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The Vices de Lawrence Douglas

The Vices

Autor Lawrence Douglas
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 16 aug 2011

La suprafață, The Vices pare a fi un exercițiu detectivistic clasic despre dispariția unui intelectual de pe o navă de croazieră. Totuși, sub stratul de mister, descoperim o explorare metafizică a identității și a modului în care trecutul colectiv al Europei se infiltrează în destinele individuale. Reținem aici o voce narativă care, deși încearcă să elucideze viața lui Oliver Vice, ajunge să se descompună sub greutatea propriilor obsesii. Găsim în acest text un echilibru fragil între umorul negru și melancolia profundă, pe măsură ce călătorim din New York la Budapesta și Lisabona pentru a dezgropa secretele unei familii marcate de traume istorice. Pe același raft cu Fra Keeler de Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, unde investigația morții altuia devine o spirală a propriei introspecții, The Vices se distinge prin rigoarea sa intelectuală și prin modul în care integrează expertiza autorului în domeniul dreptului și al istoriei. Dacă în lucrări academice precum Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice sau în eseul politic Will He Go?, Lawrence Douglas analizează fragilitatea sistemelor democratice și a legii, în acest roman el transpunere aceste preocupări într-o sferă intimă. Cartea chestionează dacă putem scăpa vreodată de „viciile” moștenite sau dacă suntem condamnați să repetăm erorile celor care ne-au precedat, totul într-un stil care amintește de precizia și ironia lui Nabokov.

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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9781590514153
ISBN-10: 1590514157
Pagini: 352
Dimensiuni: 141 x 211 x 19 mm
Greutate: 0.38 kg
Editura: Other Press (NY)

De ce să citești această carte

Recomandăm această carte cititorilor care caută o proză densă, cu valențe filosofice și un umor fin. The Vices nu oferă doar un mister de rezolvat, ci o reflecție asupra modului în care istoria se ascunde în obiecte de artă și în amintiri deformate. Este o lectură recompensatoare pentru cei care apreciază romanele în care atmosfera și construcția psihologică sunt la fel de importante ca intriga propriu-zisă.

Despre autor

Lawrence Douglas este profesor de drept, jurisprudență și gândire socială la Amherst College, unde deține catedra James J. Grosfeld. Expertiza sa vastă în procesele Holocaustului și în justiția tranzitională se reflectă în precizia cu care analizează dilemele morale în scrierile sale. Pe lângă cariera academică, este un eseist prolific pentru publicații de prestigiu precum „The New Yorker” și „Harper's”. Opera sa literară îmbină cunoștințele juridice cu o sensibilitate estetică rară, transformând fapte istorice și concepte abstracte în narațiuni umane profunde.

Notă biografică

Lawrence Douglas teaches at Amherst College. He is the author of the novel The Catastrophist (Other Press, 2006), a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, The Memory of Judgment (Yale University Press, 2001), a widely acclaimed study of war crimes trials; and coauthor of a book of humor, Sense and Nonsensibility (Simon & Schuster, 2004). His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, The Hudson Review, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, and Harper’s. A regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, Douglas lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts.

Extras

By the time we made it to the parking lot, we’d taken tentative strides toward sobriety. Winter in the past day had snuck up on us. I squinted into the sunlight, dagger sharp and empty of heat. A wicked wind made swirls and eddies of dust and cigarette butts. Oliver thrust his hands deeper into his pockets and bunched his shoulders, but his coat remained unzipped. He looked at me; his eyes, behind the formidable newscaster’s glasses, were tearing from the cold. A blast of wind made him nearly swallow his words. “Did I tell you that I was recently dumped by my therapist?”
   I shook my head, suppressing a shiver.
   “I started seeing him about two years ago, when Sophia and I got involved. He’s really an excellent therapist, smart and insightful, a dead ringer for Gene Wilder. But gradually he became so fed up with my endless frantic rehashing of the same problems, so dispirited by my compulsive tendency to seek advice which I then ignore or declare myself incapable of implementing, so perplexed by my penchant for self-examination without profitable end, and so alarmed by my inability or refusal to restrain my thoughts, which overheat and go nowhere, like
bats flapping around a closed attic, that he recently began a session with the simple declaration, ‘I don’t think I’m helping you. I don’t think I’m capable of helping you.’ He apologized and we shook hands; I even tried to cheer him up—he did as good as job as anybody could have…”
Oliver smiled wanly and pointed a single finger toward his temple, not pistol-like, but as one might to a curious artifact in a museum: “Sick.”

Descriere scurtă

Oliver Vice, forty-one, prominent philosopher, scholar, and art collector, is missing and presumed dead, over the side of Queen Mary 2.Troubled by his friend’s possible suicide, the unnamed narrator of Lawrence Douglas’ new novel launches an all-consuming investigation into Vice’s life history. Douglas, moving backward through time, tells a mordantly humorous story of fascination turned obsession, as his narrator peels back the layers of the Vice family’s rich and bizarre history. At the heart of the family are Francizka, Oliver’s handsome, overbearing, vaguely anti-Semitic Hungarian mother, and his fraternal twin brother, Bartholomew, a gigantic and troubled young man with a morbid interest in Europe’s great tyrants. As the narrator finds himself drawn into a battle over the family’s money and art, he comes to sense that someone—or perhaps the entire family—is hiding an unsavory past. Pursuing the truth from New York to London, from Budapest to Portugal, he remains oblivious to the irony of the search: that in his need to understand Vice’s life, he is really grappling with ambivalence about his own.

Recenzii

“The second novel by Lawrence Douglas gave me delight on every page. I’m always careful about calling something Nabokovian, mostly because I’ll see that in a review and read the book in question and it’s fine but not as good as Nabokov, you know? But this one is Nabokovian—there is no other word.” —Ed Park, New York Magazine, “The Year in Books”

“The Vices…is the sharp, stylish, suspenseful tale of Oliver Vice, a charismatic philosopher and art collector, and the provincial academic who falls under his spell. More than a campus novel, it is an elegant parable about the allure of self-invention.” —Adam Kirsch, The New Statesman, “Books of the year 2011”

“Playful and profound…As dazzlingly constructed as it is limpidly told, The Vices is a duplicitous delight that feels at home in this age of YouTube, e-mail, and the myriad other ways we consume and connect in this world…Lawrence Douglas gives conclusive evidence that he’s the real thing.” —Ed Park, Bookforum

“Smart...always fascinating...The novel’s biggest concern is how we construct personal narratives that accommodate slippery and unsteady acts of memory.” — A.P.D. Lawrie, Times Literary Supplement

“In its deft exploration of the way identity, especially Jewish identity, is constructed and performed, The Vices does justice to its elegant Nabokovian inspiration.” —Adam Kirsch, Tablet Magazine
 
“A good summer read…Making literal the phrase ‘literary sleuthing,’ [The Vices] combines the genres of academic and mystery novel.” —The Buffalo News

“Douglas delivers a probing and skillful examination of the conundrums of identity…masterfully kaleidoscopic…[The Vices] presents the reader with a stunning new vista.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“An intriguing, thought-provoking exploration of a man desperately unhappy to be living his own life.” —Booklist
 
“Darkly comic…[Douglas] masterly crafts a family portrait, where the paint has cracked to reveal human truths.” —Royal Young, InterviewMagazine.com

“Douglas elaborates on the inherent tensions that make up the contested borders of identity…This mystery is deceptively philosophical and introspective.” —Library Journal

 “This brilliant, funny book will appeal to lovers of Jewish fiction and those who hunger to unravel mysteries.” —ForeWord Reviews

“At its core a mystery, The Vices is a witty, provocative, and devilishly entertaining book. Sometimes philosophical, sometimes wildly comic, Lawrence Douglas’s latest novel plays yearning against satisfaction, prestige against authenticity, and, ultimately, the desire to be someone else against the difficulty of inhabiting self.” —Sabina Murray, author of The Caprices and Forgery

“Though The Vices unfolds the complexity of its whodunit with an appealing urbanity and wryness, its central virtue is the compassionate intelligence of its depiction of pain: the anguish and secret costs of self-reinvention, and in the face of history’s miseries and deceits, the unexpected consolations of uncertainty.” —Jim Shepard, author of Like You’d Understand, Anyway
 
“Crisply told and vigorously compelling. Douglas’s bright sense of humor camouflages but does not ultimately conceal his haunting story’s menacing undertow.” —Brad Leithauser, author of The Art Student’s War

“Charming and exquisite, The Vices is an urbane comedy imbued with the eccentric verve of a Wes Anderson film and the piquant nostalgia of Brideshead Revisted.  It’s also a gripping tale of fraud, compromise, and the inventive ways we survive the nightmare of history.” —Zachary Lazar, author of Sway

“A sparkling, witty, smart-set comedy, the kind where human tragedy is best faced with sexy repartee, fine cuff links, and a game of Ping-Pong.” –Commonwealth Magazine