American Stranger

American Stranger
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.
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فرمت کتاب

ebook

تاریخ انتشار

2018

نویسنده

David Plante

ناشر

Delphinium Books

شابک

9781504050128
  • اطلاعات
  • نقد و بررسی
  • دیدگاه کاربران
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نقد و بررسی

Kirkus

November 1, 2017
The comfortable but unmoored life of a Jewish graduate student "always looking for what was not there" is punctuated by encounters with three men, each challenging in a different way. Can any of them supply what's missing?A gloomy, Victorian air hangs over Plante's (Worlds Apart: A Memoir, 2015, etc.) new novel, which, while modern in setting, seems to exist in a timeless parallel universe. Its heroine is Nancy Green, the daughter of Jewish refugees from Germany who are now middle-class, secular New Yorkers whose indulgence of their only child has not prevented Nancy's "dark moods" and longings. Although studying for a master's degree in English (with a focus, tellingly, on Henry James) at Boston University, Nancy seems adrift. She's drawn to complicated men, the first of whom, Aaron, is a Hasidic Jew in the process of converting to Catholicism in order to become a monk. The second is Yvon, a Catholic Franco-American from Rhode Island, a "lonely loner" in thrall to his needy, suicidal mother. After Nancy's impassioned but troubled relationship with Yvon ends, her next involvement is with a British lawyer, Tim--Jewish, chilly, and intermittently abusive--whom she marries. Living in London, Nancy tries to be a society wife (Plante offers a somewhat caricatured portrait of the upper-crust circle Tim strains to join, though as a Jew he will always feel like an outsider), but after three miscarriages and then Tim's confession of infidelity, she finally acts for herself. Simultaneously realistic and abstract, Plante's narrative is divided between his solemn, fastidious scene-setting and more abstract intellectual inquiries. Nancy's downbeat, winding search for love, identity, and belonging is scarcely resolved but does conclude in a familiar place.A questing new work from an accomplished writer--elegant, cerebral, not entirely convincing.

COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.



Booklist

December 1, 2017
After a decade-long immersion in memoir, Plante (Worlds Apart, 2015) returns to fiction with a brooding variation on his nonfiction American Ghosts (2005), an inquiry into his French Canadian and Catholic upbringing in Providence, Rhode Island. Here that realm exerts an all-too-powerful force on Yvon, a college student in Boston. New Yorker Nancy Green, Plante's spiritually and emotionally adrift protagonist, is also studying there. She is far more worldly and privileged, yet she, too, dwells apart as the daughter of Jews who escaped Nazi Berlin. Enthralled by Henry James, she pirouettes through a series of baffling and painful relationships, falling for a Hasidic Jew who is converting to Catholicism; living with Yvon, a passionate lover unable to cope with life; and marrying a seemingly practical Jewish Egyptian Londoner who proves to be deeply wounded by his family's forced exile from Alexandria. Nancy becomes an American stranger in England, just as Yvon is in the U.S. Plante's exquisitely sensitive novel of displacement, isolation, loss, and longing is rendered in intimate, darkly enrapturing scenes of snow, haunted rooms, and desolate wanderings.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)




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