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S'està carregant… The Doomed City (Rediscovered Classics) (1989 original; edició 2016)de Arkady Strugatsky (Autor), Boris Strugatsky (Autor), Andrew Bromfield (Traductor), Dmitry Glukhovsky (Pròleg)
Informació de l'obraThe Doomed City de Arkady Strugatsky (1989)
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. La ciudad se extiende en una franja limitada al este con un muro que cubre el horizonte y al oeste con un abismo insondable. Nadie sabe desde cuándo existe y sus habitantes, procedentes de distintas épocas y culturas, han resucitado en ella después de morir. Al sur se hallan los cultivos que la alimentan y al norte los yermos que, según cuentan, ocultan la anticiudad. "The Experiment is the Experiment." The Doomed City is an exceptional work of storytelling. The Strugatskys are able to bend allegory into narrative and vice versa so that one never tires of an overwrought political message. I liked the fluid dialogue and easy scene transitions but most of all I thought the novel's structure was masterful. I just finished so I'll have to think about its implications but I was struck by the final moments of the story. I'll say this about the Strugatsky Brothers: They had *fearless* imaginations, tempered by fearful souls that quailed before publishing this nihilistic, absurdist, deeply subversive book in Soviet Russia. Completed in 1972, shelved until 1989, and published in a professional English translation only in 2016, this stateless satirical look at the amoral roots of True Belief in a System reads as well in 45's Amurruhkuh as it did in Brezhnev's USSR. Voronin, our astronomer-turned-state-official, is an ideal. He is every system's beloved child, the True Believer who makes excuses and finds reasons instead of asking, "...the fuck...? Are they kidding with this?" As experience teaches him to question, he sidesteps. He changes his beliefs without batting an eyelash, a clue to his essential hollowness. For all that he is an eager participant in all the City's shifts of philosophical direction, the reason he can do so remains unexamined: He's complicit in the acts of the State, not driven by a desire to enact a Vision. His lack of an inner compass is rather amusing given that almost the entire novel is an internal monologue. I myownself found this a delightful twist, enjoying the musings of a centerless man as irony. Others might find that conceit wearing. The things I found wearing were the astoundingly sexist and anti-Semitic attitudes of the characters (and, I suspect, the authors as well). There are horrible words used in connection with the two women I can recall at all...they might indeed have been the only two women mentioned, for I can summon no other woman to mind...and Katzman's presence in stereotypical fashion was not obviously played for ironic effect. Given my track record for objecting to these facets of other older books, why am I giving this one the Full Five? Because, my friends, the story of a city between an unscalable wall and an endless abyss recommends itself to me as a parable for all of human life, and the awful attitudes of the PoV character are part and parcel of the falling, failing world that the Strugatskys were lampooning, dissecting, parodying, itemizing. These facets seem to me, even though I suspect and believe they were presented unironically, to be so much of a piece with the Experiment being ridiculed that I could easily make them objects of fun. Nonetheless they are there and merit mention lest an unsuspecting reader trip over them and feel blindsided. Boris Strugatsky, in his Afterword, says it all and best: How to live in conditions of ideological vacuum? How and what for? In my opinion this question remains highly relevant even today—which is why City, despite being so vehemently politicized and so categorically of its own time, potentially remains of interest to the present-day reader—provided that this reader has any interest at all in problems of this kind.
The brothers immerse themselves in a Kafkaesque exploration here, composing a text that is both unequivocally satirical and seriously philosophical. (...) Russian-Jewish masterpiece, whose publication in English constitutes a long-awaited event. Pertany a aquestes col·leccions editorialsSF Masterworks (New design) Sündmuste horisont (31) 群像社ライブラリー (3) PremisLlistes notables
"The Doomed City is set in an experimental city whose sun gets switched on in the morning and switched off at night, bordered by an abyss on one side and an impossibly high wall on the other. Its inhabitants are people who were plucked from twentieth-century history at various times and places and left to govern themselves, advised by Mentors whose purpose seems inscrutable. Andrei Voronin, a young astronomer plucked from Leningrad in the 1950s, is a die-hard believer in the Experiment, even though his first job in the city is as a garbage collector. And as increasingly nightmarish scenarios begin to affect the city, he rises through the political hierarchy, with devastating effect" -- No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — S'està carregant… GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)891.73Literature Literature of other languages Literature of east Indo-European and Celtic languages Russian and East Slavic languages Russian fictionLCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana:
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