The Bell Tolls for No One
Autor Charles Bukowski Editat de David Stephen Calonneen Limba Engleză Paperback – 28 iul 2015
Imaginați-vă un birou ticsit de hârțoage în 1947, unde un tânăr de douăzeci și șapte de ani, încă necunoscut lumii literare, schițează primele sale desene grotești pe marginea unor manuscrise ce aveau să rămână ascunse decenii la rând. Aceasta este poarta de intrare în The Bell Tolls for No One, o colecție care recuperează resturile vitale ale celui mai faimos „bătrân murdar” al literaturii americane. Subliniem caracterul brut al acestor texte: nu sunt finisate pentru saloane literare, ci păstrează mirosul de cerneală ieftină și fum de țigară al revistelor pulp în care Charles Bukowski și-a rafinat vocea. Notăm cu interes modul în care volumul, îngrijit de David Stephen Calonne, alternează între povestiri de gen riguroase și acea confesiune viscerală, semi-autobiografică, ce a devenit marca sa înregistrată. Putem afirma că această antologie funcționează ca o hartă a evoluției sale: de la exercițiile de stil hardboiled din anii '40 până la textele tăioase și cinice din anii '80. Imaginați-vă tensiunea socială și mizeria umană din Tales of Ordinary Madness, mutată într-un decor de revistă underground, unde granița dintre autor și personajul său, Henry Chinaski, devine aproape invizibilă. Spre deosebire de tonul ceva mai blând din The Roominghouse Madrigals sau reflecțiile despre celebritate din Hollywood, aici găsim un Bukowski nefiltrat, care transformă eșecul cotidian într-o formă de artă absurdă. Ritmul este sacadat, marcat de capitole scurte care lovesc precum o succesiune de reprize de box, lăsând cititorului doar timpul necesar pentru a procesa o glumă amară înainte de următoarea scenă de o onestitate brutală.
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Specificații
ISBN-10: 0872866823
Pagini: 305
Ilustrații: B&W illustrations throughout
Dimensiuni: 108 x 177 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.24 kg
Editura: City Lights Publishers
De ce să citești această carte
Recomandăm această colecție celor care doresc să descopere geneza mitului Bukowski. Cititorul câștigă acces la piese rare, ilustrate chiar de autor, care completează portretul unui scriitor ce a refuzat mereu conformismul. Este o lectură esențială pentru fanii Tales of Ordinary Madness care vor să vadă cum „diamantele” literare ale lui Bukowski au fost șlefuite în paginile revistelor de consum, oferind o perspectivă unică asupra subculturii americane de secol XX.
Despre autor
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) a fost un poet, romancier și nuvelist american de origine germană, a cărui operă este indisolubil legată de peisajul social și economic al orașului Los Angeles. Considerat „regele underground-ului”, Bukowski a scris mii de poeme și sute de povestiri, publicând peste 60 de cărți care explorează viața americanilor săraci, abuzul de alcool și absurdul existenței cotidiene. Stilul său direct și adesea scandalos i-a adus o monitorizare atentă din partea FBI, dar și o loialitate neclintită din partea micilor edituri și a unui public internațional imens. A rămas fidel esteticii sale viscerale până la moartea sa în San Pedro, California.
Recenzii
“Bukowski’s world is hostile, full of runaway dysfunction, and populated by alcoholics, gamblers, adulterers, and abusers, all with few, if any, redeeming qualities ... It is Bukowski’s embrace of this world, his insistence on its validity if not its value, that makes him unique ... Bukowski can be honest and direct, and he is capable of embedding meaningful observations in the most sordid of stories."—Publishers Weekly
Bukowski’s The Bell Tolls for No One, recently released in a comic-book-like paperback, follows the hardboiled genre bent that reached its surreal apotheosis in his final novel, Pulp. The obvious influence is to Hemingway—see: the title—but perhaps more interestingly, the editor David Stephen Calonne notes Bukowski’s debt to the crime writer James M. Cain, who had also, unbeknownst to me, shaped the style of Camus’s The Stranger. The book includes some of Bukowski’s roughly drawn illustrations, which fall somewhere close to pornographic Ziggy or adult-themed New Yorker cartoons. One features an asthmatic customer at an adult bookstore asking the cashier to inflate his blow-up doll for him; another shows an expressionistically drawn party girl surrounded by gawking men with the caption 'God, a woman could get bored.' The subject matter is a more amplified version of the usual Bukowski fare—stalwart, sleazebag protagonists; spectral, deathly women with emphatically described upper legs. As always, the most one can hope for in Bukowski’s universe is 'a grim yet comfortable isolation.'"—Casey Henry, The Paris Review
"Like Robert Crumb, whose art appears on the cover of The Bell Tolls For No One, Charles Bukowski represents a kind of brazenly counterculture spirit that holds in contempt anything that represents the Establishment. Read in this light, this newest compilation can be viewed as more than the self-admitted 'notes of a dirty old man,' but as the further works of an iconoclast who, much like the underground comics artists and punk rock bands of the late ‘70s, waged war against all that was supposedly ‘decent' and conventional for the sake of getting at the grit of human experience.”—ZYZZYVA
These are tales from the lower class and underclass, in all their glorious craziness and absurdity. It’s not pretty, and yet, somehow, there is joy in reading these stories, and somehow too, Bukowski ends up being a good buddhist, finding the larger beauty in these dismal lives … [For those] who already love Buk, this book will leave content, drunk, smiles on our faces.”—Entropy Magazine
Notă biografică
Bukowski published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. His first book of poetry was published in 1959; he went on to publish more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including Pulp (Black Sparrow, 1994), Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970 (1993), and The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992). He died of leukemia in San Pedro on March 9, 1994.
David Stephen Calonne was born in Los Angeles in 1953. He earned a B.A. in Ancient Greek from UCLA and a doctorate in English at the University of Texas at Austin where he wrote his dissertation on the works of William Saroyan. He has written several other books on writers including Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski. A new critical study of Miller will appear from Reaktion Press in London in September of 2014. He is the editor of three volumes of Bukowski's uncollected prose for City Lights. He has lectured in Paris, at Columbia University, Penn, Berkeley, Harvard, and Oxford.
Descriere
Previously uncollected pulp fiction by the 20th century American master.
"The uncollected gutbucket ramblings of the grand dirty old man of Los Angeles letters have been gathered in this characteristically filthy, funny compilation ... Bukowkski's gift was a sense for the raunchy absurdity of life, his writing a grumble that might turn into a belly laugh or a racking cough but that always throbbed with vital energy."—Kirkus Reviews
From the self-illustrated, unpublished work written in 1947 to hardboiled contributions to 1980s adult magazines, The Bells Tolls for No One presents the entire range of Bukowski's talent as a short story writer, from straight-up genre stories to postmodern blurring of fact and fiction. An informative introduction by editor David Stephen Calonne provides historical context for these seemingly scandalous and chaotic tales, revealing the hidden hand of the master at the top of his form.
Born in Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, Charles Bukowski published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. His first book of poetry was published in 1959; he would eventually publish more than forty-five books of poetry and prose. He died of leukemia in San Pedro, California on March 9, 1994.
David Stephen Calonne is the author of several books and has edited three previous collections of the uncollected work of Charles Bukowski for City Lights: Absence of the Hero, Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook, and More Notes of a Dirty Old Man.