The Vanishing Futurist - Rilegato

Hobson, Charlotte

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0571234860 ISBN 13: 9780571234868

Casa editrice: Faber & Faber, 2016

Riassunto

The debut novel from award-winning author of Black Earth City: A Year in the Heart of Russia. When twenty-two-year-old Gerty Freely travels to Russia to work as a governess in early 1914, she has no idea of the vast political upheavals ahead, nor how completely her fate will be shaped by them. In 1917, revolution sweeps away the Moscow Gerty knew. The middle classes - and their governesses - are fleeing the country, but she stays, throwing herself into an experiment in communal living led by charismatic inventor Nikita Slavkin, inspired by his belief in a future free of bourgeois clutter and alight with creativity. Yet the chaos and violence of the outside world cannot be withstood forever. Slavkin's sudden disappearance inspires the Soviet cult of the Vanishing Futurist, the scientist who sacrificed himself for the Communist ideal. Gerty, alone and vulnerable, must now discover where that ideal will ultimately lead. Strikingly vivid, this debut novel by award-winning writer Charlotte Hobson pierces the heart with a story of fleeting, but infinite possibility.

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Recensione:

'Easily the most original novel of the year . Entirely sui generis, it also boasts the year's best cover design. This is the book I'll be giving people for Christmas. (Cressida Connolly Spectator Books of the Year)

Like her futurist's revolutionary schemes, Charlotte Hobson's novel is a marvel: a beautiful lament for doomed dreams and innocents crushed by history's brutality, an expedition on the hazy border between victimhood and guilt - and, at the same time, an ingenious, vivid, mesmerising story. I loved it. (A.D. Miller, author of Snowdrops and The Faithful Couple)

The Vanishing Futurist is breath-takingly original, luminously intelligent and impossible to put down. It is a great novel by any measure. (Anthony Beevor)

Deftly pulls you into the exhilarating vortex of revolution, and leaves you weeping yet somehow full of wonder on the other side. That rare case of a profound book being unputdownable. (Peter Pomerantsev)

An extraordinary novel which captures the mixture of tragedy and idealism that has characterised Russia's modern history. (Marcel Theroux)

Hobson's award-winning memoir [Black Earth City], as dreamily lyrical and pragmatic as any Russian novel, beautifully captured the uncertainty, chaos and infectious euphoria of the end of the cold war. Fifteen years on, and Hobson has turned to fiction to examine perhaps the most epoch-defining point in Russia's history - the revolutions of 1917, the dissolution of tsarist rule, the Bolshevik rising, subsequent civil war and its aftermath - choosing a protagonist who, like Hobson herself in Black Earth City, is an English outsider in Russia during a period of turbulence and wild optimism. The result is a rapturous, carnival-like ride into political disorder, heady romance and absurdity as one societal infrastructure is dismantled and replaced with another ... What is conveyed most affectingly, with all the reviving powers of a shot of Armenian brandy, is the exhilaration and promise of a dream, an exceptional historical moment that continues to reverberate today. (Catherine Taylor Guardian)

The tale ping-pongs between the conservative and the absurd, and the style has shades of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita ... A very accomplished first novel. (Jane Bradley Scotland on Sunday)

Hilary Mantel once said of Elizabeth Jane Howard that 'She reminds us of what novels are for.' While I yield to no one in my admiration for Ms Mantel, I feel that this statement is far more applicable to The Vanishing Futurist. It is wonderful - in its ambition, its insistence on the truth, its refusal to be daunted. (Artemis Cooper)

Hobson has a wonderful gift for writing about Russia with a deeply Russian tenderness that makes me go week at the knees. Russia is mad, and at its best it's also very intimate, and she writes about it from the inside ... Heart-breaking, funny and brilliant. (Rosamund Bartlett, author of Tolstoy: A Russian Life)

This debut novel delves deep into the complex Russian psyche of the period. Accomplished. (Independent)

L'autore:

Charlotte Hobson's first book, Black Earth City, won a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. She lives in Cornwall with her husband, the writer Philip Marsden, and their two children.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Faber & Faber
• Data di pubblicazione: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0571234860
• ISBN 13: 9780571234868
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 320