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Indlæser... The Bodyaf William Sansom
Indlæser...
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Turning upon the smallest of hints, and taking the detritus of modern life - offhand diary entries, discarded cigarette ends, casual glances - as a series of clues, a London barber becomes obsessed with the idea of his wife's infidelity. In this masterfully told tale, jealousy, hatred and nostalgia stir uneasily in the quiet of London's post-war suburbia. First published in 1949, The Body is an excellent example of William Sansom's ability to suspend and play out momentary fears, building up to an altered vision where even the most familiar things are uncertain. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Indlæser... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.91Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999LC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit:
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For The Body rises from a different ground—a novel, expertly crafted by Sansom out of a molehill. It is seeded in what amounts to a sandbox, rooted as it is in an immature husband's absurd overreaction to a neighbor's leering glance. The novel flourishes swiftly, like a prickly weed, from the uncommunicative cracks of this self-hating husband's heart, feasting on his doubt and festering insecurity. Over another man staring over the wall at his attractive wife. The Body, then, is about a marriage that may soon be buried, because of a husband's jealousy and profound paranoia. A paranoia so profound its become perverse as the husband repeatedly "goes out of town" that he may spy on his wife and that ungodly garrulous, lascivious neighbor-paramour. Alleged paramour. Watching this extraordinarily double minded husband as he deviously befriends his wife's envisioned lover for pints at taverns all over town, concocting elaborate traps to prove himself a cuckold (and a cuckoo cuckold at that) in the very company of the vile offender, demonstrates exactly how pathologically overpowering and perverse the husband's paranoia has become. He'll do just about anything to contrive some future indiscreet rendezvous between the pair to "prove" there's been an affair, even as he's the one orchestrating it. Is a single unreciprocated glance, in the first place, automatic grounds for a spouse's jealousy and suspicion? That's the molehill William Sansom turned into a novel. A novel that may have been better executed and more believable as a long short story. Because even as I'd rate it a good but not great novel (perhaps "great" for a first novel, I won't quibble over that), it's still a novel at heart that's as shallow as a sandbox upon first inspection. Upon introspection, however, the novel gains major mass. One could say it embodies the depth of dunes. Holy shit, though, God forbid that such measly weaselly husks of human beings otherwise known as men indeed exist in this world who are as idiotic and insecure as the husband in The Body. And what could possess a wife to remain true to that, anyway, to her husband's faithlessness in her faithfulness? Are there really wives that forbearing and angelic in this world, willing to put up with such unjust and unfounded barrages of bullshit? What are the odds that this marriage, on the verge of being embalmed, can bounce back and survive?
Yet somehow, The Body has survived, barely, since its publication in 1949, even enduring decades of being out of print; survived largely, I suspect, because of both the underground but growing reputation of William Sansom's short stories and on the hard won approval of one Anthony Burgess, who included The Body in his influential 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 (published in 1984) and wrote, in part, of it:
"Sansom's ear, matching his eye, renders the idioms and rhythms of post-war lower-middle-class English with a frightening exactness. The final image that emerges in the self-tortured brain of the husband is of the human body growing old and unsavoury -- the broken toenails, the rough skin, the bad breath -- and the sexual urge as a kind of insentient insanity. It is what the sharpened eye is led to observe at last and it leads, in its turn, to a kind of resigned philosophy. By a paradox, Sansom mines into the human spirit by staying on the surface."
The surface of my tattered 1959 Penguin Books copy of The Body has sure seen better days. The cover, in fact, is held on by scotch tape. Who knows for how many years it languished, in the dust and dimly lit glory, on a long crowded shelf at the late great Acres of Books in Long Beach before I salvaged it, thanks to Anthony Burgess, in 2008, just before the store closed. The Body remained out of print until Faber and Faber reissued it in 2011. I believe it's worth the steep price to obtain, or I'd be happy to send you my copy. ( )