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Laddar... The Friend: A Novel (191 GRAND) (urspr publ 2018; utgåvan 2019)av Sigrid Nunez (Författare)
VerksinformationThe Friend av Sigrid Nunez (2018)
Books Read in 2019 (85) » 9 till Books Read in 2021 (153) Favorite Animal Fiction (135) Top Five Books of 2018 (294) Top Five Books of 2022 (369) Books Read in 2018 (2,618) Laddar...
Gå med i LibraryThing för att få reda på om du skulle tycka om den här boken. Det finns inga diskussioner på LibraryThing om den här boken. "La protagonista y narradora de esta novela es una escritora neoyorquina que pierde de forma inesperada a su gran amigo y mentor, y de forma no menos inesperada se ve obligada a hacerse cargo de su perro –un enorme y artrítico gran danés–, que se ha quedado solo y traumatizado por la súbita desaparición de su amo. La protagonista no tendrá otro remedio que llevárselo a su minúsculo apartamento, arriesgándose a que la echen porque en el edificio está prohibido tener animales. Y así, con el trasfondo del duelo por el amigo y el amo desaparecido en trágicas circunstancias, se desarrollará la singular y bellísima historia de la amistad entre una escritora solitaria y un perro que se ha quedado sin dueño…". (Descripción editorial). "The Friend" is a very good novel. Let me rephrase that. "The Friend is a good novel despite the fact that its main character is an academic who liberally quotes major twentieth-century writers and thinkers. But even if you're sort of reader who recoils when they read about yet another main character who teaches at some MFA program at some Midwestern university, thereby proving that the oft-repeated dictum that you should write what you know is demonstrably wrong, you should give this one a chance. Even if you don't like dogs -- and trust me, I don't -- you should give give it a try. The friend that is referred to in the title is both the central protagonist's former mentor, recently found dead by his own hand,, and man's best friend, in this case a Great Dane who, though he doesn't yet suffer the indignities of age, is rapidly getting on in (dog) years. There are other deaths here, too. The dog in question cannot process the death of its owner, while the main character, a teacher of creative writing at the university level, worries about the death of literature. I feel fairly confident that the awful and hilarious stories she tells about her newest students -- all of whom are digital natives who can barely remember a world without smartphones and barely seem to know what literature is even for -- are true. We don't always expect to lose our friends in middle age: it's clear that our narrator did not, and neither, for that matter, did the Great Dane: it waited faithfully by the door for its departed master until his widow could take no more. If deaths that are chosen are especially heartbreaking, an enormous dog that she must take care of but whose presence she cannot fully explain in her life proves a remarkably apt metaphor for the enormous, irrational shock that a death like this can deliver. At the same time, the dog also represents a strange persistence here: we witness the Great Dane's dogged (oh, ha) insistence on surviving despite the genetically-determined odds, its vet's cold-eyed yet somehow comforting realism, and the very real and slightly ridiculous physicality of a canine that's bigger and heavier than many human beings. In another sort of book, the narrator might have been left with an elephant or giraffe that she didn't know how to care for. Grief and grieving seem to be hot topics these days, and perhaps in the wake of a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans, that's hardly a surprise. But our narrator's delicate yet steadily improving attempts to adjust and appreciate her new roommate -- or life partner? -- also serve as a splendid metaphor for the slow, unwilling adjustments we are forced to make to death and finality, even though our narrator knows that her relationship with the "Dogge" will necessarily be a short one. Her introduction of Wittgenstein's definition of love "two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other" and the dog's genuinely affecting death scene -- which reminded me of nothing so much as the elegant, melancholy, beachy setting of "To the Lighthouse" -- suggests that the author knows how to borrow from the greats without seeming at all pretentious. This one's a worthy recipient of whatever prizes it might have been awarded. inga recensioner | lägg till en recension
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Gripande om kärlek, vänskap, sorg och det magiska bandet mellan en kvinna och hennes hundHyllade författaren Sigrid Nunez har vunnit prestigefyllda priser och översatts till fler än 20 språk. Nu översätts hon för första gången till svenska! Inga biblioteksbeskrivningar kunde hittas. |
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Google Books — Laddar... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Klassifikation enligt LCBetygMedelbetyg:
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