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S'està carregant… Zone One: A Novel (2011 original; edició 2011)de Colson Whitehead
Informació de l'obraZone One de Colson Whitehead (2011)
  
Books Read in 2021 (228) Books Read in 2022 (981) » 13 més No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra.  daplz | Apr 7, 2024 |   BookyMaven | Dec 6, 2023 | *Minor spoiler* Also annoyed that the one tiny innovation Colson introduced was of course a huge plot point at the end — a very obvious Chekhov's gun. (  ) thisisstephenbetts | Nov 25, 2023 |  ) everettroberts | Oct 20, 2023 |  ) lschiff | Sep 24, 2023 |
“Zone One” spares the form’s conventional reliance on summer-movie scares and chase scenes — though there’s plenty of those too — and instead turns an unsparing focus on the dark reality such a world-crumbling plague unleashes. ... At one point, Whitehead compares humanity’s shift to the ravenous undead as self-actualization for the secretly immoral or those too timid to chase their dreams. “I have always been like this,” Whitehead coldly observes in a mob of townspeople-turned-monsters. “Now I’m more me.” ... Linguistically cryptic military diagnoses, the PR churn of the war machine and a merciless city that fed on its own long before its citizens started feeding on one another still endure in Whitehead’s apocalypse, all the way to the bitter end. A literary novelist writing a genre novel is like an intellectual dating a porn star. It invites forgivable prurience: What is that relationship like? ... Colson Whitehead is a literary novelist, but his latest book, “Zone One,” features zombies, which means horror fans and gore gourmands will soon have him on their radar. He has my sympathy. Broad-spectrum marketing will attract readers for whom having to look up “cathected” or “brisant” isn’t just an irritant but a moral affront. These readers will huff and writhe and swear their way through (if they make it through) and feel betrayed and outraged and migrained. But unless they’re entirely beyond the beguilements of art they will also feel fruitfully disturbed, because “Zone One” will have forced them, whether they signed up for it or not, to see the strangeness of the familiar and the familiarity of the strange. ... There will be grumbling from self-appointed aficionados of the undead (Sir, I think the author will find that zombies actually . . .) and we’ll have to listen for another season or two to critics batting around the notion that genre-slumming is a recent trend, but none of that will hurt “Zone One,” which is a cool, thoughtful and, for all its ludic violence, strangely tender novel, a celebration of modernity and a pre-emptive wake for its demise. Cinematic in scope and nimble in its use of hard-core gore, it’s an absorbing read, crammed with thoughtful snapshots of the world the survivors have left behind... The implicit question: Have we all become zombies? Are 21st-century Americans wandering around in a stupor, drinking designer coffee from designer mugs, ordering the same modular sofas from the same big box retailers, standing in trances before copying machines in drab office buildings coast to coast? ... Whitehead’s answer appears to be “yes,” which can be problematic for the novel. As readers, we should be at liberty to mourn a civilization that appears to be gone for good — one with safer homes, loving families and, yes, flat screen TVs. But the book sometimes makes us feel naive, even foolish for courting these feelings, in the same way a smug New Yorker make a non-native feel like a hick. In the endless and in no way tedious debate between lovers of genre and lovers of whatever "literary" fiction is (we can't define it but we know it when we see it), consider this theory: a book is not a song. A book is the performance of a song... Whitehead isn't your usual zombie singer. He never overburdens the zombies with allegory or omits the requisite gore, but he does what all artists do: he observes, closely, and reports back what he sees... Whitehead does have a tendency to overwrite – sentences sometimes grow so rhythmical, you fail to take in their actual meaning as the words wash over you – but he achieves a kind of miracle of tone. A fragile hope permeates these pages, one so painful and tender, it's heartbreaking. From the very opening, Zone One sets itself as a novel about ideas, rather than people. The hallmarks of (recherché) postmodernism are ever present: temporal distortion, metafiction, pastiche, paranoia... This approach may work to great effect elsewhere, yet in a zombie novel, where pace and narrative urgency are of the essence, it falls sadly flat. On the odd occasion that the novel does begin to gain some momentum, the author has a tendency to embark on tiresome digressions which involve but are not limited to groceries, flossing, tog-count and yoga mats. As a result, the narrative shambles along at the pace of an emaciated skel... This is, without doubt, a dense, difficult book. In parts it is amusingly clever, yet it is also guilty of being too clever. The author’s use of temporal distortion, for instance, lacks the necessary control leaving the plot tangled, disoriented, and dull. Pertany a aquestes col·leccions editorialsStile libero [Einaudi] (Big) PremisDistincionsLlistes notables
Fiction.
Horror.
Literature.
Science Fiction.
HTML:In this wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel, a pandemic has devastated the planet. The plague has sorted humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. Now the plague is receding, and Americans are busy rebuilding civilization under orders from the provisional government based in Buffalo. Their top mission: the resettlement of Manhattan. Armed forces have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street??aka Zone One??but pockets of plague-ridden squatters remain. While the army has eliminated the most dangerous of the infected, teams of civilian volunteers are tasked with clearing out a more innocuous variety??the ??malfunctioning? stragglers, who exist in a catatonic state, transfixed by their former lives. Mark Spitz is a member of one of the civilian teams working in lower Manhattan. Alternating between flashbacks of Spitz??s desperate fight for survival during the worst of the outbreak and his present narrative, the novel unfolds over three surreal days, as it depicts the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, and the impossible job of coming to grips with the fallen world. And then things start to go wrong. Both spine chilling and playfully cerebral, Zone One brilliantly subverts the genre??s conventions and deconstructs the zombie myth No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
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 Google Books — S'està carregant…GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana: (3.33)
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This might be the saddest zombie novel I've ever read. Zone One takes the moments of disorientation and loss in most zombie stories -- the empty streets of New York in "Omega Man", or Atlanta in "The Walking Dead" -- and crawls up inside and nests there permanently. Every character cherishes their stories of how it Used To Be. They exchange memories as cautiously as trust.
This isn't a thriller or an action story. It's more like a meditation (or maybe an elegy); time runs forward and back as Mark narrates. The pace is slow, but in the end it worked for me. (