

S'està carregant… The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013)de Neil Gaiman
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And an extra 3-quarter star.... I nearly 'really liked' it. It was nicely written with a lot of heart. The tone seemed a bit lightweight for the substance of fear. Put me in mind of the fears and horrors in Lucy Boston's Green Knowe books but those were very much for children. This seems to fall in a gap between the young and adult. ( ![]() Haunting, beautiful, this novel is childhood!!! So, my very first taste of Neil Gaiman's writing. I found it weird, a bit strange and very odd. Gaiman pulls you in with his descriptive language and I was really curious where this book was going to end up. For me, it felt like reading a Salvador Dali painting. Very melty. That said, I may read Gaiman books again, but they're not at the top of my reading list. :) This is the fourth of Gaiman's I've read, and I've found him a little uneven so far, but this one I liked a lot for its lovely prose and fantastical (but, given the epigraph, almost half believable) story that made me cringe in good ways and bad. I'm quite pleased to've read it. If this book were food, it would be a new take on an old comfort food recipe. Something soothing and familiar, with a few simple, exotic changes that have made the old favorite a delicious and tantalizing treat. For a book that has been labeled as Horror; it was incredibly sweet and lovely. Yes, there is a monster, yes, some bad things do happen, but the whole thing is written with such a coating of Kodachrome pixie-dust nostalgia that you really can't be scared by it. Besides, the book begins with the main character as an adult; so we know he survives this boyhood incident. The main thing I took away from this book: I want to live on the Hempstock Farm. It was very reminiscent of places I have visited in my dreams. Those Hempstock ladies......wow! I want to be them and I simply adore NG's sweet and gentle handling of the Triple Goddess. This book was an extremely fast read and one that I will want to pick up and read again and again. When I return this copy to the public library I'm going to buy a copy for my personal library. Oh, and I must say that NG does love his kitties, which earns him the Pet Lovers Seal of Approval Okay, so there was one small tragedy at the very beginning but......it wasn't gratuitous, it wasn't graphic and it was something that most of us cat lovers have experienced and gotten over. Where he went with the cat theme after that.....was beautiful and I loved it.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane arouses, and satisfies, the expectations of the skilled reader of fairytales, and stories which draw on fairytales. Fairytales, of course, were not invented for children, and deal ferociously with the grim and the bad and the dangerous. But they promise a kind of resolution, and Gaiman keeps this promise. [Gaiman's] mind is a dark fathomless ocean, and every time I sink into it, this world fades, replaced by one far more terrible and beautiful in which I will happily drown. The story is tightly plotted and exciting. Reading it feels a lot like diving into an extremely smart, morally ambiguous fairy tale. And indeed, Gaiman's adult protagonist observes at one point that fairy tales aren't for kids or grownups — they're just stories. In Gaiman's version of the fairy tale, his protagonist's adult and child perspectives are interwoven seamlessly, giving us a sense of how he experienced his past at that time, as well as how it affected him for the rest of his life. Reading Gaiman's new novel, his first for adults since 2005's The Anansi Boys, is like listening to that rare friend whose dreams you actually want to hear about at breakfast. The narrator, an unnamed Brit, has returned to his hometown for a funeral. Drawn to a farm he dimly recalls from his youth, he's flooded with strange memories: of a suicide, the malign forces it unleashed and the three otherworldly females who helped him survive a terrifying odyssey. Gaiman's at his fantasy-master best here—the struggle between a boy and a shape-shifter with "rotting-cloth eyes" moves at a speedy, chilling clip. What distinguishes the book, though, is its evocation of the powerlessness and wonder of childhood, a time when magic seems as likely as any other answer and good stories help us through. "Why didn't adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and ... dangerous fairies?" the hero wonders. Sometimes, they do.
It began for our narrator forty years ago when the family lodger stole their car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed. Dark creatures from beyond the world are on the loose, and it will take everything our narrator has just to stay alive: there is primal horror here, and menace unleashed - within his family and from the forces that have gathered to destroy it. His only defense is three women, on a farm at the end of the lane. The youngest of them claims that her duckpond is ocean. The oldest can remember the Big Bang. No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
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