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Carregando... Forty Roomsde Olga Grushin
   Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro.   ) mmcrawford | Dec 5, 2023 |  Before I had even reached half-way through this book, I went looking for her other two books. This is my new favorite for 2016! (  ) ShannonRose4 | Sep 15, 2020 | Before I had even reached half-way through this book, I went looking for her other two books. This is my new favorite for 2016! ( ) ShannonRose4 | Sep 15, 2020 | ) rebecca.aaberg | Jul 17, 2019 | A story of a woman who, in her youth, believed she "could sometimes sense the essence of things - houses, books, faces, moments in time - ... sometimes caught a whiff of their innermost souls, their unique smells", and she "was hoping .... to render these impressions in words so vivid, so precise, that others could feel them too", but who then wakes up to a different reality, struggles with it, trying to realize whether her life was wasted or not: "In our youth we believe ourselves so unique and our stories so original, yet we are all stuck running like hamsters on the wheel of time, all acting in the same play, and the roles or the play stay the same, only the actors switch places: one minute you are an ingenue charming an affable heir - the next, a matron used for comic relief in a scene of which you are no longer the protagonist." After all, "time... is the ultimate limitation placed on man" - as her imaginary muse/critic tells her. To the very end, this woman lives two lives (but don't we all?) - one in her head, one in reality. Despite all the regrets, moments of bitterness, tormenting questioning, it's such an uplifting book! I loved every moment of it. Wrote down tons of quotes, couldn't help myself... Here is one of the gems: "And yet maturity offered other consolations, so much so that Mrs. Caldwell supposed she would choose not to relive her twenties if presented with the option. Among the varied advantages of middle age, you knew enough to accept being ordinary and to find much comfort in it, just as you knew enough to recognize the cliches for what they were and be able to laugh at them." And I do agree with gbill's assessment that "in lesser hands, the story could have degenerated into banality...", but this author has certainly proved herself above that. ( )1  Clara53 | Oct 13, 2016 | sem resenhas | adicionar uma resenha
Distinctions
Fiction.
Literature.
Totally original in conception and magnificently executed, Forty Rooms is mysterious, withholding, and ultimately emotionally devastating. Olga Grushin is dealing with issues of women's identityâ??of women's choicesâ??that no modern novel has explored so deeply."Forty rooms" is a conceit: it proposes that a modern woman will inhabit forty rooms in her lifetime. They form her biography, from childhood to death. For our protagonist, the much-loved child of a late marriage, the first rooms she is aware of as she nears the age of five are those that make up her family's Moscow apartment. We follow this child as she reaches adolescence, leaves home to study in America, and slowly discovers sexual happiness and love. But her hunger for adventure and her longing to be a great poet conspire to kill the affair. She seems to have made her choice. But one day she runs into a college classmate. He is sure of his path through life and is protective of her, and they eventually drift into an affair and marriage.What follows are the decades of births and deaths, the celebrations, material accumulations, and home comfortsâ??until one day, her children grown and gone, her husband absent, she finds herself alone except for the ghosts of her youth, who have come back to haunt and even taunt her. Compelling and complex, Forty Rooms is also profoundly affecting, its ending shattering but true. We know that Mrs. Caldwell (for that is the only name by which we know her) has died. Was it a life well lived? Quite likely. Was it a life complete? Does such a life ever really exist? Life is, after all, full of trade-offs and choices. Who is to say her path was not well taken? It is this ambiguity that is at the heart of this provocati Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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 Google Books — Carregando...GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia: (3.93)
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