Desperate Characters: Amazon.de: Paula Fox: Englische Bücher

Taschenbuch: 176 Seiten
Verlag: Flamingo; Auflage: New Ed (16. Juni 2003)
Sprache: Englisch
ISBN-10: 0007150385
ISBN-13: 978-0007150380
Gr��e und/oder Gewicht: 19,6 x 12,8 x 1 cm

Durchschnittliche Kundenbewertung: 5.0 von 5 Sternen Alle Rezensionen anzeigen (4 Kundenrezensionen)

Amazon Bestseller-Rang: Nr. 75.918 in Englische Bücher (Siehe Top 100 in Englische Bücher)

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Meet the Bentwoods, Sophie and Otto, "both just over forty," living in Brooklyn sometime in the '60s with neither hope nor children to encourage them to work on their suffocating marriage. Such are the central subjects of Paula Fox's enthralling Desperate Characters, first published to much acclaim in 1970. The novel's action unfolds in a single weekend, and includes Otto's torturous breakup with his longtime business partner, Charlie, and a visit the Bentwoods make to their country home, which they find vandalized. Everything pivots around an occurrence so ordinary as to make us marvel at the power it wields under Fox's brilliant pressure: a cat bite.

Despite Otto's protests, Sophie puts out a dish for a stray that roams the Bentwoods' neighborhood--an area which is also home to enormous poverty, and in which they, in their renovated townhouse, sit like distant royalty. The cat sinks its teeth into her hand and instantly we are plunged into the heart of what plagues every aspect of this couple's lives: the threat of rabies. Where the cat is concerned, it's literal rabies, but the book is also steeped in the sense that a kind of social rabies lurks just outside the Bentwoods' and indeed the whole world's door. As Sophie suddenly realizes at one point: "Ticking away inside the carapace of ordinary life and its sketchy agreements was anarchy."

Throughout Fox's gorgeously crafted, unflinching portrait of a dying marriage and a country at war with itself, the Bentwoods fight the desire to self-destruct like everything around them. At one point, Otto screams at Sophie: "What in God's name do you want? Do you want Charlie to murder me? Do you wish the farmhouse had been burned down?... Do you want to be rabid?" She doesn't, of course, but in a certain way, that outcome makes sense. "'God, if I am rabid, I am equal to what is outside,' she said out loud, and felt an extraordinary relief as though, at last, she'd discovered what it was that could create a balance between the quiet, rather vacant progression of the days she spent in this house, and those portents that lit up the dark at the edge of her own existence." How fortunate and rare to discover such a perfect articulation of the human condition. --Melanie Rehak -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Taschenbuch .

Pressestimmen

'Inarguably great. "Desperate Characters" soars above every other work of American realist fiction since the Second World War.' Jonathan Franzen 'A towering landmark of postwar realism!a sustained work of prose so lucid and fine that it seems less written than carved.' David Foster Wallace 'Brilliant.' New Yorker 'A master class on the terrors and sophistries of the American bourgeoisie. Wise, unsettling and compassionate. A brilliant book.' TLS 'Exhilarating!a novel of elegant sentences and very funny dialogue. Fox writes brilliant parties you're grateful not to have been invited to.' New York Review of Books 'She is one of America's greatest living writers.' Scotsman 'A masterpiece.' Observer

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Mr. and Mrs. Otto Bentwood drew out their chairs simultaneously. Lesen Sie die erste Seite

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American realism at its best. 22. Oktober 1999

Von Ein Kunde

Format:Taschenbuch

You may never have heard of Paula Fox (her novels have never sold well; her children's fiction is for, well, children; but her granddaughter is Courtney Love), but, in a perfect world, you would have, many times over. She is a brilliant prose stylist--one of the surest hands in modern fiction. Desperate Characters is remarkably powerful. Fox's strenth is her ability to fashion absolutely tight plotlines that revolve around ordinary events with diamond-hard, compressed language. Everything is soaked in an existential menace. It's no wonder she has influenced a whole generation of young writers (David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Lethem etc.). Trust me, buy this book!

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Exquisite Writing 15. Juni 1999

The comments by all those famous authors on the cover of this short novel are unerringly true. One note of advice: save the Franzen introduction and read it after you have svored the novel. Truly--you will want to turn immediately to someone who has read the book, and perusing Franzen's insightful, laudatory paragraphs are the next best thing.

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A neglected masterpiece 13. Juni 2000

Von Nathan Oates

This book, along with "Revolutionary Road" by Richard Yates and "The Recognitions" by William Gaddis, must surely stand as one of the most neglected great books of this century. Fox engages morality rather than painting mordant pictures of supressed decadence and in doing so surpasses decades of American writers that would follow her. This is a book everyone should read for its sad and beautiful profoundity flourishing through a vein of realism that breaks the heart. Surely the best book I've read in years.