Clica una miniatura per anar a Google Books.
S'està carregant… The Mercy Room (2003)de Gilles Rozier
Cap S'està carregant…
Apunta't a LibraryThing per saber si aquest llibre et pot agradar. No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra. Novel of illicit love set in occupied France during WWII. Strains to be tittilating and risque but in fact it hardly maintains the reader's Interest. The problem here is that we know so little about the characters that it's all but impossible to care about them. Treated differently, this tragic tale of obsession could have been much more compelling. While I recognize the homosexual/heterosexual ambiguity in the text, and while reading the text this ambiguity seems to work well, I think analysis of it as a separate issue can lead one to lose track of a larger theme it supports. I believe that a major theme is the ambiguity that comes during an occupation and genocide, and it is shown in how it muddles up categories in relationships: lover/prisoner, homosexual/heterosexual, family member/spy, lover/enemy, etc. I believe there is a larger point about the devastating effects of genocide on everyone, but I don’t grasp it completely. Perhaps one can’t grasp it without living through it, and the feeling of not grasping it is the point. This book makes me look forward to reading more of Rozier’s work.
An exquisite novel about love, faith and the transforming power of language. With a passion for the limpid, crystalline prose of the great German writers, the narrator of Gilles Rozier's sublime novel lives, in other respects, on the fringes of life. A tutor in occupied France, it is the conjugation of verbs rather than the mystery of conjugal relations that comes naturally. Marriage was a duty. Language is a passion. But not, even remotely, the living language of love. That exists only in the literature devoured in the basement; the forbidden volumes of Heine, Mann and Rilke. Then Herman appears, awakening desire of the deepest sort. Impelled by adolescent memories, the narrator saves him, a Polish Jew, from the Germans. Hidden with the other secret, buried passions in the basement, Herman also shares them, unexpectedly devouring the literature of love. And so develops an extraordinary and shattering affair within which two bodies and two antagonistic languages, Yiddish and German, are magnetically attracted. Sparely told, compelling, and both morally precise and uncertain, Gilles Rozier's novel invites comparison with Bernhard Schlink's The Reader. An achingly beautiful exercise in emotional intelligence, it sees its protagonists wrestle with collective guilt, individual motivation and the power of words - words that are written, spoken and left unsaid. No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
Debats actualsCapCobertes populars
Google Books — S'està carregant… GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)843.92Literature French French fiction Modern Period 21st CenturyLCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana:
Ets tu?Fes-te Autor del LibraryThing. |
the issue of gender is unfortunately more of a party trick than a genuine, thought-provoking issue being tackled. the beginning of the book i felt that rozier seemed to be trying to write a woman main character but was doing it poorly, so so poorly, because the character felt so male but the author kept throwing things in that were supposed to make a reader think the character was female. i think, though, that his point is supposed to be that the main character is male, and the spouse (gender also unspecified, but assumed to be male) is female. leading to the shock, i guess, of the relationship between the unnamed male main character and herman. (why else make it theoretically ambiguous?) so he wasn't writing a woman badly after all. except that there are so many things that make it so unlikely that the character is male. in the end then probably, rozier wasn't writing a woman poorly, he was writing the "trick" poorly. it's just not well done or believable, and would have been far stronger a book and a story without the vagueness, which there really is no reason for. (for an example of writing a genderless narrator actually well, see jeanette winterson's gorgeous written on the body. not this book.)
there is something lovely in this book, but it's not the "genderless" narrator aspect, at all. it's the living through war (specifically the holocaust and so add in issues of anti-semitism and discrimination, plus german vs yiddish language) and every day morality in that situation, and maybe how you deceive yourself into thinking that your morality exists or is excusable. ( )