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Carregando... Lola Benskyde Lily Brett
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Registre-se no LibraryThing tpara descobrir se gostará deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. For this reader in his seventh decade Brett's idea of combining an exploration of the mind of the Holocaust survivor's child with cameos of the pop stars of the flower-child era, is compelling. It has the effect of profound light and shade: the spotlight on the plainly human "stars" contrasted with the blackness of Survivor-life. It worked brilliantly for me. The pace rarely falters and Brett shows great skill in picking things up just as you feel the book's weight. Ich habe das Buch Weihnachten 2012 von meiner Klasse geschenkt bekommen und mich unheimlich darüber gefreut! Zum Lesen bin ich erst jetzt gekommen, zuviel andere Pflichtlektüre... Also: Ich war zwar sehr neugierig auf das Buch - auch, weil es eines ist, das ich mir wahrscheinlich trotzdem selbst nicht gekauft hätte - nicht so ganz mein Thema und der reale und virtuelle Stapel ungelesener Bücher viel zu hoch. Gefangengenommen haben mich dann die Treffen mit den vielen Woodstockstars, die Lola interviewt, oder eigentlich erzählt sie ihnen die Geschichte ihrer Eltern, die das Konzentrationslager überlebt haben- oder irgendwie auch nicht. Lola wird dadurch auch zu einer gerade eben überlebenden, ohne eigentlich zu wissen, was mit ihr los ist. Ihre Äußerungen lassen die Stars auch einen Teil von sich zeigen, was sie menschlich und unkonventionell erscheinen lässt. Ich kann es ja nur vermuten, aber wahrscheinlich bekommt man auch einen Einblick in die jüdische Mentalität, wenn ich das einfach einmal so wenig konkret schreibe, aber in diesem Buch ist viel Stimmung, Empathie und wie es jemanden durchs Leben treiben kann, die das schwierige Erbe ihrer Eltern mitleben muss. Trotz der für mich schon bedrückenden persönlichen Situation - Dicksein, Panikattaken, Sorge um die Mutter - ist das Buch locker und schnell zu lesen, manchmal auch komisch. Vielleicht macht diese Mischung von komisch und tragisch den jüdischen Humor aus. The year is 1967, and young Lola Bensky has arrived in London to interview a series of famous rock stars for Australian magazine Rock-Out. The book opens with Lola and a very gentile Jimi Hendrix chatting about weight and hair curlers, and continues through a series of interviews with superstars like Mick Jagger, Twiggy, and Pete Townshend to name just a few. There’s something rather compelling about Lola’s character. Perhaps it’s her wide-eyed innocence, which doesn't seem to diminish as she gets older, or her weight-obsessed introspection, or her Woody Allen styled neurosis that later becomes a series of phobias. Or maybe it's just the way she openly becomes absorbed with the most domestic aspects of her famous subject’s lives. They clearly think so too. Jimi Hendrix invites her over to his place to see him in his hair curlers. Mick Jagger offers her a cup of tea and later phones her to invite her over to meet Paul McCartney. Janice Joplin confides in Lola that she was a fat, pimply misfit as a teenager, and reassures her that she’s nowhere near as big as Mama Cass. The story is told in several parts, moving through key timeframes in Lola’s life. It begins in London with Lola at nineteen. Then moves to New York the following year. The next section moves to Melbourne when Lola is married to "Mr Former Rock Star" and beginning to become seriously agoraphobic. Then we move forward in time to Lola at fifty-one, a successful author in New York with her second husband, "Mr Someone Else". The following chapter goes back in time to Lola’s 20th year at the Monterey International Pop Festival, and the book ends with Lola in the New York City of the present – at sixty-three years of age. Though Brett is adamant that the books she calls fiction are indeed fictional, she has also admitted that Lola Bensky follows her ‘real life’ experiences pretty closely, from the protagonists initials through to how she looks, and the interviews she conducted as a young journalist during the sixties. Reading the book you get the definite sensation that you’re experiencing a unique insight into rock stars like Hendrix, Cher, Mama Cass, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Pete Townsend and Mick Jagger. Hendrix, Cher, Joplin, and Jagger come across very well indeed – presenting a warm, thoughtful, and surprisingly sane image through the pages of this book. Jim Morrison and Pete Townsend in particular come across as odious: unpleasant, immature, and twisted. Reading Lola’s responses to these people, and her own sense of herself as a young Jew, and of course, as is always the case in Brett’s book, her sense of what it means to be the child of Holocaust survivors, is fascinating. That these famous people also respond to Lola’s experiences as much as she responds to theirs, adds to the power of this story. But there is always something a little detached about Lola, even as she sweats through heavy makeup and tight fishnet stockings, panics about going outside, plans yet another diet, or worries about her parents dying. We never really get under her skin. She keeps the reader at arm’s length by telling us how she feels rather than showing us: Lola felt bad. She couldn’t beleive Renia’s response to the news that she was leaving the man who, Lola thought, Renia had possibly, initially, hoped she would not marry. She really hoped that her mother wasn’t wishing she had died in Auschwitz. (130) The result is an odd deadpan quality. However, it doesn’t hurt the novel. Instead Lola comes across as droll, peppering her slightly naive demeanour with rather intense and poetic observations about her parents’ pain: For Renia, the future had changed. Overnight. It had spun on its axis and cracked and crazed adn fractured. It was split into pieces with fissures and chinks and splinters. Overnight, everything had changed. One minute Renia was a beautiful and studious teenager. The next minute she was, like all the other Jews of Lodz, a bedraggled prisoner, imprisoned in a universe bereft of sustenance of almost every sort. (166) The same quiet, almost detached insights apply to her perception of the rock stars she meets. Lola isn’t dazzled or even excited by them. Instead she gives us a very down-to-earth picture of interviewees such as Brian Jones, who is so stoned that when she asks him whether he thinks the world is changing, he checks his pockets and indicates that he doesn’t have any spare change. Then he promptly nods out. She’s proud of Cher, even though she never gets back the rhinestone encrusted false eyelashes Cher borrowed. Lola wonders whether John Weider’s parents minded him being in a rock band. She argues with Mama Cass about who is fatter. Overall, Lola Bensky is a funny, easy to read novel, which conceals its pithy story about healing and transformation in funky fashion, rock and roll gossip, and a great deal of verve. Article first published as Book Review: Lola Bensky by Lily Brett on Blogcritics. sem resenhas | adicionar uma resenha
Lola Bensky is a nineteen-year-old rock journalist who irons her hair straight and asks a lot of questions. A high-school dropout, she is not sure how she got the job - but she has been sent by her Australian newspaper right to the heart of the London music scene at the most exciting time in music history: 1967. Lola spends her days planning diets and interviewing rock stars. In London, Mick Jagger makes her a cup of tea, Jimi Hendrix propositions her and Cher borrows her false eyelashes. At the Monterey International Pop Festival, Lola props up Brian Jones and talks to Janis Joplin about sex. In Los Angeles, she discusses being overweight with Mama Cass and tries to pluck up the courage to ask Cher to return those false eyelashes. Lola has an irrepressible curiosity, but she begins to wonder whether the questions she asks these extraordinary young musicians are really a substitute for questions about her parents' calamitous past that cannot be asked or answered. As Lola moves on through marriage, motherhood, psychoanalysis and a close relationship with an unexpected pair of detectives, she discovers the question of what it means to be human is the hardest one for anyone to answer. Drawing on her own experiences as a young journalist, the author has created an unforgettable character in the unconventional and courageous Lola. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Google Books — Carregando... GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Classificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
É você?Torne-se um autor do LibraryThing. Penguin Australia2 edições deste livro foram publicadas por Penguin Australia. Edições: 1926428471, 0143569198 |
Das ist in Kürze zusammengefasst der Inhalt des Buches. Wie immer bei Lily Brett beschreibt er im Endeffekt ihr eigenes Leben, das Aufwachsen mit den traumatisierten Eltern, das Sich-Befreien daraus. Ich lese Lily Brett gern, aber da in jedem Buch ziemlich das gleiche steht, schrumpft meine Motivation immer mehr. Die Konstruktion dieses Buches überzeugt mich nicht. Auf der einen Seite stehen die vielen Gespräche mit den Rockgrößen der 1970er, von denen ein Großteil nicht lange lebt. Lola ist offensichtlich eine gute Journalistin, obwohl sie selbst eigentlich nur zwei Themen kennt: das Schicksal ihrer Eltern und ihre Körperfülle. Auf der anderen Seite ist dann Lola als erwachsene Frau. Sie hat Therapien gemacht, lebt wie ihr Vater Edek in New York, ist glücklich verheiratet und hat drei Kinder. Zudem ist sie endlich schlank. Selbst Mick Jagger goutiert am Ende, dass sie sich gut rausgemacht hat. Mir ist wirklich unklar, was Lily Bertt mit dieser Verknüpfung zu den 1970ern sagen will. Vll. hätte sich Lily Brett lieber nur auf Lola als Journalistin beschränken sollen und den Bezug zu ihrer Geschichte und ihrer Figur weglassen können. ( )