Questions of Travel

Questions of Travel
افزودن به بوکمارک اشتراک گذاری 0 دیدگاه کاربران 3 (1)

A Novel

مشارکت: عنوان و توضیح کوتاه هر کتاب را ترجمه کنید این ترجمه بعد از تایید با نام شما در سایت نمایش داده خواهد شد.
iran گزارش تخلف

فرمت کتاب

ebook

تاریخ انتشار

2013

نویسنده

Michelle de Kretser

شابک

9780316219242
  • اطلاعات
  • نقد و بررسی
  • دیدگاه کاربران
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نقد و بررسی

Publisher's Weekly

April 1, 2013
While her earlier books The Lost Dog and The Hamilton Case were meditations on the nature of art and mystery, de Kretser’s brilliantly observed new novel explores the meaning of travel. Borrowing a title from the poet Elizabeth Bishop, de Kretser evokes and subverts the tradition of the literary travelogue—the chronicle of the leisured, intercontinental quest for self-improvement. The book moves back and forth between the lives of two very different characters, Australian Laura and Sri Lankan Ravi. Laura’s early travels, like Bishop’s, are funded by a surprise inheritance; she trades art school for guidebooks as she sets out to see the world. The death of one of her twin brothers when Laura is a teenager creates a vague menace that later follows her from continent to continent, reinforced by a silent caller with an unknown agenda who wakes her in the middle of the night a few times each year. For Ravi, childhood is filled with the anxiety of limited opportunity, while the violence of the Sri Lankan civil war rages in the background. In his early life, he travels in his mind, whether to Japan or Silicon Valley; later, travel becomes necessary, a way to find safety in a brutal world. De Kretser creates the anticipation that Laura and Ravi’s paths will eventually cross, but an epigraph from E.M. Forster signals not to expect an epiphany when they do meet. While “Only connect!” is the message at the heart of Forster’s Howards End, de Kretser’s book severs strong ties and dissolves weaker ones, making the broken more broken. Coming together, Ravi and Laura plan a new journey that begins in guidebook banality and ends in disaster. While de Kretser doesn’t provide the expected satisfactions, she offers deadly darts of observation that puncture clichés and deflate false enthusiasm. In the end she leaves you flat on the ground, possessed of harder truths. Agent: Sarah Lutyens, Lutyens & Rubinstein.



Kirkus

March 15, 2013
Two travelers--a man from Sri Lanka and a woman from Australia--ultimately meet up as both their lives and their narratives intertwine. The story begins in the 1960s with Laura Fraser growing up in Sydney amid a gloomy family situation, for her mother has died and her father is emotionally remote. The only saving grace in her early life is her beloved Aunt Hester. When her aunt dies, she leaves enough money for Laura to spend some time seeing the world, and Laura's travels take her from India to London and points in between. Concurrently, Ravi Mendes is growing up in Sri Lanka. He has Roman Catholic schooling and a technological bent, and he gets involved with an equally tech-savvy friend in the early days of the Internet. Although Laura has numerous affairs but no serious relationships, Ravi gets married to Malini and has a child. Malini has strong political convictions that lead her to expose corruption in Sri Lanka, but this passion eventuates in her being brutally killed and dismembered. Ravi is distraught but also endangered, so he immigrates to Australia. Not so coincidentally, Laura has recently resettled there, eventually getting a job--appropriately enough--as a travel editor for European guidebooks. Ravi spends his time getting accustomed to a new and alien culture, anchoring himself in websites familiar from his previous life in Sri Lanka, and Laura continues to fritter away her time with meaningless affairs, fulfilling the definition of "modern love: traceless, chilling." Eventually, of course, and after an agonizingly long time, Ravi and Laura meet. De Kretser negotiates the fragmentation of her major characters with aplomb as well as with an aggressive but rhapsodic prose style.

COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.



Library Journal

Starred review from April 1, 2013

Awkward and diffident, Laura Fraser grows up in Sydney, Australia, feeling alienated from her family, her country, and her future prospects. But when she receives an unexpected inheritance and travels abroad, she slowly pieces together an independent life and self-identity during a transformative expatriate decade. Meanwhile, bookish Ravi Mendes comes of age in Sri Lanka as a witness to the horrors of the country's civil war. Wrenched away from home after escalating political violence destroys his family, Ravi arrives in Sydney as a refugee at the same time as Laura, who is finally returning from abroad. Their paths eventually cross at the apex of this exquisite, haunting novel. VERDICT Award-winning Australian/Sri Lankan writer de Kretser (The Lost Dog) is in wondrous form with this epic, savage tale of two lost souls. As she traces Laura's and Ravi's lives over four decades, de Kretser's style is poetic, indelible, and often breathtaking in its beauty. This novel of memory, transformation, and loss is not to be missed by readers who enjoy literary, multicultural fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 11/26/12.]--Kelsy Peterson, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.



Booklist

April 15, 2013
After his human-rights activist wife is slaughtered with her little son in Sri Lanka, Ravi flees to Sydney, Australia, where he faces prejudice as he applies for asylum and gets a job in computers with a big travel company. Laura works for the company as a tourism writer, having returned home from London, where Australia, with stars, aborigines, and cities so secondhand they need the outback, is regarded as exotic. More than all the multiple personal intricacies in Ravi's and Laura's alternating narratives, the contemporary work scene will grab readersthe corporate drivel (Moral indignation is not managerial), the office politics with the daily e-mails, the technician who installs new software and cannot explain how to use it. Best of all is the wry take on tourists. As a travel writer, Laura knows they do not want ordinary life: That is what they were on holiday from. Forget the unwilling travelers like Ravi, the soldiers, and the millions made homeless. This ironic, contemporary view of finding home makes for heartfelt drama.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)




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