Contents
Books open up new facets of perception of the world, help to find answers to questions that concern us. Book reviewer Elena Pestereva has chosen 5 novelties for your May reading.
Adventure
“Head in the Clouds” by Kate Atkinson
An exciting and funny story, with strong intrigue and adventure. Creepy, but not scary, in which you go headlong. When I want such prose, I choose Wells, or Jules Verne, or Pratchett – I thought only fantasy was good for this. But it turned out not – Kate Atkinson wonderfully adapted the metatext novel for this purpose.
Nora lives with her (seemingly) daughter Effie on a tiny island in Scotland, on an abandoned estate among wild cats, gannets, seals, moors and heather. Effie is an English student in Dundee. Nora, as it turns out, is only 17 years older than her. Effy talks about the university, classmates, teachers, boyfriend – a continuous routine with teapots, curtains and plots within plots: all teachers and students write books, their characters appear on the pages of our novel every now and then – it’s lucky that the publisher types them in different fonts. From the middle of the book, Nora’s story will follow – about diamonds, murders, heroism and the secret of Effy’s origin.
There will be eccentric old women and lots of tea, red dogs and structuralist criticism, rivers, bridges, bicycles and a constable who pretends to be a private detective. The novel is arranged in such a way that for 480 pages you will not unravel all its secrets, but you will really want to do it. Effie is a bit of an Atkinson. She studied there and at the same time, and, informing the reader through the lips of the heroine, “I eventually began to write detective novels -“ cozy ”, for timid readers,” of course, she speaks about herself.
Atkinson defines the genre of Cloudborne as a comic novel – and the humor in it is English. This is an abyss of allusions to world literature, a language game, hidden quotes, oxymorons, paradoxes that the translator Tatyana Borovikova has preserved in the text. He also has an epigraph from Carroll, which sets you up for a flight of fancy. Indeed, relationships between people can be seen as an endless series of tea parties and empty talk, or as a grand adventure. Everything is in the eye of the beholder. Some are lucky, they invent clouds for themselves, hover in them and generously share them with others.
Kate Atkinson “Throwing in the Clouds” Translation from English by Tatyana Borovikova. Alphabet, 480 p.
The act
“Pay It Forward” Katherine Ryan Hyde
This sentimental, very American novel, written in 1999, was made into a film starring Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt, and very successful. But when choosing between a film and a book, prefer the book: it is deeper, more poignant, more honest. Schoolteacher Reuben St. Clair gives the whole class an assignment: “Change the world.” Well, at least try.
His student, 13-year-old Trevor McKinney, proposes a system: help three people and ask them to “pass on” the kindness to the next three. Thus, there will be a progression of helping others. And the poor, the hungry, the persecuted will not remain in time. The idea, at first glance, is utopian, but it formed the basis of an international movement and still inspires – to show care, to provide support – to things that are not so large-scale, but quite real.
Katherine Ryan Hyde Pay It Forward. Translation from English by Vladimir Misyuchenko. Eksmo, 384 p.
Relations
“Between Heaven and You” Lorrain Fouche
The Frenchwoman Lorrain Fouchet wrote two dozen books, but the story of the widower Jo and his children is the first translation into Russian. Lou dies, having lived a long life in an ideally happy marriage in ideal seaside Brittany. In her will, Jo read that he was an excellent lover, an excellent husband and a useless father – and that the woman he loved asked him to improve.
Their son is a nervous henpecked. Their daughter is too promiscuous. Jo is unbearable, misses his wife every second and communicates with children, only to fulfill her will. Family relationships are complex, but Fouche is a master at describing people, their characters and feelings. This is a very warm book about the fragility of life, the value of family, and the effort to understand the other.
Lorrain Fouche Between Heaven and You. Translation from French by Natalia Vasilkova. Phantom Press, 416 p.
Personality
Гендер VS пол
The division of mankind into men and women is conditional. Post-feminist theorists write about this rather convincingly, and in particular the American philosopher Judith Butler, who never supported the demand for equality between men and women, since she considers gender to be a social construct.
She teaches at George Washington, Johns Hopkins and Berkeley. Her course of lectures on gender politics and democracy, bodily vulnerability, coalitions and interdependence formed the basis of the book. Butler refers to Foucault and Buber, uses the terminology of modern philosophy and introduces his own, creating a basis for research.
This is a complex text, but Butler does not pretend to be a popularizer – unlike the Hungarian linguist, Professor Adam Nadasdy. For many years he has been explaining to readers that he wants to be happy more than normal, that he writes about gay men, because one of them set the goal of his life to dispel prejudices.
For example, Nadashdy talks about the composer Britten: he met his husband Peter Pierce in the mid-1930s, and since 1939 they lived together. In 1953, the police came to their house to find out what was going on between them. In 1976, Britten died, and the queen sent her condolences to Pierce, thus recognizing him as a widower. So Nadashdy recalls the obvious: there is no norm, the person is primary, and social institutions are secondary. Being yourself is more important than conforming to the scale.
Judith Butler, Notes on a Performative Theory of the Gathering. Translation from English by Dmitry Kralechkin. Ad Marginem, Garage, 248 p.
Adam Nadashdy “Thick-skinned Mimosa: To be happy – or normal?”. Translated from Hungarian by Vyacheslav Sereda. Publishing house of Ivan Limbakh. 184 p.