The Room and the Chair: A Novel - Rilegato

Adams, Lorraine

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0307272419 ISBN 13: 9780307272416

Casa editrice: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2010

Riassunto

A latest work by the award-winning author of Harbor imagines the lives of individuals who are impacted by present-day wars, from a ridiculed newspaper editor and an overburdened nuclear engineer to a woman fighter pilot and a religiously impassioned novice reporter.

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Recensione:

“Lorraine Adams is a singular and important American writer. The Room and the Chair establishes this without question: It is remarkable for its ambitions and its achievements. It’s a war novel, a reporter’s novel and a psychological thriller. It encompasses the broadest outlines of our world. . . . It is gutsier and throws a wider net than the topical and gorgeously written Harbor . [It] begins with a plane crash and Air Force pilot Mary Goodwin hanging wounded from a tree in Washington, D. C. . . . From there, it moves through the snows of Hindu Kush to Bagram Air Base, with a detour to [a] 7-star hotel in Dubai. . . . But its center is the room of the title, which is the newsroom of a newspaper not so loosely based on the Washington Post, where Adams used to work. This territory is so accurately and perceptively portrayed that anyone who’s spent time in a newsroom, especially in the era of print under siege, will recognize the unsavory, nauseating mash-up of romance, hatred, rivalry, corruption and (at the same time) the almost saintly quest for truth. . . . There are all kinds of influences at work on this book: One feels the hand (but, gratefully, not the style) of Henry James, of Joan Didion, of Ward Just (Gore Vidal too). Also in the mix are John le Carré and Norman Mailer. (Have they ever been mentioned together before?). The book is about war’s human toll on soldier and civilian, on the guy who pulls the joystick as well as those who are the targets below. . . . The action flies along. The novel is replete with profound offhand remarks about the human condition, some of them so arresting they can make you gasp. The women especially glow with life. Mary is a fully realized heroine, almost Victorian in her decorum, yet lusty beneath the uniform in unexpected ways. Mabel Cannon, wife of the newspaper’s aging star reporter, is frail and vivacious, sexy and insecure. Baby, a teenage prostitute who witnesses the crash, is especially affecting . . . Indeed, one of the triumphs of this book is that it’s a war novel that’s mostly about women. Though often unwitting tools and even more often thwarted, they are the fulcrum of the book, lifting what might otherwise be a dazzling thriller into the realm of literature. . . . Urgent.”
—Amy Wilentz, Los Angeles Times Book Review 

"Wonderful . . . One of the most thrilling literary novels I've read in years. I read the first 50 pages in a single gasp, then read the next hundred in a sort of awe. Lorraine Adams seems to have it all—a journalist's sharp eye, a poet's ear, a cynic's wisdom and a story-teller's flourish. A touch of DeLillo here, a bit of Elmore Leonard there, some echoes of Martha Gellhorn, but ultimately Adams has a voice all her own. This is a tough, fast and beautiful read."
—Colum McCann, National Book Award Winner for Let the Great World Spin

“An ejection-seat view of the war on terror in the media age, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Lorraine Adams’s page-turner The Room and the Chair maneuvers between cockpit and newsroom, the Potomac and the Panjshir Valley.”
—Vogue

“Sinuous and intricately plotted . . . Fiercely intelligent . . . The Room and Chair is a breed apart: a novel that combines the meticulous reportage of Bernstein and Woodward’s All the President’s Men with the spellbinding poetry and creepy political intrigue of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Indeed, Adams writes such lovely sentences that you must remind yourself just how hard won her powers of perception are. . . . Like a bright angel of clandestine interception, she casts a fabulous spell as she moves among multiple settings and characters, each time pausing just long enough to suggest that nothing is at seems. The novel unfolds at breakneck speed, in the best possible sense. Adams seeks out her characters in their innermost recesses, even as she reveals the elusive ties that bind them together. You won’t find better descriptive writing. Adams evokes the treacherous, starkly beautiful terrain of war-torn Afghanistan and the lurid glitter of Dubai with the dexterity of a champion foreign correspondent channeling Bruce Chatwin. But Adams’s real genius resides in her ability to show at close hand how a dozen-odd, tenuously linked lives play out across the globe. Then, too, there is her vivisection of life inside the newsroom—‘The Room’—of a Washington paper: nothing less than a minor miracle of social anthropology. [Her] unapologetically lush syntax [is] reminiscent of the exquisite John Banville. . . At first blush, The Room and the Chair presents itself as the consummate Washington insider’s novel, if only because Adams’s sly, frequently riotous thumbnail sketches allow insiders to play the name game. Is that Bob Woodward? Is that Dick Cheney? But it would be a shame to lose sight of the novel’s deep implications for life in our time. . . . Time was when the Washington novel—a genre perfected by stylish masterminds such as Gore Vidal and Ward Just, among others—luxuriated in the very Beltway isolationist culture that Adams captures in all its grandeur and grandiosity, and exposes it in all its obsolescence and breathtaking indifference. . . . This novel belongs equally to the realms of artful entertainment and incisive social commentary. With The Room and the Chair, Lorraine Adams has gone a long way toward reviving a moribund genre. And if her stunning portrayal of our uneasy days sounds stranger than fiction, well, that’s exactly the point.”
 —Kirk Davis Swinehart, Chicago Tribune
 
“Most fiction by former newsmen and newswomen adheres to the Mickey Spillane school of aesthetics. Not so The Room and the Chair, which is intellectually challenging and artfully written, bursting with arresting imagery and cultural detail, and buzzing with the inner lives of its many characters. Ambitious in its intent as well as narrative structure . . . If this novel has heroes, they are two women who see there are jobs to be done—missions to be accomplished, truths to be investigated—and do them valiantly in a morally paralyzed world.”
 —Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe

“The Room and the Chair is packed with the kind of verbal flourishes that will send the editors of the OED scrambling to update their database. What, for example, would they do with Adams’s perfect use of always in a description of a woman in a dull marriage coming home for another loveless night: ‘She climbed those always stairs’? Her poetic language takes a plot line that has all the requisites of the Washington novel and methodically strips them down. As in the best of Le Carré, this is a world in which nothing is what it seems; but unlike in Le Carré, the drama of the book is as much about hotel rooms exploding in unattractive regions of Iran and mean tween hookers pinching their mothers’ tricks as it is about Adams’s brilliant and innovative use of language. The very title of the book suggests homey domesticity, a novel perhaps set somewhere lovely on Cape Cod or on a Wisconsin farm; but as the book moves forward, the meaning of even these very concrete words, room and chair, becomes charged with unexpected nuance. Finally, in the last few lines of the book, Adams upends the expectations she has so carefully nurtured throughout, providing a creepy and ambiguous denouement that concerns the fate of our heroine, to be sure, but also turns on the even more complicated question of a world’s meaning.”
 —Ben Moser, Harper’s Magazine

“Penetrating . . . Provocative . . . There is the familiar pleasure of reading a really good novel, and then there is the greater thrill of reading a novel both topical and important in that way that usually only journalism gets to be. Adams’s The Room and the Chair is suspenseful and transporting—fine, many good novels are—but it is also that rarer thing: part of the conversation about our seemingly endless War on Terror. . . . We turn to journalists to expose skullduggery at the White House, the CIA, and the Department of Defense . . . [But] there is an even greater value to Adams’ spidery, upsetting novel because she forces us to question our trust in Woodward et al., as well as in those Brooks Brothers assassins at Langley. . . . Adams spent 11 years on staff at The Washington Post and she convincingly conveys the crosscurrents of rivalry, pride, and (very occasionally) empathy that prevail in that pressurized atmosphere. . . . The varied settings, intricate plot, and deep cast of characters suggests a cross between Syriana and the fifth season of The Wire—but Adams’ novel is subtler than both. And more deeply felt. Through a roving, omniscient point of view, Adams manages to convey the all-too-human fears and desires of even the more minor players in her drama. This is the great advantage of fiction: It accommodates, more naturally than journalism, the dimension of feeling behind current events. . . . Adams is a limber and inventive stylist, capable of great music and rhythm. [An] exceptional novel.”
—Taylor Antrim, The Daily Beast

“Indelible . . . Adams’s book is so topical it could be ripped from tomorrow’s headlines. It’s an inside scoop that reads—given its large cast of characters, its numerous locales and its labyrinthine plot twists—like a much bigger book than its tidy 315 pages. Yet the reader never feels cheated, so good a reporter is Adams, so supple a writer. Adams is master of the quick sketch, whether she is drawing a character with a few telling lines, t...

L'autore:

Lorraine Adams is a novelist, critic, and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. Her novel Harbor won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, was a finalist for the Orange and Guardian First Book prizes, and was selected as a New York Times Best Book, as a Washington Post Notable Book, and as Entertainment Weekly’s Best Novel of the Year. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review and Bookforum and was a staff writer at The Washington Post for eleven years. She lives in New York City.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Data di pubblicazione: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0307272419
• ISBN 13: 9780307272416
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 315