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Indlæser... The Clothes They Stood Up In (1996)af Alan Bennett
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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. What a quirky little book! A middle-class couple return home from the opera to discover that everything--every single item--has been removed from their apartment, leaving them only with "the clothes they stood up in." But why? Who? And what does it reveal about their marriage?? ( ) The Clothes They Stood Up In ist Alan Bennetts erste Geschichte. Wie die Romane von Charles Dickens, die zuerst in Zeitschriften veröffentlicht wurden, erschien sie ursprünglich in der London Review of Books - die, wie der Autor sagt, "für mich (und nicht nur, weil ich gelegentlich dazu beitrage) die lebendigste, seriöseste und auch radikalste Literaturzeitschrift zu sein scheint, die wir haben".
What would you do if you lost, at one fell swoop, every one of your possessions? What if a thief were to come in and take not only your television and your jewelry but your dirty dishes, your underwear, your light bulbs, even your toilet paper? This is what happens to Mr. and Mrs. Ransome, the bourgeois, habit-bound couple in Alan Bennett's sharp new novella, THE CLOTHES THEY STOOD UP IN (Random House, $14.95). It comes as quite a shock to them to discover just how much their lives have been controlled and defined by their objects, and when they are suddenly relieved of them the couple's reactions expose the irreconcilable differences in their characters: Mr. Ransome rigidly carries on as though nothing has changed, while his wife begins to feel rebellious twinges of -- dare she admit it? -- freedom and adventure. But then their paraphernalia is restored to them as mysteriously as it was taken away, and ''life returned to what Mrs. Ransome used to think of as normal but didn't now, quite.'' Their marriage, and they themselves, have subtly changed. "The Clothes They Stood Up In'' was a best seller in Britain, where Bennett, the author of the plays ''Habeas Corpus,'' ''Forty Years On,'' ''The Madness of George III'' and countless other films and television shows, is rightly thought of as a national treasure. The book will probably not do quite so well here, for the traits personified by the Ransomes -- emotional constipation on the husband's part, an almost pathological diffidence on the wife's -- are English vices and not American ones. (Our own run on quite different lines.) But it is a witty, dark piece of work, a happy evening's read and a tantalizing mental challenge to those of us who, like the Ransomes, find their lives encumbered and their senses blunted by too much stuff. HæderspriserDistinctions
The Ransomes had been burgled. "Robbed," Mrs. Ransome said. "Burgled," Mr. Ransome corrected. Premises were burgled; persons were robbed. Mr. Ransome was a solicitor by profession and thought words mattered. Though "burgled" was the wrong word too. Burglars select; they pick; they remove one item and ignore others. There is a limit to what burglars can take: they seldom take easy chairs, for example, and even more seldom settees. These burglars did. They took everything. This swift-moving comic fable will surprise you with its concealed depths. When the sedate Ransomes return from the opera to find their Notting Hill flat stripped absolutely bare--down to the toilet paper off the roll (a hard-to-find shade of forget-me-not blue)--they face a dilemma: Who are they without the things they've spent a lifetime accumulating? Suddenly the world is full of unlimited and frightening possibility. But just as they begin adjusting to this giddy freedom, a newfound interest in sex, and a lack of comfy chairs, a surreal reversal of events causes them to question their assumptions yet again. The Ransomes' bafflement is the reader's delight. Alan Bennett's gentle but scathing wit, unerring ear for dialogue, and sense of the absurd make The Clothes They Stood Up In a memorable exploration of where in life true riches lie. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Indlæser... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit:
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