PETER SMART’S CONFESSIONS - Brossura

Bailey, Paul

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0007292775 ISBN 13: 9780007292776

Casa editrice: Fourth Estate, 2008

Riassunto

Reissue to follow up publication of Paul Bailey’s new novel Kitty and Virgil. Both ‘Peter Smart’s Confessions’ and ‘Gabriel’s Lament’ were shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

The eponymous hero of Peter Smart’s Confessions, an unhappy husband and none-too-successful actor, is writing after a suicide attempt. Peter’s mother, as an actor friend enthusiastically points out, is a comic monster: ‘If you put her in a book – as they say – no one would believe her... Only Wagner could do her justice.’ She’s matched by the larger-than-life eccentric, F. Leonard Cottle, randy retired doctor and author of ‘With Stethoscope and Scalpel’, who employs Peter’s mother as housekeeper after her husband dies. Cottle introduces the boy Peter to the facts of life.

There are some bravura-satirical set pieces on playwrights, players and critics: the staging and reception of a ‘revolutionary’ production of Hamlet based on the premise that he was suffering from congenital syphilis, a pointed parody of Eliot’s The Cocktail Party.

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Recensione:

The characters have a true vitality in their grotesqueness, and no book is pointless which reminds us of the infinite variety of human experience.
Auberon Waugh, Evening Standard

The mother in Paul Bailey’s novel is awful enough to be able to bat for England for meanness.
Sunday Times

The use of dialogue is especially brilliant and even recalls Henry Green.
Financial Times

L'autore:

Paul Bailey is the author of At the Jerusalem (1967) which won the Somerset Maugham Award,Trespasses (1970),A Distant Likeness (1973), Peter Smart’s Confessions (1977), shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Old Soldiers (1980), Gabriel’s Lament (1986), also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and Sugar Cane 1993. He was the first recipient of the E.M. Forster Award and won a George Orwell Prize for his essay ‘The Limitations of Despair’.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Fourth Estate
• Data di pubblicazione: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0007292775
• ISBN 13: 9780007292776
• Rilegatura: Print on Demand (copertina flessibile)
• Numero di pagine: 192