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...

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005)

af Lydia Millet

MedlemmerAnmeldelserPopularitetGennemsnitlig vurderingOmtaler
3711168,295 (3.62)29
The three dead geniuses who invented the atomic bomb- Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and Enrico Fermi-mysteriously appear in Sante Fe, New Mexico, in 2003, nearly sixty years after they watched history's first mushroom cloud rise over the New Mexico desert. One by one, they are discovered by a shy librarian, who takes them in and devotes herself to them. Faced with the evidence of their nuclear legacy, the scientists embark on a global disarmament campaign that takes them from Hiroshima to Nevada to the United Nations. Along the way, they acquire a billionaire pothead benefactor and a growing convoy of RVs carrying groupies, drifters, activists, former Deadheads, New Age freeloaders, and religious fanatics. In this heroically mischievous, sweeping tour de force, Lydia Millet brings us an apocalyptic fable that marries the personal to the political, confronts the longing for immortality with the desire for redemption, and evokes both the beauty and tragedy of the nuclear sublime.… (mere)
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 29 omtaler

Engelsk (9)  Fransk (2)  Alle sprog (11)
Viser 1-5 af 11 (næste | vis alle)
Dans les pays et les familles riches l’envi d’être rassuré est la première forme de censure (p144)

Il savait qu’il existait un lieu pour le réconfort, mais quel était-il ? D’un côté la loyauté et la confiance, de l’autre, le septicisme, la rigueur, le sens commun (…) au bout du compte, s’il s’agit prendre le parti de la raison ou de la rigueur par moments, il croyait que le monde extérieur, avec ses jugements et ses catégories était le plus dangereux (p149)

Dans ce pays, la liberté est un euphémisme pour l’égoïsme (p151)

Et aussi, ils savent que la plupart des conventions et des rituels avec lesquels nous remplissons notre temps ne sont rien de plus. Tant de gestes quotidiens semblent avoir été inventés pour épuise le jour (p162)

Les hommes qui tenaient encore les stands de cirage de chaussures dans les aéroports n’étaient-ils pas les vestiges anachroniques et déplacés d’une époque révolue ? Ces hommes ne servaient pas à ce que l’on ait des chaussures bien cirées mais à ce que l’on s’assoira au-dessus d’eux. (..) Leur technique commerciale et le produit qu’ils vendaient , c’était la servilité (p170)

Les états proposent des solutions qui postulent le pire de la nature humaine (p176)

Les armes sont pleines de désir, frémissantes. Elles sont les instruments de l’expression d’un désir (p180)

Nous nous sommes réveillés dans une société en faillite (..) une société qui depuis que nous l’avons quitté n’à rien fait, absolument rien fait d’autre, depuis cette fraction de seconde après le flash de Trinité, que de mourir de mort lente (..) Et quelque chose nous a choqué plus que tout, c’est que cela ne vous chique pas, cela ne vous indigne pas, cela ne vous épouvante pas, cette agonie de la civilisation sous nos yeux. Car il s’agit bien de l’effondrement de notre civilisation, mais pas seulement, c’’est un effondrement violent, li emporte toute la création avec lui. (P299)

Si seulement quelque chose pouvait sortir delà foule qui ne soit pas seulement de l’ordre de l’instinct ou du grondement, si seulement les gens pouvaient faire et rendre leur voix. S’ils pouvaient juste parler hônnetement, à défaut d’être occupés, de quelque chose qui les dépasse, si quelque chose pouvait les rassembler en dehors du sport ou de leur intérêt privé. Quelque chose qui implique une alliance mais pas de victime, qui reporterait non sur la fièvre de dominer mais que une volonté qui transcende le temps au lieu de s’arc-bouter contre lui, une volonté consciente d’incarner l’infini et l’éphémère. Mais toute alliance, toute résolution, semblait vouloir servir la vengeance : s’emparer, avoir. Quand elle se mettait au service d’une cause étrangère, elle devenait fragile, dérisoire, jamais elle n’avait la puissance du rouleau compresseur , du mécanisme bien huilé. Quand les hommes construisent des machines de guerre, c’est toujours pour se faire et rendre eux. (P342)

Rien ne vient du dedans, car on naît sans âme. C’est le monde qui nous en donne une. L’amour était l’étoffe de l’âme et le temps l’étoffe de l’amour. c’est le monde qui nous donne l’âme qui est la notre (p354)

Noous avons obscurci le monde… nous avons oublié ce qu’était le monde… Nous le confondons avec nous (p375)
Plier la terre à notre convenance (p379)

Cette chimère que nous portons en nous, l’illusion de pouvoir conrtrôler la perception qu’on a de nous. Mais en fait ce que nous croyons être et notre existence face à autrui, ce sont deux phénomènes distincts. Des apparitions séparées (p469)

Je me suis accroché à l’idéal de la connaissance mais je me trompais. Nous nous trompions tous. Ce n’est pas la connaissance que nous avons besoin, pas du tout. Les individus ont besoin d’apprendre, mais la société a besoin d’autre chose, de la vibration de la lumière sur la mer, de l’instinct qui nous pousse à nous nicher les uns contre les autres pour nous tenir chaud. Nous avons besoin d’empathie, nous avons besoin d’yeux qui sache encore pleurer. (…) au début, nous essayions de progresser dans la connaissance de l’univers et à ce stade ce n’était pas encore dangereux. Mais bientôt nous avons préféré la connaissance de nous-mêmes à celle de l’univers, non pas par curiosité mais pour prouver quelque chose. Nous avons voulu prouver que nous étions à l’image de Dieu. Alors, l’univers et nous-mêmes nous sommes confondus à nos yeux. (P560) ( )
  folivier | Oct 3, 2021 |
I had never heard of Millet until recently, when I read that she was really great. So I picked up her acclaimed longish novel and sort of hated it from the beginning. It was a little hard to get into from the beginning. Once the premise began to unfold, I found it pretty appealing, but I didn't love the way she structured the book or her manner of writing.

The book is often a bit preachy, which I suppose is ok, but I felt like it could be done better. Often I thought the book felt like a mashup of Franzen's Freedom and some of Powers's books that try to ram interpersonal conflict up against some scientific conflict or notion. The result tends to be sort of unbelievable characters I'm not invested in and a general sense that while the aim was lofty and worthy, the execution didn't live up to it. This sort of book is always very disappointing.

Unbelievable characters were one of the chief flaws in this book. I can buy the fantastical idea that the fathers of the nuclear bomb have somehow been zapped into the future to go on a crusade against nuclear weapons -- I like the idea, in fact -- but I feel like when you're mixing absurdity with elements supposedly conforming to reality as we understand it, you sort of have to get the more prosaic reality bits right. So much of this book, and especially the relationship between Ann and Ben felt wooden and basically expedient, as if Millet knew she had to include sections in which people acted like normal people but didn't really know how to write them. In other words, it often felt like your standard potboiler but with lofty ambitions that it came nowhere near living up to.

It seems like another case here of every but me falling down over a wonderful book. Maybe I just didn't get it. Maybe what I read as clumsy writing was intentional, part of some bigger literary purpose I'm too dim to have picked up on. ( )
  dllh | Jan 6, 2021 |
novels this ambitious (nuclear science military-industrial complex American religion), fascinating, imaginative (Oppenheimer, Fermi and Szilard come back from the dead!), and funny (great satire of the sun belt rich) don't come along all that often. They should be read when they do.

But, as everyone who has read this book has pointed out, OPRH could have been cut by a quarter without really losing much of anything. The problem is: which quarter do you cut?

* Some readers could do with a great deal less of Ann and Ben's relationship. Their argument is generally not that Ann and Ben could be eliminated--they play an important narrative role, at least--but that there is far too much of them given how uninteresting they are.

* Some readers could do without the history of the USA's nuclear program. Their argument, in short, is "I hate learning. Keep facts out of my novels."

* I don't think anyone would want less of the final quarter: the story of Oppenheimer, Fermi and Szilard coming back from the dead. All three are wonderful characters; their actions dramatize perfectly the problems of scientific knowledge, social ignorance, political activism, and religious belief. That said, some would probably prefer a more convincing ending. Millet could have left it open, but this is a roman a these, and I understand why she ends as she does.

* Some readers could do without the philosophizing that the characters get up to, particularly Anne, who is given to thinking things like "If a country were more like a crowd, with feeling rippling among the ranks, instead of a network of institutions all distant from each other.... it would not control itself with such coldness and such economy. If a country were more like a body, then it might have a chance to know itself," (271). Is this satire? Ann/Millet must know that bodies don't know themselves, right? That bodies react to external stimuli without mediation? So if a country were more like a body, not only would it not know itself, it would probably start a war every time someone brought one too many bottles of wine back from the Rhine? (= geopolitical version of a mosquito bite). Later we get even more immortal thought along the bad-Rilke lines of wouldn't it be great to be an object so then you couldn't choose things and then you'd be content, why don't people just accept this objecthood and embrace it??? Because, Ann, then we'd all be dead.
Ben is guilty, too: "It is the world with its animals... tides and seasons, he thought: it is the world that gives us such a soul as we have. It gives us life and we all it our own," (274). If this seems a little less silly than Ann, don't worry, Ben will get absolutely moronic twenty pages later (293): "If the world gave us our souls, why were the souls so impoverished?" Because, you know, the world is so naturally full and perfect. "We have obscured the world, he said to himself... we have forgotten what the world is. We believe we are it. We can't see past ourselves to the world, he thought." Right, that's it! The world is perfect, it gives us our soul, but we've done something wrong with those souls, though I suppose the souls should have caused us to act as we did and... the naturalist's rather theological dilemma: if everything is natural, what causes evil?
Oppenheimer, Fermi and Szilard also get into a bit of the old cod-philosophizing, but at least with them it's often just a reaction to how much the world has changed since their last memories of it in the mid-century.

Now, you might think I've tipped my hand fairly heavily here, as to what I'd like to see less of. Yes, I like the very short bits on the history of nuclear weapons.

Obviously, you think, I object to the philosophizing. But not so, my friend! If I were to cut, Ann and Ben would get the axe. It's important to have some kind of domestic arrangement here, it holds the book together, but we only need connective tissue. Millet just doesn't make the very mild ups and downs of their relationship matter--in fact, the only time I was at all interested was when I realized Ann's obsession with the scientists could be read meta-narratively, as Millet's obsession with the scientists. That fits well with the most intelligent aspect of the novel: how to make the impossible choice between complete domestic happiness, and social activism. But it's a bad sign for the romance angle when it functions best as commentary on another part of your book.

Now, that said, the philosophy expounded here is *horrific*. I'm fine with books that philosophize, at great length. I object, however, to books that

i) stick words and thoughts in the characters' mouths, when those words and thoughts are fairly obviously those of the author. This is what a narrator is for: to say things the author thinks. Millet is too far into close third person for that to work. This is a technical issue that can't be overcome.

ii) go on at great length with *bad* philosophy. This is my third Millet book, and I'm fairly sure she's setting herself up as the Tolstoy of deep ecology. Nothing wrong with that, but if you want to make the case, for goodness sake, at least make it well. There's no reason to become a positivist ("what is is the world, and the world is right"). You can stop just short of that, at nature mystic; at least then you're not claiming that there's any rational basis behind the feelings outlined so clearly by Freud in his work on religion.

iii) expound a philosophy that directly contradicts the book's form, as here. You can't be a positivist, and write close third person. There is no close perspective in positivism, only bodies being pushed around.

That's an awful lot of criticism, so let me repeat: novels this ambitious, fascinating, imaginative, and funny don't come along all that often, and they should be read when they do. And, of course, I might be wrong: Millet might be presenting the deep flaws in ecological thought, and not affirming that thought itself. In any case, Millet forces you to think in ways that the average novelist can only dream of. As I said: Tolstoy of deep ecology. ( )
  stillatim | Oct 23, 2020 |
Hard to get into at first, but as the mysteries start unfolding, it becomes mesmerizing. Very unique plot and storytelling style. ( )
  captainsunbeam | Oct 16, 2020 |
J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard are transported to Santa Fe in 2000 immediately after the Trinity testing at Los Alamos. With Ann, a librarian, her husband Ben, a gardener, and Larry, a very rich countercultural layabout and his colorful friends, they set off in a trailer on a quest to convince the world of the evils of nuclear weapons.

The story culminates at the Washington National Monument, where Oppie, Fermi and Szilard are carried off by cranes (the ones made by the girl in Hiroshima?). It's a farce full of librarian jokes, and big swabs at the fundamentalist Christian right. Millet does, however, treat the scientists with respect, honoring their legacies both good and evil. Ann is prone to philosophical ponderings—solitude, responsibility, existential questions. She ends up in a smaller town than Santa Fe, cataloging images for the Very Large Array.

The author's outrage at how the bomb has shifted the whole moral tone is strongly and effectively conveyed. She interrupts the text in places with statistics on bomb tests, degradations to the environment. However, perhaps it is a little overwritten--it's 500 pages and could easily lose 100 of them. ( )
  deckla | Jan 5, 2019 |
Viser 1-5 af 11 (næste | vis alle)
Other than her apparent ability to conjure controversial historical figures from the beyond, Anne is an American Everywoman: she has a good job as a suburban librarian, a cute house, and a sexy husband who adores her and is eager to start a family; her grass seems fairly green. But instead of stagnating in her small town contentment, Anne persists in viewing the world as a threatening dystopia and can’t help but search around for something more largely meaningful to fill her days.
 
Du bliver nødt til at logge ind for at redigere data i Almen Viden.
For mere hjælp se Almen Viden hjælpesiden.
Kanonisk titel
Originaltitel
Alternative titler
Oprindelig udgivelsesdato
Personer/Figurer
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen Viden Redigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
Vigtige steder
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen Viden Redigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
Vigtige begivenheder
Beslægtede film
Indskrift
Tilegnelse
Første ord
Citater
Sidste ord
Oplysning om flertydighed
Forlagets redaktører
Bagsidecitater
Originalsprog
Canonical DDC/MDS
Canonical LCC

Henvisninger til dette værk andre steder.

Wikipedia på engelsk

Ingen

The three dead geniuses who invented the atomic bomb- Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and Enrico Fermi-mysteriously appear in Sante Fe, New Mexico, in 2003, nearly sixty years after they watched history's first mushroom cloud rise over the New Mexico desert. One by one, they are discovered by a shy librarian, who takes them in and devotes herself to them. Faced with the evidence of their nuclear legacy, the scientists embark on a global disarmament campaign that takes them from Hiroshima to Nevada to the United Nations. Along the way, they acquire a billionaire pothead benefactor and a growing convoy of RVs carrying groupies, drifters, activists, former Deadheads, New Age freeloaders, and religious fanatics. In this heroically mischievous, sweeping tour de force, Lydia Millet brings us an apocalyptic fable that marries the personal to the political, confronts the longing for immortality with the desire for redemption, and evokes both the beauty and tragedy of the nuclear sublime.

No library descriptions found.

Beskrivelse af bogen
Haiku-resume

Current Discussions

Ingen

Populære omslag

Quick Links

Vurdering

Gennemsnit: (3.62)
0.5
1 1
1.5
2 11
2.5
3 11
3.5 4
4 24
4.5 1
5 13

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 | 202,646,867 bøger! | Topbjælke: Altid synlig