| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
It seems to combine the best of the wonderful chaotic rush that life in adolescence can give you, when you're doing everything for the first of times; with the other pleasures - of age, now - of looking back on the past and realising personal time then is now becoming part of history.
Helprin catches that cusp dead on, naturally without pretentious artifice.
I'm a Brit, Welsh by background, and RF has an age-spanning resonance for me with 'Oh Lucky Man', a film made in 1974, directed by Lindsay Anderson, a 'new realism' Brit, socialist/surrealist theatre director. He's also famous for 'This Sporting Life' and 'If' - which is about English public schoolboys rebelling (I've just remembered the recent US school massacre and made the connection)and taking the guns from the school OTC armoury and attacking the parents and teachers as they come out from a memorial ceremony.
That was made in 1970, so I don't think the lawyers can class it as an influential video nasty.
'Oh Lucky Man' is a modern equivalent of a Mystery Play. Young Man is tempted, learns, becomes wiser in different ways, and then is plucked from the crowd to star in 'Oh Lucky Man'.
A similar focus on the intensity of experience of life with Helprin, but of 'American' as both immigrant and explorer - but a stranger always in his adopted lands - the subtitle of the book is, I seem to remember: Marshall Pearl, The Adventures of a Foudling.
Which, when you think about it, is actually a fairly Dickensian/middle Victorian sort of subtitle ?
Some keys are maybe there ? In RF, Helprin has created a Dickensian kind of sprawl of characterisation - though not as caricatured as Dickens; a span of history and class; and a hero with a self-creating will and destiny who keeps getting caught up in history.
Read this book !
P.S. Also read Alan Garner's collection of Essays
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
