling throwaway moments of brilliance.... A tour de force.
What would happen if some genius were able to unite the high-wattage storytelling exuberance of Kurt Vonnegut, the combustive glee of Walt Whitman, and the reality-smashing despair of Franz Kafka? Impossibly, Steve Toltz has done just that, turning out a new masterpiece that is at once an old-fashioned page-turner, a tragicomic lament for the digital age, and an aching howl at the intractable existential dilemmas of our poor species. Quicksand is the sort of book that refuses to sleep between its covers on your nightstand; it is its own blazing, intricate, hysterically surreal universe, big and brilliant enough to swallow your own.
Brilliantly funny