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Lädt ... South of Broad: A Novel (2009. Auflage)von Pat Conroy (Autor)
Werk-InformationenSouth of Broad von Pat Conroy (Author)
Lädt ...
Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. I was first drawn to Conroy's writing; it is as lush as the azalea and camellias that make Charleston such a lovely city. I loved the way the first chapter introduced all the characters and described them so perfectly that they were set in my mind for the entire book. What an improbable group of friends, but Leo was able to pull them all together. I admired his quiet compassion and wisdom; he always seemed to know the right way to handle any situation and move it toward the best outcome. The depth of the friends' caring for each other when they reunited as adults and embarked on the trip to San Francisco to save Trevor was maybe a bit unrealistic, but Conroy made me believe, and I was even inspired. In the end all the loose ends were tied up nicely. It was undoubtedly a melodrama but one that drew me in completely. ( ) For once, I'm recording my impression immediately after finishing a book. The reason is that basically the end of the book left me with a surprising amount of energy and desire for action. I'm sitting here questioning how much I should believe that, but it's hard not get caught up in Conroy's characters' feelings. Leo's triumph and nice, novelistic ending is not one that I necessarily think I can achieve, but it still manages to leave me feeling good. I'd say this is typical of the book as a whole, where an entire cast of characters appears and moves around in a way that - while not predictable exactly - lends itself to feeling like it's on rails, with just a hint too much deus ex. I don't feel that seriously harms the novel though for me; I take it with an understanding of suspension of disbelief and the enjoyment is conscious rather than consuming. Here's what I wrote in 2010 about this read: "Easy read, with a flair for the dramatic. Come on, nobody talks constantly about gay sex like Trevor Poe, or has such a consistently smart aleck tongue like "Toad" (the narrator). Still a good story to keep company in the winter . . . And great eulogy to Charleston."
Conroy thanks his editor Nan A. Talese in his acknowledgments, but South of Broad merely adds urgency to the question of what it is this woman does, exactly, apart from pick up the tab. Conroy remains a magician of the page. As a writer, he owns the South Carolina coast. But the descriptions of the tides and the palms, the confessions of love and loss, the memories “evergreen and verdant” set side by side with evocations of the “annoyed heart” have simply been done better — by the author himself. Conroy is an entertaining storyteller -- he has a corker of a final twist here -- yet much of “South of Broad” shows a weakness for emotional fireworks, two-dimensional characters and rough or purplish prose. Conroy reels his teenage characters through cliché showdowns of racial and class divisions, trying to make those broad social issues the backdrop to the personal stories in the narrative -- including the recurring presence of the shadowy and vicious Poe father. But Conroy doesn't have anything new or interesting to say about the racial and class divides. And too many of his characters are set up as types instead of fully fledged people, incapable, at times, of anything more than the most mundane of dialogues. Prestigeträchtige AuswahlenBemerkenswerte Listen
Leopold Bloom King, the narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local high school. His mother, an ex-nun, is the high school principal and a well-known Joyce scholar. After Leo's older brother commits suicide at the age of thirteen, the family struggles with the shattering effects of his death. Eventually he becomes part of a tightly knit group of high school seniors that includes friends Sheba and Trevor Poe, glamorous twins with an alcoholic mother and a prison-escapee father; hardscrabble mountain runaways Niles and Starla Whitehead; socialite Molly Huger and her boyfriend, Chadworth Rutledge X; and an ever-widening circle whose liaisons will ripple across two decades-from 1960s counterculture through the dawn of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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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:
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