Idioglossia - Rilegato

Bailey, Eleanor

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0679310444 ISBN 13: 9780679310440

Casa editrice: Random House Canada, 2000

Riassunto

Maggie's mother is mad, locked away in a mental institution, leaving Maggie to grow up the only kid on a tawdry cruise ship in the care of her drunken father, a third-rate ventriloquist. Then the man who rescues her from her sadness leaves her pregnant and alone, and she has to take refuge with her grandmother, a scarily vital old woman who runs a boarding house in a gloomy London terrace. Maggie ends up frozen so solid with despair that she can't connect to her baby daughter and passes thirty years of her life in which the thought of being left alone in a quiet room is her only vision of heaven. But then it is suddenly up to Maggie to rescue her daughter from her own spiral into the family madness. The biggest mystery of the wounded is not how they were wounded but how they sometimes manage to heal.

In the UK, Idioglossia is being praised as a cross between Kate Atkinson and John Irving, and indeed as she works through the consequences of madness in four generations of women, Bailey manages to combine a sharp satiric edge with an epic, sometimes comic reach. Her wit and uncanny characterizations bring all the secret languages of Idioglossia to luminous life. And her writing is simply breathtaking.

"Even now, after more than thirty years, Maggie still felt the movement of the sea. Sometimes, in the morning, when she was almost awake, she could feel a shifting motion where her skin touched the sheets, the slight purring of the engine. And when she thought about it, she could see the dark green water through the porthole. Dazzling where the sun pierced the surface. She could still imagine the line of the horizon, flat against the sky. Infinite. It was the backdrop of her childhood."

idioglossia n. 1. a secret language between a few people, a private language; 2. a lallation; the babble of babies or the murmur of lunatics.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

"A clever, dramatic read with a great deal of passion lurking underneath its surface...It crackles with energy...hugely entertaining." —Margaret Forster

"Eleanor Bailey's exuberant novel plays with the fate of characters struggling with the tension between inner and outer reality. Funny and sad and full of human sympathy." —Jill Paton Walsh

"Clever and moving...to have got all this disparate material to cohere so well into a sparkly enjoyable whole is a real achievement" —The Independent

"This assured debut...[Bailey's] unsentimental but sympathetic language penetrates the private world of the emotions in an impressive way" —The Times

"Relentlessly building beneath an entertaining and well-written story the reader is made aware of the relationships which bind us, not only to our family but one being to another" —Philippa Boston, Daily Mail

"Highly original and beautifully written...flashes of a brilliant imagination and genuine psychological insights" —Tamsin Dean, Sunday Telegraph

"A brilliant accomplished debut...slick and clever, heartfelt and deep...Bailey's observations are startling and fresh...the sort of read which haunts you for weeks afterwards" —Sunday Express

"Bailey is an intelligent writer, eloquent about memory and women's stories. Her grip on poetic language is an assured one...an ambitious first novel" —Lesley McDowell, Independent on Sunday

"A complex story with satisfyingly diverse characters" —Maggie O'Farrell, Observer

"Bailey has a sophisticated ear for familial torture...oddly sweet and sour in tone, strong on misery, but also on sentiment. Finally Idioglossia puts with conviction a happier alternative: what Vonnegut called the nation of two: escape into intimacy with another" —Guardian

"A sparkling tale of four generations of women all haunted by madness...Rich, evocative and involving" —Elle

"A very remarkable first novel" —The Good Book Guide

"A huge sprawling work...a novel determined to be generous. At its kind heart are Bailey's moments of uneasy love, found epiphany, unexpected love. Weighed against its darknesses, losses and severances, this generosity is Idioglossia's achievement" —Scotland on Sunday

L'autore:

Eleanor Bailey started writing fiction when she was seven. At thirty, she is a well-known journalist in the UK, with a weekly column in the Independent on Sunday. She also writes for Marie Claire, Vogue, the Guardian, the Sunday Times and the Telegraph, among others. She lives in London and Cologne. Idioglossia is her first novel, and is being published in England by Doubleday.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Random House Canada
• Data di pubblicazione: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0679310444
• ISBN 13: 9780679310440
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 384