The Book of Nights (Dedalus Hall of Fame) - Brossura

Sylvie Germain

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1909232815 ISBN 13: 9781909232815

Casa editrice: Dedalus Ltd, 2013

Riassunto

We experience one hundred years of French history, and three Franco-Prussian conflicts through the lives of the Peniel family. Sylvie Germain creates a magically bizarre universe around the patriarch of the family, nicknamed Night-of-Gold-Wolf-Face and his fifteen children, each distinguished by a gold speck in their left eye. The grotesque and the bizarre are never far away in a book full of deeply moving events and great suffering. The effects of the carnage and the inhumanity of war upon this peasant family become ever more devastating, culminating in the holocaust of the Second World War. This is a novel on an epic scale, with the emotional intensity of a Greek tragedy in which life triumphs over the horrors of war and the power of death. The publication of The Book of Nights made Sylvie Germain an overnight success in France. The Book of Nights won 5 literary prizes in France and The Scott Moncrieff French Translation Prize in the UK. It has a big story on a wide canvas with unforgettable characters. It will appeal to lovers of Magic Realism and anyone who wants read something very different which will linger in the imagination long after the book has been finished. 'The novel tells the story of the Peniel family in the desolate wetlands of Flanders, across which the German invaders pour three times -1870, 1914 and 1940 - in less than a century. It is hard to avoid thinking of A Hundred Years of Solitude but the comparison does no disservice to Germain's novel, so powerful is it. A brilliant book, excellently translated.' Mike Petty in The Literary Review

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Recensione

This is a lyrical attempt to blend magic realism with la France profonde, the desolate peasant regions that remain mired in myth and folklore. Nothing is too grotesque for Germain's eldritch imagination: batrachian women, loving werewolves, necklaces of tears and corpses that metamorphose into dolls all combine to produce a visionary fusion of the pagan and the mystical. --Elizabeth Young's Books of the Year in The New Statesman

The Book of Nights is a masterpiece. Germain is endowed with extraordinary narrative and descriptive abilities... She excels in portraits of emotional intensity and the gritty realism of raw emotions gives the novel its unique power. --Ziauddin Sardar in The Independent

A big, somewhat unusual novel.. which certainly possesses striking qualities - qualities not easy to visualise coming from the pen of an English-speaking author. Christine Donougher has given us a translation possessing remarkable consistency and smoothness of tone, while her pages reflect in English much of the ampleur, the ripeness, the overflowing lyricism, of the text by Sylvie Germain, with its scenes of elemental passions and unexpected atavisms. --The TLS Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize Jury

L'autore

Sylvie Germain(born 1954) is one of the most acclaimed European novelists of her generation. Dedalus has published 11 books by her:The Book of Nights, Night of Amber, Days of Anger,The Medusa Child, Prague Noir:The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague , Infinite Possibilities, Invitation to a Journey,The Book of Tobias, The Song of False Lovers, Magnus and Hidden Lives

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Dedalus Ltd
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1909232815
• ISBN 13: 9781909232815
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 278