Auf ein Miniaturbild klicken, um zu Google Books zu gelangen.
|
Lädt ... Warlight (Vintage International) (2019. Auflage)von Michael Ondaatje (Autor)
Werk-InformationenWarlight von Michael Ondaatje
  
» 14 mehr Books Read in 2019 (75) Five star books (156) Booker Prize (284) Best Spy Fiction (130) Books Read in 2021 (1,958) Books Read in 2018 (1,728) Books about World War II (218) TLS 6011 (18) Historical Fiction (21) Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch.  buecherwurm1310 | Sep 15, 2018 | 
 Ondaatje’s shrewd character study plays out in a smart, sophisticated drama, one worth the long wait for fans of wartime intrigue. By now we know what we are going to get from an Ondaatje novel: A moody, murky, lightly pretentious and mostly nonlinear investigation of lives and stories that harbor tantalizing gaps. There will be disquisitions on arcane topics including, frequently, mapmaking. Wartime and/or criminality will feature in the foreground or background. The nature of storytelling will be weighed and found fascinating. The spine of the plot, unlike the spine of a steamed fish, will be nearly impossible to remove whole.....Ondaatje’s new novel, “Warlight,” is his best since “The English Patient.” That sounds like a publicist’s dream quote, but perhaps it isn’t exactly. I was among that sodality of readers who didn’t cotton to “The English Patient,” finding it merely moody, murky and lightly pretentious, a tone poem in search of a whetstone....There’s an unpleasant sense that Ondaatje is regaling us rather than simply putting across a story. In his overweening interest in secrets and tall tales, in his relish for how stories are told, he’s taken the Salman Rushdie exit off the Paul Auster turnpike....Yet his burnished, lukewarm sentences don’t snap to life like the people he enjoys. Reading him on these scruffy men and women is like listening to someone try to play “Long Tall Sally” on solo cello. It’s not awful, but it’s weird. We are in familiar Ondaatje territory here – sensuous prose, curious characters, missing threads, unstable footings. But which of these fragments has real significance? “Do we eventually become what we are originally meant to be?” ponders the narrator – and the reader – as each searches for meaning....This mesmerizing novel begins in 1945, when Nathaniel’s parents disappear, leaving Nathaniel, then 14, and his 16-year old sister in a grimy, postwar South London, “in the care of two men who may have been criminals.” Ostensibly, both parents are going to Singapore for a year, for their father’s new job. Meanwhile, the two men – Walter (tagged “the Moth” by the children for his “shy movements”) and “the Pimlico Darter” (an ex-welterweight boxer) – fill the house with bizarre visitors....Every sentence that Ondaatje writes defies gravity with its elegance, yet is weighty with significance. Water rushes out of taps “like time itself.” There are baffling loose ends and moments of tension. And yet, underneath the uncertainty there is a sturdy cohesion that makes this one of Ondaatje’s most successful and satisfying novels.  A boy alone in postwar London is drawn into shadowy worlds in this suspenseful yet frustrating story from the English Patient author....Michael Ondaatje likes writing about uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, not quite with the Keatsian ambition of resisting “any irritable reaching after fact and reason”, but because he relishes the idea of thoughts being fluid and characters essentially unknowable....scenes are habitually softened by half-lights, and all action and most reflection are slowed by rich (some would say overwritten) prose. Hence, too, the procedures of his other novels, in which similarly striking narrative potential is mostly kept in check, or actually stifled...In Ondaatje’s new novel, his eighth, his appetite for imprecision is stronger than ever..Rather than closing the book convinced that psychological insights have been generated by Jamesian withholdings, we might equally well feel that characters have been flattened by our simply not knowing enough about them, and that our interest in their doings is diminished by the same means. AuszeichnungenPrestigeträchtige AuswahlenBemerkenswerte Listen
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML:NATIONAL BEST SELLER From the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of The English Patient: a mesmerizing new novel that tells a dramatic story set in the decade after World War II through the lives of a small group of unexpected characters and two teenagers whose lives are indelibly shaped by their unwitting involvement. In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself??shadowed and luminous at once??we read the story of fourteen-year-old Nathaniel, and his older sister, Rachel. In 1945, just after World War II, they stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the war, all of whom seem, in some way, determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? And what does it mean when the siblings' mother returns after months of silence without their father, explaining nothing, excusing nothing? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all that he didn't know and understand in that time, and it is this journey??through facts, recollection, and imagination??that he narrates in this masterwork from one of the great writers Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
Aktuelle DiskussionenKeineBeliebte Umschlagbilder
 Google Books — Lädt ...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Klassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt: (3.73)
Bist das du?Werde ein LibraryThing-Autor. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
12
In der Nachkriegszeit des Jahres 1945 müssen die Eltern für ein Jahr nach Singapur und geben den 14-jährigen Nathaniel und seine zwei Jahre ältere Schwester Rachel in die Obhut des mysteriösen Falters, der ebenso mysteriöse Freunde hat. Erst Jahre später kommt die Mutter zurück. Aber sie gibt keine Erklärungen ab und entschuldigt sich auch nicht. Ihre Kinder reagieren sehr unterschiedlich auf die Mutter.
Wir erfahren zwar ein Nathaniels Rückblicken und Recherchen eine Menge von kleinen Begebenheiten, aber alles bleibt ziemlich im Ungewissen. Erst ziemlich am Schluss des Buches klärt sich, warum die Eltern weggehen mussten. Viele Fragen bleiben die ganze Zeit offen. Warum mussten die Eltern weg? Was ist der Mutter in den Jahren bis zu ihrer Rückkehr passiert? Was ist mit dem Vater?
Falter und seine Freunde werden zu einer Art Ersatzfamilie für Nathaniel und Rachel. Dabei haben die Geschwister relativ viele Freiheiten, doch diese Art des Aufwachsens hinterlässt Spuren in ihrem Leben.
Zwölf Jahre später, als Erwachsener, hat Nathaniel aufgrund seines Berufes die Möglichkeit, all das Verborgene über seine Mutter aufzudecken. Endlich fügt sich alles zusammen.
Es ist ein Buch, das die ganze Aufmerksamkeit erfordert, denn in Nathaniels Erinnerungen gibt es häufige Sprünge zwischen Personen und Zeiten.
Die ruhige und angenehme Sprechweise von Frank Stieren passt sehr gut zu dieser tiefgründigen Geschichte.
Eine ungewöhnliche, berührende und gleichzeitig spannende Familiengeschichte. (