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Indlæser... Island of the Mad: A Novel (udgave 2017)af Laurie Sheck (Forfatter)
Work InformationIsland of the Mad: A Novel af Laurie Sheck
   Ingen Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog.  Jakujin | May 31, 2019 |  ingen anmeldelser | tilføj en anmeldelse
Following on the heels of her exciting and widely acclaimedA Monster's Notes, and with Sheck's characteristic brilliance of language,Island of the Mad follows the solitary, hunchbacked Ambrose A., as he sets out on a mysterious journey to Venice in search of a lost notebook he knows almost nothing about. Eventually he arrives in San Servolo, the Island of the Mad, in the Venetian Lagoon, only a few minutes' boat-ride from Venice. At the island's old, abandoned hospital which has been turned into a conference center, he discovers a mess of papers in a drawer, and among them the correspondence and notes of two of the island's former inhabitants--a woman with a rare genetic illness which causes the afflicted to gradually become unable to sleep until, increasingly hallucinatory and feverish, they essentially die of sleeplessness; and her friend, a man who experiences epileptic seizures. As the sleepless woman's eyesight fails, she wants only one thing--that her friend read to her from Dostoevsky's great novel,The Idiot, a book she loves but can no longer read herself. As Ambrose follows their strange tale, everything he has ever known or thought is called into question. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsIngenPopulære omslag  
 Google Books — Indlæser...GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit: (3.33)
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And yet, and yet. It failed to move me. Sheck revolves around those passages in the life and works of Dostoyevsky that are most significant to me, too (of course: 'D's Empathy' most closely expresses my own reception of D. You didn't ask, but my 'truest' scholarly interpretation is the D. chapter in Aileen Kelly's Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers Between Necessity and Chance). Sheck's iteration and citation of those moments x20 did not charge them with further significance but drained them for me. I'm scared now I've overdosed on the encounter between Myshkin and the murderer Rogozhin, when I've read The Idiot 5-6 times and don't mean to stop. In D.'s novel, these are a few pages at the end of 600pp. Here it is rehashed, without addition, unto surfeit. D. told his boyhood story of Marey the peasant several times, but not nearly as frequently as Sheck. I am now sick to the back teeth of Marey the peasant, which does a disservice (it's the ultimate sacrilege to say that, and I'll regret it).
This is a non-novel. Which is fine, although out of tune with D. who wrote novels, known for deep-dive into people (and he'd almost certainly be perplexed by the intellectualisation of his content in this work). It seemed to me 'magical' without an anchor in 'realism', with a couple of over-weird and under-developed protagonists of Sheck's, otherwise populated by the casts of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and selected D. novels; along with D. biography, the painter Titian and documentation of a plague in Venice. There's extensive endnotes and huge bibliography.
Dammit, Pilate features heavily -- he wandered in out of Bulgakov -- and the first novel I ever wrote, my childhood novel, was about Pilate: This should have been perfect for me! I'll stick to her pieces on D. in mags. She also has two on The Idiot and the conception of Island of the Mad.:
https://granta.com/best-book-1868-dos...
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertain...
I still rec it for Dostoyevsky types. I don't know what you'd make of it if you aren't. (