HjemGrupperSnakMereZeitgeist
Søg På Websted
På dette site bruger vi cookies til at levere vores ydelser, forbedre performance, til analyseformål, og (hvis brugeren ikke er logget ind) til reklamer. Ved at bruge LibraryThing anerkender du at have læst og forstået vores vilkår og betingelser inklusive vores politik for håndtering af brugeroplysninger. Din brug af dette site og dets ydelser er underlagt disse vilkår og betingelser.

Resultater fra Google Bøger

Klik på en miniature for at gå til Google Books

Indlæser...

London: city of disappearances (2006)

af Iain Sinclair

Andre forfattere: Jonathan Meades (Bidragyder)

MedlemmerAnmeldelserPopularitetGennemsnitlig vurderingOmtaler
1773152,859 (3.16)8
An endlessly fascinating anthology of writing about streets, places and people that have disappeared in and from London 'A book full of richness, unexpected enticements, short sharp shocks and breathtaking writing' Guardian Welcome to the real, unauthorised London- the disappeared, the unapproved, the unvoiced, the mythical and the all-but forgotten. The perfect companion to the city. 'Exhilarating, truly wonderful, a cavalcade of eloquent writing. London demands an anthology like this to remind us of the irascible quirkiness of its residents, and we have Sinclair to thank for marshalling such a perverse and ultimately pleasurable exercise' Independent on Sunday… (mere)
Ingen
Indlæser...

Bliv medlem af LibraryThing for at finde ud af, om du vil kunne lide denne bog.

Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog.

» Se også 8 omtaler

Viser 3 af 3
A low 4 stars but still a 4. So Sinclair called up every writer he knows, gave them the subjects 'London' and 'Disappearance' and asked them to send him something.

So this isn't some organized decisive breakdown of london through the ages its a random collection of personal anecdotes, biography, history, poem, short story, essay and other odds and ends. I doubt more than a couple of pieces were written specifically for this collection.
The mix of writing styles is quite cool, although your bound to find one or two you can't stand.
Also if i was an english teacher grading these assignments a lot of people would be getting F's as many have very tenuous connections to the word 'Disappearance' :P.

There is a lot to like here. Literally a LOT, this thing is really long. I have an ebook but a hardcopy might be better, its the sort of book you leave lying around and randomly open and read.

But i do have some gripes, both to do with Sinclair's editing. He's made two attempts to add some sort of structure to this mess.
First he's corralled the pieces into various groupings based on their geographic location in London, not the worst idea. However in effect this has led to a very uneven reading experience as some groups are heavy on fact or fiction, history or biography, long entries or short ones etc.

The other attempt at structure is a piece of ligament called the 'Gazetteer of Disappearances and Deletions' a recurring piece that appears in each grouping. Having some sort of repeating section sounds good. This is made up of short entries mostly by either Sarah Wise, who does what seems to be well researched historical bits or Michael Moorcock who does bullshit.
You see Moorcocks entries here are all fiction but presented as fact. Now this might make sense to Sinclair, 'oh look at the thin line between fact and fiction'. But for me this felt insulting to the reader, insulting to Sarah Wise, insulting to history and even insulting to Moorcock. Especially since these entries are not just fictional but are references to other Moorcock stories, making him seem like an underhanded self promoter.

Anyway that was my biggest problem, apart from that its interesting stuff. I mean most of the best parts are biographical or historical and with that sort of thing its not going to blow your mind or anything best you can say is 'oh that was very interesting' :lol . ( )
  wreade1872 | Nov 28, 2021 |
I found this book somewhat frustrating on a number of fronts, not least because I felt that for someone it would be a wonderful book but that someone is not me. Iain Sinclair has a very particular style and approach in all his work, and this book is very Sinclair. I wanted to like it. It sounded fascinating in the introduction, but I soon became frustrated by the very layout of the book. The names of the fifty-nine 'contributors' (I'm not sure that Thomas De Quincy could properly be regarded as a contributor) appear in a block at the beginning of the book. The names run into one another with no gaps between names or initials, the only indication of the end of one person's name and the beginning of the next being that surnames appear in capital letters. The book is divided into twelve segments each of which is made up of a number of pieces by different writers but although each piece has a title the index does not list them. There are notes on contributors towards the back of the book (De Quincy is omitted - disappeared?) and finally a list of contributors appears in conventional form at the end of the book, with page numbers for their contributions. Where the contributions appear within the segments the piece starts with a title, but no author attribution until it ends. In fairness probably many anthologies are laid out like this without causing any difficulty, but in this book I wanted to know whose voice I was hearing, so for each piece I would have to go rummaging through the book to find its end and the author's name. I think it mattered to me for this book because it was set up that it would include fact and fiction, and what people remembered as fact, though others approached might remember it differently. Sometimes someone mentioned in one piece is the author of the next. It seems to me that one should know that in advance.

I gave up on the book partway through the first section, West End Final. It's a big book, over six hundred pages, and though I feel certain that I have missed some interesting stuff the commitment of time required was too great for something I was really only reading as a curiosity when I have a large stack of books that I really want to read. Of what I did read, the editing is clever as one piece leads into the next, but the book would be best read by someone with a substantial knowledge of the London fringe/underground culture of the mid twentieth century, as many of its places and people feature here. There are the Fulcrum Press poets, Better Books, Indica, the Raymond Revue Bar, the whole strange but not uncommon mix of art and criminality round the fringes. Many of the names and places were familiar to me, many were not. I think the book could be read as it stands but to be properly appreciated one would really need to know the people involved. I see that later sections of the book include fiction, poetry, and archive news reports, but with regret I am passing them up and passing the book back to the charity shop from whence it came.
  Oandthegang | Nov 10, 2015 |
An anthology of fragments and glimpses befitting it's subject. Sinclair has collected myriad prose which captures the London I live in-- a place of ghosts, absences and markers of what might have been.

Worth reading for De Quincey's ode to his first opium dealer: "The Disappeared Pharmacist."
( )
  allyshaw | Apr 4, 2013 |
Viser 3 af 3
ingen anmeldelser | tilføj en anmeldelse

» Tilføj andre forfattere (1 mulig)

Forfatter navnRolleHvilken slags forfatterVærk?Status
Iain Sinclairprimær forfatteralle udgaverberegnet
Meades, JonathanBidragydermedforfatteralle udgaverbekræftet
Du bliver nødt til at logge ind for at redigere data i Almen Viden.
For mere hjælp se Almen Viden hjælpesiden.
Kanonisk titel
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen Viden Redigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
Originaltitel
Alternative titler
Oprindelig udgivelsesdato
Personer/Figurer
Vigtige steder
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen Viden Redigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
Vigtige begivenheder
Beslægtede film
Indskrift
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen Viden Redigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
Looking for someone is, as psychologists have observed, perceptually peculiar, in that the world is suddenly organized as a basis upon which the absence of what is sought is bodied forth in a ghostly manner. The familiar streets about my house, never fully to recover from the haunting, were filled with non-apparitions.

Iris Murdoch
You don't disappear, you reappear, dead.

Ed Dorn
Tilegnelse
Første ord
Citater
Sidste ord
Oplysning om flertydighed
Forlagets redaktører
Bagsidecitater
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen Viden Redigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
Originalsprog
Canonical DDC/MDS
Canonical LCC

Henvisninger til dette værk andre steder.

Wikipedia på engelsk (4)

An endlessly fascinating anthology of writing about streets, places and people that have disappeared in and from London 'A book full of richness, unexpected enticements, short sharp shocks and breathtaking writing' Guardian Welcome to the real, unauthorised London- the disappeared, the unapproved, the unvoiced, the mythical and the all-but forgotten. The perfect companion to the city. 'Exhilarating, truly wonderful, a cavalcade of eloquent writing. London demands an anthology like this to remind us of the irascible quirkiness of its residents, and we have Sinclair to thank for marshalling such a perverse and ultimately pleasurable exercise' Independent on Sunday

No library descriptions found.

Beskrivelse af bogen
Haiku-resume

Current Discussions

Ingen

Populære omslag

Quick Links

Vurdering

Gennemsnit: (3.16)
0.5
1 2
1.5
2 2
2.5 1
3 3
3.5 1
4 5
4.5 1
5 1

Er det dig?

Bliv LibraryThing-forfatter.

 

Om | Kontakt | LibraryThing.com | Brugerbetingelser/Håndtering af brugeroplysninger | Hjælp/FAQs | Blog | Butik | APIs | TinyCat | Efterladte biblioteker | Tidlige Anmeldere | Almen Viden | 203,208,026 bøger! | Topbjælke: Altid synlig