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Carregando... Dissident Gardens (2013)de Jonathan Lethem
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Registre-se no LibraryThing tpara descobrir se gostará deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. Much of it was a slog. I didn't care about the characters until the last 20%. I love flashy writing, but much of the writing was off-puttingly obtuse. By the end, I did appreciate the thread that was woven through the generations. ( ) Remarkable...stunning...written by a true master, Dissident Gardens takes the reader on journey filled with triumph,disaster, family, Communism, and much more through the eyes of an array of characters unrivaled. As with most stories Lethem writes, this takes place in the Bronx, NY and surrounding areas. Lethem is gifted in his ability to create stories that vary from one book to the next, as do the characters, a trait of a master storyteller. This the fourth book of his I read, and when I think one is a favorite, the next one immediately replaces it. In some ways I feel this one is worthy of a Pulitzer if for no other reason than the breadth of story, and rich characters..Outstanding! So I like Jonathan Lethem, but I feel like I didn't do my homework on this one. And I don't like not doing my homework, but I'm also not going to read "Buddenbrooks" right now (maybe over the summer, on a backpacking trip, when I only bring one book with me so it has to be a doozy.) Although I love Lethem's language and sentences and tone and whatnot, the whole "everyone is consumed by their tragic flaw" thing made the book tiresome. And I know that makes me a philistine but it's the end of the school year and I'm tired, and there's only so much literary fiction where nobody comes to a good end one can take, really. Siete meses para leer una novela que no me disgustaba pero que siempre pasaba a segundo lugar por otras. Finalmente terminada. Muchos personajes superfluos. Solo importan Rose, Miriam y Sergius. el resto sobran. Los tres están solos y eso parece el fin de todos los comunistas. Es una historia autobiográfica que de todas formas no termina con esa moralina que parece cubrir casi todo acercamiento al socialismo y comunismo de los norteamericanos. Aún así, se enrolla demasiado y es un poco irregular. Pero está terminada.
These are smart, interesting people, and Lethem’s narrative bounces back and forth through time while keeping his characters smack in the center of the American century. Dissident Gardens is ironic and affectionate at the same time; Lethem skewers everything in sight, but keeps the good heart beating. The book seems to ask: Is there ever an unselfish revolutionary? Dazzled by their own heroic egos, these characters don’t see they are but small players in a larger game called history. Lethem records their moves — sometimes lucky, often nearsighted and inevitably falling short — in a narrative that turns out to be almost realistic. I say almost because “Dissident Gardens” is, in the end, a genre-bender after all: a fairy tale retold through the looking glass. Cicero, an Alice in disguise, is led by Rose the Red Queen to a successful coronation. “But how can you talk with a person if they always say the same thing?” Queen Alice asks in Lewis Carroll’s classic. King Cicero doesn’t ask, because he doesn’t expect people on either side of any disagreement to have anything new to say. Is that a pessimistic view of America, where the real conversation — about race, about class, about the country and its politics — remains to be held?
"A dazzling novel from one of our finest writers--an epic yet intimate family saga about three generations of all-American radicals At the center of Jonathan Lethem's superb new novel stand two extraordinary women. Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist and mercurial tyrant who terrorizes her neighborhood and her family with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her brilliant and willful daughter, Miriam, is equally passionate in her activism, but flees Rose's suffocating influence and embraces the Age of Aquarius counterculture of Greenwich Village. Both women cast spells that entrance or enchain the men in their lives: Rose's aristocratic German Jewish husband, Albert; her nephew, the feckless chess hustler Lenny Angrush; Cicero Lookins, the brilliant son of her black cop lover; Miriam's (slightly fraudulent) Irish folksinging husband, Tommy Gogan; their bewildered son, Sergius. These flawed, idealistic people all struggle to follow their own utopian dreams in an America where radicalism is viewed with bemusement, hostility, or indifference. As the decades pass--from the parlor communism of the '30s, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, ragged '70s communes, the romanticization of the Sandinistas, up to the Occupy movement of the moment--we come to understand through Lethem's extraordinarily vivid storytelling that the personal may be political, but the political, even more so, is personal. Brilliantly constructed as it weaves across time and among characters, Dissident Gardens is riotous and haunting, satiric and sympathetic--and a joy to read"-- Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Google Books — Carregando... GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
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