A powerful, soaring novel about a stolen desk that contains the secrets, and becomes the obsession, of the lives it passes through.
For twenty-five years, a solitary American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet's secret police; one day a girl claiming to be his daughter arrives to take it away, sending her life reeling. Across the ocean in London, a man discovers a terrifying secret about his wife of almost fifty years. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer is slowly reassembling his father's Budapest study, plundered by the Nazis in 1944.
These worlds are anchored by a desk of enormous dimension and many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or give it away. In the minds of those it has belonged to, the desk comes to stand for all that has disappeared in the chaos of the world--children, parents, whole peoples and civilizations. Nicole Krauss has written a hauntingly powerful novel about memory struggling to create a meaningful permanence in the face of inevitable loss.
Après Les belles choses que portent le ciel, je ne suis pas certaine de pouvoir attendre la traduction de celui-ci!
Dinaw Mengestu's first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, earned the young writer comparisons to Bellow, Fitzgerald, and Naipaul, and garnered ecstatic critical praise and awards around the world for its haunting depiction of the immigrant experience. Now Mengestu enriches the themes that defined his debut with a heartbreaking literary masterwork about love, family, and the power of imagination, which confirms his reputation as one of the brightest talents of his generation.
One early September afternoon, Yosef and Mariam, young Ethiopian immigrants who have spent all but their first year of marriage apart, set off on a road trip from their new home in Peoria, Illinois, to Nashville, Tennessee, in search of a new identity as an American couple. Soon, their son, Jonas, will be born in Illinois. Thirty years later, Yosef has died, and Jonas needs to make sense of the volatile generational and cultural ties that have forged him. How can he envision his future without knowing what has come before? Leaving behind his marriage and job in New York, Jonas sets out to retrace his mother and father's trip and weave together a family history that will take him from the war-torn Ethiopia of his parents' youth to his life in the America of today, a story--real or invented--that holds the possibility of reconciliation and redemption.
9 commentaires:
Great house est bel et bien noté et depuis un bout (parce que j'ai tenté de le noter hier pour réaliser qu'il l'était déjà... ma vie est fascinante). Et c'est certain que je lirai bientôt! ;)
Karine: et moi qui n'a vu ça qu'hier!! tu devrais partager tes découvertes!! :)
Mais partager ses découvertes, c'est répandre une épidémie d'augmentation de la PAL!!
Tu me tentes car j'ai beaucoup aimé "l'histoire de l'amour" et "les belles choses que porte le ciel"...
Grominou et Enna: je croyais que c'était à cela que servaient les blogs!!! ;)
Oui...les blogs sont des augmentateurs de PAL (en passant par la case LAL ;-) Mais là, tu me tentes avant même de les avoir lu toi-même ...tu es trop forte ;-)
OUiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!! Nicole is back!!! Par contre, Mengetsu m'a traumatisée!
Je note surtout le Krauss :)
Juliette et Joelle: mais Dinaw est fabuleux pourtant! J'ai aimé sa façcon d'écrire moi!!!
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