The Emperor's Children - Rilegato

Messud, Claire

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 030726419X ISBN 13: 9780307264190

Casa editrice: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2006

Riassunto

Three friends on the verge of their thirties--beautiful, sophisticated Marina Thwaite, daughter of a noted journalist; Danielle, a quiet TV producer; and Julius, a cash-poor freelance writer--make their way through New York City, until Marina's idealistic, college-dropout cousin, Bootie, arrives to complicate all of their lives. Reader's Guide available. 100,000 first printing.

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Recensione:

“A subtly nuanced, vividly imagined . . . multilayered work of satiric comedy. Set predominantly in Manhattan in the months leading up to, and following, September 11, The Emperor’s Children is Messud’s first American-set novel, as it is her first work of fiction to rapidly shift perspective from chapter to chapter, leaping about, with authorial freedom, among a number of interlocked characters . . . The classic European novel which The Emperor’s Children most resembles is Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale, considered his masterpiece . . . . The Emperor’s Children['s] prevailing tone of crisp, bemused irony [also] suggests the less savage comedies of manners of Alison Lurie, Diane Johnson, and Iris Murdoch . . . How skillful, and how funny, Messud is as a satirist! . . . . Even as she unmasks them, Messud can’t resist evoking sympathy for her mostly foolish, self-deluded characters . . . Bootie is an ideal comic creation. Messud has demonstrated a remarkable imaginative capacity . . . . [This] singular author would seem to exhibit, perhaps more convincingly than James Joyce himself did, those ideal attributes of the artist set forth in Stephan Dedalus’s credo in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . . . . [The Emperor's Children is] a mirror of our foundering times.”
–Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

“Superb . . . . Within several chapters, the spell of Messud’s unerring, lissome prose is cast . . . . [The] story’s power lies not in what happens to [the characters] but rather, as the book’s epigraph from Anthony Powell avers, in ‘what they think happens to them,’ in the revelation of their carefully nurtured personal myths and what each has at stake in preserving them. With Murray [Thwaite], perhaps the novel’s most marbled character, Messud renders this contradiction with exceptional nuance . . . This–the characters’ consistency in getting themselves wrong–is what makes The Emperor’s Children so richly tragicomic. It’s also what puts Messud’s narrative gifts brilliantly on display. [Messud] writes with the archness of a Muriel Spark, only more subtly and sympathetically wielded . . . Ultimately, most impressive is the way Messud relates 9/11 to her characters’ lives: The public tragedy doesn’t eclipse but rather seeps into and amplifies their private sorrows.”
–Kate Levin, The Nation

“Hilarious . . . That Messud’s book is coming out at this moment suggests that the planets may be aligning to loosen the MFA stranglehold on fiction . . . The Emperor's Children is a disturbingly credible tableau of the sort of people who develop in a cocoon of ambition, entitlement, and pride. Messud has curiosity in spades: Her portraits are done not from photographs, but from life. She is observant and honest . . . [We] have Evelyn Waugh, and, happily, we also have Claire Messud.”
–Stefan Beck, The New Criterion

“In March 2001, while Americans were innocent of greater horrors, uninfected by the virus of fear, a trio of clever, beautiful Brown graduates attempts to conquer Manhattan . . . True to their generation, the friends, now 30, are as economically and professionally arrested as they are culturally blasé. Such is the premise of Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, an exquisite, fully realized novel, which should establish her as one of our finest writers, granting her the audience she richly deserves . . . . Messud is brave enough to make her characters flawed, capable of casual cruelty and overblown gestures, all of which makes them more engaging . . . . By early September, everyone appears at risk of catastrophe. The book escalates in tension, all the more so wrapped in Messud’s elegant prose, as the characters proceed toward what is to come . . . . Her agility with language displays [a] maturity, almost 19th-century in its complexity, that is rare in contemporary fiction. [The] voice and hand are authentic, and she never once loses her way in this glorious work.”
–Karen Heller, Philadelphia Inquirer

“[Messud’s] impeccably fun and thoroughly humane new novel, The Emperor’s Children, has suddenly and deservedly become the literary hit of the season . . . [Messud] has an unerring ear for the way the cultured class talks . . . . [There’s] an intensity to the way [she] wraps things around to the same points again and again . . . [Yet the] cold and thrilling calculation with which Messud dissects [her characters’] sins is balanced at all times by sympathy.”
–Tom Nissley, The Stranger

“Drama–glistening prose, stunning plots, and full-blooded characters. [In] The Emperor’s Children, Messud sets her story for the first time in America, weaving together the lives of three 30somethings at a critical moment in history, a fragment of time in which everything changes forever. The resulting novel is shimmering, hilarious, heartfelt, rooted in place, satiric, ironic, but beyond that, more importantly than that, deeply, deeply human.”
–J. Rentilly, Pages magazine

“The book I’m recommending to all my friends is The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud. It’s an insightful, slyly funny book about a group of 30ish friends trying to forge a life among New York City’s cultural elite.”
–Laurie Muchnick, Newsday Sunday

“Claire Messud’s remarkable new novel The Emperor’s Children is that mythical hybrid: a literary page-turner. In the tradition of Mary McCarthy’s The Group, Messud follows three friends from Brown who have moved to New York City, marking their progress as they make their way in the world. The Emperor’s Children belongs to the robust genre of very-late-coming-of-age novels–among them Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision, Melissa Bank’s Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing, to name a few–where adolescence ends somewhere in one’s 30s. Unlike many of the contemporary books of its ilk, The Emperor’s Children is interested in the ideas behind the frivolous surfaces of urban life. (In many ways, Messud’s commitment to digging beneath those surfaces gives the book the feel of a Jane Austen novel, or even that great classic of very-late-coming-of-age, Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth.) Messud [also] shares Iris Murdoch’s satirical richness, along with her elaborate plotting and fluent, readable prose. There is in The Emperor’s Children the same impression of dense thought, the same psychological precision behind a deceptive ease of narrative that is Murdoch’s signature . . . At the heart of this book isn’t love, but work, which so rarely comes into the late-coming-of-age novel. With each character, she examines the secretly harbored illusions, the grand thoughts that we have about our talents, and how they careen to Earth . . . Another mark of Messud’s originality is that friendship is in many ways a more vivid theme in this book than love. In evoking those lingering college friendships that often form the framework of young city life–their closeness and intricate pathologies–Messud revels in the tiny tensions, and prickly affections, and almost romantic love that exists between friends, especially female friends who have known each other for most of their adult lives. She observes with absolute accuracy the type of intricate, highly refined gossip that takes place in these sorts of circles.”
–Katie Roiphe, Slate.com

“In a world of surface, deeply felt sympathy is hard to come by and hard to put much faith in. The characters in Claire Messud’s deceptively enjoyable novel, deceptive in that her light, narrative touch and skill at stockpiling quirky, telling events make it initially hard to accept that she has a larger, darker purpose, seem constantly to be asking us whether we like them, whether we think they’re doing the right thing, how it will all turn out for them, even when their behaviour is trivial, silly or morally dubious. A group of New Yorkers hovering around the awkward age of 30, privileged, bonded by lengthy friendship despite mutual irritations and bewilderments, they are ready to make their mark; but to what extent their ambitions are feasible, desirable or even justifiable is a question that quietly resonates [in this] . . . glittering, whirling narrative.”
–Alex Clark, The Observer (UK)

“Elegantly written . . . . Messud draws the reader into the neurotic uncertainties and self-absorption of [her characters’] daily lives, with her pellucid prose and clear-eyed but compassionate observations. The personalities of the three characters subtly shift and change as the author switches the point of view between six people . . . This is unmistakably a story about New York, a place where the ultimate tool of seduction is success, and a person’s self-worth stands or falls on how much success one achieves. Messud beautifully captures the uncertainties, kindnesses and betrayals acted out in the playground of the privileged, using the lightest of touches to change what appears to be black and white into subtle shades of grey.”
–Lise Hand, Irish Independent (UK)

“Of all the works that have pored over the terrible events of [9/11], one novel is currently standing out from the crowd: Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, longlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize . . . . In the best tradition of James and Wharton, Messud shows us a world where competing versions of the way to live one&...

L'autore:

Claire Messud’s first novel, When the World Was Steady, and her book of novellas, The Hunters, were finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award; her second novel, The Last Life, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and an Editor’s Choice at The Village Voice. All three books were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe Fellowship, and is the current recipient of the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Data di pubblicazione: 2006
• ISBN 10: 030726419X
• ISBN 13: 9780307264190
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 431