This Is Happiness
Autor Niall Williamsen Limba Engleză Hardback – 3 dec 2019
Cum ne putem agăța de o lume care se stinge chiar sub ochii noștri, lăsând loc inevitabilului progres? În This Is Happiness, Niall Williams ne transportă în satul Faha, un loc unde ploaia nu este un fenomen meteorologic, ci o condiție a existenței. Considerăm că forța acestui roman rezidă în capacitatea autorului de a surprinde acel moment suspendat în care vechile tradiții se întâlnesc cu promisiunea electricității. Narațiunea este condusă de Noel Crowe, care, la șaptesprezece ani, asistă la sosirea lui Christy, un personaj venit să-și ispășească o iubire veche, declanșând o serie de reflecții despre memorie și fericire.
Observăm un stil de o finețe rară, unde descrierile senzoriale — cum este tăcerea care urmează după oprirea ploii — devin aproape palpabile. Ritmul narativ amintește de Niamh Campbell în This Happy prin explorarea nuanțată a intimității, dar structura lui Williams este mult mai ancorată în spiritul comunitar și în melancolia peisajului irlandez. Dacă în Boy and Man autorul explora incertitudinea dispariției, aici el alege să fixeze în pagină certitudinea schimbării ireversibile. Merită menționat că această operă continuă preocuparea scriitorului pentru legătura dintre om și mediul său, temă centrală și în History of the Rain, însă This Is Happiness oferă o perspectivă mai luminoasă, un omagiu adus bucuriilor mărunte care alcătuiesc textura vieții. Este o proză care nu se grăbește, invitând cititorul la o contemplare profundă a modului în care poveștile ne scriu și ne rescriu identitatea.
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Specificații
ISBN-10: 163557420X
Pagini: 400
Dimensiuni: 168 x 243 x 35 mm
Greutate: 0.69 kg
Editura: Bloomsbury USA
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De ce să citești această carte
Recomandăm această carte celor care apreciază proza contemplativă și atmosfera satului irlandez de la mijlocul secolului XX. Cititorul câștigă o meditație superbă despre trecerea timpului și valoarea amintirilor într-o lume în continuă schimbare. Este un roman ideal pentru cei care vor să descopere cum simplitatea unei vieți rurale poate ascunde profunzimi filosofice și emoționale remarcabile, totul sub semnătura unui maestru al limbajului.
Despre autor
Niall Williams, născut în Dublin în 1958, este un scriitor irlandez de renume, a cărui operă a fost nominalizată la premii prestigioase precum Man Booker Prize și IMPAC Award. După studii de literatură la University College Dublin, s-a mutat la New York, unde a lucrat în domeniul editorial înainte de a se dedica scrisului și de a se retrage în comitatul Clare. Succesul său internațional a început cu romanul Four Letters Of Love, recent adaptat pentru cinematografie. În lucrările sale, Williams explorează adesea teme legate de familie, credință și peisajul rural, fiind considerat una dintre cele mai rafinate voci ale literaturii irlandeze contemporane.
Descriere scurtă
You don't see rain stop, but you sense it. You sense something has changed in the frequency you've been living and you hear the quietness you thought was silence get quieter still, and you raise your head so your eyes can make sense of what your ears have already told you, which at first is only: something has changed.
The rain is stopping. Nobody in the small, forgotten village of Faha remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard was a condition of living. Now--just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of electricity--it is stopping. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is standing outside his grandparents' house shortly after the rain has stopped when he encounters Christy for the first time. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed.
This is the story of all that was to follow: Christy's long-lost love and why he had come to Faha, Noel's own experiences falling in and out of love, and the endlessly postponed arrival of electricity--a development that, once complete, would leave behind a world that had not changed for centuries.
Niall Williams' latest novel is an intricately observed portrait of a community, its idiosyncrasies and its traditions, its paradoxes and its inanities, its failures and its triumphs. Luminous and otherworldly, and yet anchored with deep-running roots into the earthy and the everyday, This Is Happiness is about stories as the very stuff of life: the ways they make the texture and matter of our world, and the ways they write and rewrite us.
Descriere
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BEST NOVEL IN THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 WALTER SCOTT PRIZE
By the author of Four Letters of Love, the international bestseller now a major film starring Helena Bonham Carter and Pierce Brosnan
'I love this book so passionately' Ann Patchett
'Lyrical, tender and sumptuously perceptive' Sunday Times
After dropping out of the seminary, seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe finds himself back in Faha, a small Irish parish where nothing ever changes, including the ever-falling rain.
But one morning the rain stops and news reaches the parish - electricity is finally arriving. With it comes a lodger to Noel's home, Christy McMahon. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed.
As Noel navigates his coming-of-age, Christy's buried past gradually comes to light, casting a glow on a small world and making it new.
'If you're craving a novel of delicate wit laced with rare insight, this, truly, is happiness' Washington Post
'Written with a turn of phrase that makes the reader want to underline something on every page'
Financial Times
'What makes this so compelling and enjoyable is Williams's transparent love of his characters and delight in his setting' Observer
Recenzii
Charming is one word for Williams' prose. It is also life-affirming and written with a turn of phrase that makes the reader want to underline something on every page. I suggest we all buy his books, pushing him into that realm of globally fashionable Irish writers, but more importantly, sharing with a vast audience his humane and poetic world view
Williams has the eye of a poet and the raconteur's knack for finding a tale in the most unpromising nook of everyday life, as a now-adult Noel, summoning the Faha of his nostalgic imagination, narrates an elegiac novel that's careful always to offset the antic rural eccentricity with darker notes of loss
This is Happiness returns to the beguiling gloom of Faha . [A] wise and redemptive novel . It dares, in addition, to be wildly comic . With his silver ear for speech and extreme attentiveness to the Heaneyesque "music of everyday", Mr Williams treads softly on the dreams of youth and memories of old age
Lovingly written, the text is brimming with humanity, truth and humour - and then there's the pitch perfect language, with not a word out of place . Magnificent
Sharp as a tack, bright as a button, and engorged with rich humour, this is a love letter to the sleepy, unhurried and delightfully odd Ireland that is all but gone
A surge of language, beautiful and enchanting, a novel that weaves a love of literature into its own moving tale
Extremely moving, poignantly capturing Ruth's doomed childhood relationship with her twin brother. By the final chapter I was weeping
Deeply allusive, infectiously hopeful . Somewhere between bildungsroman, epic and family saga, History of the Rain is an unashamedly unfashionable, lyrical paean to the pleasure of reading and to serendipity
A delicate and graceful love story that is also an exaltation of love itself . . . A luminously written, magical work of fiction
A book that I am rereading in an attempt to figure out the magic and calm my soul