Современная зарубежная литература
Различные книги в жанре Современная зарубежная литератураBetrachtungen einer Barbarin
“Asal Dardan traut sich, von den Zwischenorten zu erzählen, von der immerwährenden Suche nach Verortung, und sie stellt damit die dringenden Fragen an unsere Gesellschaft.” Lena Gorelik Als Kind iranischer Eltern ist Asal Dardan in Deutschland aufgewachsen, die Erfahrung des Exils hat sie geprägt. In einer erhellenden Auseinandersetzung mit der deutschen Gesellschaft begibt sie sich auf die Suche nach einer gemeinsamen Sprache, nach der Überbrückung des ewigen Gegensatzes von „Wir“ und den „Anderen“. Immer ist ihr Blick überraschend, immer ist ihre Analyse scharfsichtig. Da ist das geflüchtete Kind, das Trost in Spitzwegs heimeligen Bildern findet, die auch Hitler so gut gefielen. Da sind die bürokratischen Rentenbescheide der sardischen Nachbarin, deren Inhalte niemand entschlüsseln kann. Da werden die Goldfische vom persischen Neujahrsfest in die Freiheit entlassen und eigene, neue Traditionen gewählt. Sprachlich brillant und stilistisch elegant schlägt die Autorin Bögen von der ganz persönlichen Erfahrung zum gesellschaftlich-politisch Brisanten und zeigt auf, dass Zusammenleben bedeutet, Differenz anzunehmen.
Entangled Objects
Entangled Objects is a contemporary pilgrim's progress, the story of three very different yet interconnected women. As the story advances, their overlapping lives reveal the mysterious entanglement of quantum behavior.
Fan is a struggling adjunct professor. When she and her husband move to Korea so he can investigate the cloning of human cells, she finds herself having an affair, even as her husband gets caught trying to publish falsified research.
Filomena is a maid who begins to steal clothing from the rooms of wealthy guests, dressing up and haunting the hotel where she works. As she questions her own sexuality, she becomes obsessed with televangelists and begins communicating anonymously with hotel guests through text messages, delivering reassurances and warnings.
Finally, there is Cate, a reality star who manages her own reality television career and that of her family. She orchestrates the alcoholic binges of her rock-star husband, edits the family's daily footage, arranges re-shoots, and crafts her world as well as that of her mother and sisters.
As the characters' lives converge, all three confront the question: when are we most ourselves, when we realize the selves we aspire to, or when we are unadorned? Their meeting will leave them all changed forever.
Three Continents
Three Continents is a tale of the clash between the easternized West and the westernized East. Twins Harriet and Michael-spoiled, quixotic, and extremely wealthy-have eschewed the vapid world of cocktail parties and adulteries that seems to be their inheritance. In constantly searching to complete themselves, they become the perfect fodder for the charismatic Rawul of Dhoka and his sinister Sixth World Movement.
Travelers
In Travelers, Jhabvala examines the unlikely convergence of four wanderers: Asha, an imperious Indian widow, Raymond, a curious Englishman, Lee, an American looking for her spiritual core, and Gopi, an impressionable young student. With a mixture of impassioned dialogue and subtle narrative, Jhabvala examines the psychological and cultural forces that wend their paths into inextricable knots of love and conflict.
The Visitor
The current revival of the work of Maeve Brennan, who died in obscurity in 1993, has won her a reputation as a twentieth-century classic—one of the best Irish writers of stories since Joyce.Now, unexpectedly, Brennan's oeuvre is immeasurably deepened and broadened by a miraculous literary discovery—a short novel written in the mid-1940s, but till now unknown and unpublished. Recently found in a university archive, it is a story of Dublin and of the unkind, ungenerous, emotionally unreachable side of the Irish temper.The Visitor is the haunting tale of Anastasia King, who, at the age of twenty-two, returns to her grandmother's house—the very house where she grew up—after six long years away. She has been in Paris, comforting her disgraced and dying mother, the runaway from a disastrous marriage to Anastasia's late father, the grandmother's only son. «It's a pity she sent for you.» the grandmother says, smiling with anger. «And a pity you went after her. It broke your father's heart.»Anastasia pays dearly for the choice she made, a choice that now costs her her own strong sense of family and makes her an exile—a visitor—in the place she once called home.Penelope Fitzgerald, writing of Brennan's story «The Springs of Affection,» said that it carries an «electric charge of resentment and quiet satisfaction in revenge that chills you right through.» The same can be said of the The Visitor, Maeve Brennan's «lost» novel—the early work of an incomparable master.
Book Doctor
Everyone wants to write a book. Arlette Rosen knows this and earns her living helping strangers with their book ideas: books about Derrida and dieting, books of psychic exercises, a compendium of Alzheimer's jokes, and of course, an infinite number of books about love. Enter Harbinger Singh: a tax lawyer still in love with his ex-wife and set on revenge, who believes he can win her back by writing a book. All he needs is help with the actual writing. The lives of Arlette and Harbinger intertwine in unexpected ways as they meander along a path filled with writing, sex, movies, love, music, and continual revelation. Cohen has crafted a modern-day romance and a hilarious, knowing look at the troublesome process of bringing a book into the world—for readers and struggling writers everywhere.
The Briefcase
Tsukiko, thirty-eight, works in an office and lives alone. One night, she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, “Sensei” in a local bar. Tsukiko had only ever called him “Sensei” (“Teacher”). He is thirty years her senior, retired, and presumably a widower. Their relationship–traced by Kawakami’s gentle hints at the changing seasons–develops from a perfunctory acknowledgment of each other as they eat and drink alone at the bar, to an enjoyable sense of companionship, and finally into a deeply sentimental love affair.As Tsukiko and Sensei grow to know and love one another, time’s passing comes across through the seasons and the food and beverages they consume together. From warm sake to chilled beer, from the buds on the trees to the blooming of the cherry blossoms, the reader is enveloped by a keen sense of pathos and both characters’ keen loneliness.
Negative Space
While sitting on a French terrace overlooking a three-hundred-year-old olive grove at sunset, a man listens as his wife confesses her love for someone else. Preparing to leave after twenty years of marriage, she details her erotic and emotional life, a confession that leaves her husband spent but delirious with love for her. The imminent loss of the passion of his life leads him to experience the power of desire, grief, and flushed obsession—and thus begins this riveting monologue at the end of a marriage, one that is mesmerizing with anger and regret.Entirely alive in these intense moments, the husband examines every experience, every feeling that floods his mind with grief and anticipation. And this need, this experience, becomes one of absolute truth, as the story itself becomes composed of complicating love and loss.Negative Space joins Steiner's earlier fictions—such as Bathers, Dread, and The Catastrophe—in evoking the dark texture and brilliant detail of erotic loss. The result is an exploration of heartbreak and sexual obsession the reader will not soon forget.
Angels Go Naked
Margaret Rose is a talented but nervous violinist given to bouts of stage fright and unrequited love; Webster Hale is a biologist who, on principle, refuses to kill animals in order to study them. In Angels Go Naked, a novel told in stories, Cornelia Nixon, a writer whose gift is apparent on every page, follows this vexed love story and the collision course they call their life together.Their connection is never in doubt, though Webster is appalled by the urban underbelly of Chicago, which Margy calls home. He refuses to have children because the earth is overrun with humans, and Margy feels compelled to expiate an early abortion by having a live child. Webster’s gloomy view of global disaster threatens to triumph in the final story, as their close friend Calvin is dying of AIDS beside a moribund Lake Michigan. Meanwhile, the one child Webster has agreed to conceive appears destined for stillbirth because Margy herself was poisoned as a fetus by misguided medical intervention.At the end of this sad, funny, moving tale, there may be hope, as life and love prove unexpectedly resilient, even in the twenty-first century.
The Eden Hunter
In 1816, five years after being captured and sold into slavery, Kau, a pygmy tribesman, flees south into the Spanish Florida wilderness, determined to find a place where he can once again live in harmony with nature. Both haunted and driven by his memories of Africa, he embarks on an epic quest through the treacherous pinewoods, swamps, and river bottoms of the Southern frontier. He encounters renegades and thieves, traitors and mercenaries, and the dark prophetic magic of the forest before he finally finds himself within the walls of a remote fort on the Apalachicola River. There, he becomes the reluctant companion of several hundred runaway slaves once recruited by the British to fight in the War of 1812, then abandoned to fend for themselves against the American forces intent on destroying their remarkable stronghold.Inspired by actual events, and at times both violent and beautiful, The Eden Hunter provides a fascinating glimpse at a forgotten, bloody chapter in our nation's history through the eyes of one truly remarkable hero.