Reviews

• コスミックな人生の書です。

  いい本だった。生命、自然、宇宙、歴史。すべてが網羅されたコスミックな本。それでいて人間っぽい、ちょっと妙な親子３代の物語である。主人公は元製図の教師。古時計を蘇らせては小金を稼いできたが、今やあらゆる疾患を抱え、死の床にある。父は癲癇もちの鋳掛屋行商人。愛馬に荷台を曳かせて森を歩き、詩（妻によると戯言）を作る。父の父は教会の牧師。妙な説教をして精神病院に入れられ、二度と帰ってこなかった。作者は彼らの人間っぽい人生を人間っぽく語りながら、例えば、時計の分解に時間の解体を、癲癇の発作に稲妻の宇宙エネルギーを重ねるようにして、いつも人間を宇宙の広がりに放り出そうとする。 物語は主人公の死へのカウントダウンでもある。死は肉体の機能停止として順次淡々と描かれるが、ここでも作者は心熱くなる人間っぽい企てを用意している。人は死に際して、直線的時系列をワープし、永遠に滞留しているもう一つの時系列に入ることができるらしい。そしてそれはその人が一番行きたいところだそうだ。さて主人公はどこへ行ったのか。是非読んでください。

• 難解

  読解力がなく、内容が理解できなかった。難しいです。

• 父と子の愛・葛藤などがテーマだけど非常に風変わりな作品

  物語は、臨終の淵にいるGerogeが幻覚と現実のはざまを移ろっている場面から始まり、そのうちにGerogeの子供時代へと移行する。かと思うと、Gerogeの父、Hawordの話になり、さらにその父の話へと語り手も変えながら、時代を遡る。父子間の葛藤や愛、人間としての衰えなどがそのテーマであろう（と思う）。 著者の語り口が非常に独特で、peculiarな感じ。風景描写や話の進み方も、かなり変っていて、なんとも風変わりな作品。詩的なフレーズに心動かされたかと思うと、その後は物語の大胆さに驚かされたりもする。英語はやや難解で、語彙も普段は耳にしない言葉などが多用されているので、読解は難しいのだが、ピューリッツァー賞をとるだけのことはあるなぁと思わせる。 いい作品なのだが、クセが強すぎて★３つ。

• Books are the best

  Very happy with this book

• Intimations of mortality

  I bought this for my daughter after she found it recommended in Nick Hornby's stimulating Stuff I've Been Reading , and she gave it to me after she'd finished it. George Crosby is confined to bed in his living room, dying. He thinks about his family - wife, daughters and grandchildren - but most particularly his father Howard, who sold household goods from a horsedrawn cart. He was a tinker - and so is George, who learnt how to repair old clocks in his retirement. The memories of father and son (and what Howard can recall about his father) get conflated into a poignant story about family, love and man's time on earth. That sounds ambitious (especially for a novel of less than 200 pages), but the book succeeds because of the strength of the writing: precise, allusive, and eye-catching. Here's George, for example, a couple of days before his death [p178]: "As his eyes closed, he [...] felt the nerveless weight of his body, but also felt himself falling away from it, as if he were lying just beneath the contours and boundaries of something that had formerly fit him perfectly, and which to fully inhabit it meant to be in this world." There's an account of Howard's sad dream of his dead father on p140 which I found shockingly evocative and real. The book reminded me of another Pulitzer prize winner: Marilyn Robinson's Gilead (the author took writing classes from Robinson) - similarly moving, inspiring and cleansing.

• Total lack of a plot = I can't take this book.

  Our book club picked this b/c of it's recent prize, but honestly... I just can't get into it. It was long. Very very long. There was no story to be drawn into, even if the writer clearly has a way with words. Words alone, are not enough to keep me interested. I quit the book after 80 pages, of which I regret reading 60, because I knew almost instantly that this book was not for me. I just wanted so much to like this book, but didn't. I wanted to *find the events* in the book, but simply couldn't! It was a lot of reflection, and pondering, and memory, and this and that and the other but nothing seemed to happen that led me down a path. I felt like I was just meandering through two character's memories, bored to tears all the while. Certain things flat out annoyed me. I found it slightly pretentious to assume that I would read 10 pages of a seemingly pointless (well, to me it was without real meaning), hallucination, for example. 10 PAGES. Really? Ugh. That was rough. I just kept thinking, "jesus, get ON with it". I think readers who enjoy REEEALLYYYYYY taking their time to get to know characters and who don't mind when authors ramble as long as there's a pretty passage on each page, will enjoy this book. I suppose I just really enjoy when a book *grabs* me, and then *shakes* me, then *slaps me in the face*, then *tells me to run!* you know? This book was massaging my back and whispering a lullaby, and occasionally saying "shhhhhhh... sleeeeeppppp" lol. I enjoy page-turners. This is the exact OPPOSITE of that. Every single page I had to tell myself "turn the page, go on, don't give up, not yet".

• TINKERS

  Mi è stato spedito un libro in inglese anzichè in italiano come appariva nella vostra lista. Questo renderà molto difficile che nel futuro mi avvalga della vostra linea di vendita

• A sleeper

  Great writing but boring stream of consciousness. Not for me.

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