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Laddar... Alice I Have Been: A Novel (utgåvan 2010)av Melanie Benjamin
VerksinformationAlice I Have Been: A Novel av Melanie BENJAMIN
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Det finns inga diskussioner på LibraryThing om den här boken. I really loved this book. One of my favorite pieces at the Met is one of Dodgson's (aka Lewis Carroll) photgraphs of Alice Liddell, the caption mentions the mysterious circumstances of their relationship and I've always been curious about it. I don't know much about the actual occurences but based on the author's note, it seems like she did a wonderful job melding what is and isn't known with her vision of what happened in Alice Liddel's life. I also found her character Alice to be very human and relatable, and I liked that it showed her at different points in her life. Really good stuff :) This was one of those books that I wanted to love. It was a book about how narrative shapes one's identity and the identities that are forced upon us to perform, the identities we envision for ourselves and the distance between these idealized selves and the way in which we're perceived. Or, at least that was the book I wanted it to be. In reality, this book was more like an Austen novel: focused on British women and their prospects. Which, I mean, is fine, if you like that sort of thing. I guess I'm also not enough of a historical fiction lover. The creepiness with which Charles Dodgson was portrayed made my skin crawl. I half wanted to shake the book and say: "You know he was a real person, right? You can't just make up whatever you want about him." I think the way that Dodgson (and JM Barie) tend to be portrayed in retrospective fictional pieces as sketchy pedophiles says a lot of really negative things about our society and without getting into a feminist rant, it was hard to read this book without internally getting into a snit over it. I have never actually read the story of Alice in Wonderland or any of the other Alice books (I have seen the animated movie though), and I thought this sounded interesting. It was a good book, kind of a little slow in some parts, but kept a decent pace throughout. I didn't know that Lewis Carroll was a pen name, and had no idea of this background. I wonder, though, how much of this book is accurate and how much is poetic license. The author states at the end that Alice's and Dodgson's letters were burned, so we'll never know for sure how true this book is. I know the author did all the research she could and made it as accurate as evidence would allow. All in all, this was a good story, and it makes me want to finally read the original story, along with some other biographies to see what other authors have made of this history. It's pretty funny that this month I have read "Still Alice" and now have just completed "Alice I Have Been" . . .I'm not sure I ever read a book with the word Alice in the title since Alice in Wonderland, not to mention two books in which the title describes Alice in a state of being. I digress. This book is a fictionalized autobiography of Alice Pleasance Liddell, the inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. We meet Alice at three pivotal periods of her life: childhood, young adulthood, and elderly Alice. In my mind, the writing of this story is akin to a beautiful woman dressed in an overcoat. You can see she is beautiful, and you are basically dying for her to remove her coat so you can see if she's really as gorgeous as you think. And she won't take off the darned coat. The writing just aches with suspense even though the story is truly a simple one. The first section raises the question of whether Carroll is in fact a pedophile, and it does it without one ounce of unnecessary graphic description . . .yet, you are on the edge of your seat with concern for Alice. My only issue was that the first two segments were so well done and engaging that the third segment paled a bit in comparison. It felt a bit rushed as we fast forward to Alice in her eighties and that detaches the reader a bit from the character we've really grown to care about. The bottom line is Alice's life is a far cry from Wonderland, and I found it just as fascinating as the story she inspired. Inspirerades av
Fiction.
Literature.
Historical Fiction.
HTML:BONUS: This edition contains an Alice I Have Been discussion guide and an excerpt from Melanie Benjamin's The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb. Few works of literature are as universally beloved as Alice??s Adventures in Wonderland. Now, in this spellbinding historical novel, we meet the young girl whose bright spirit sent her on an unforgettable trip down the rabbit hole??and the grown woman whose story is no less enthralling. But oh my dear, I am tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful? Alice Liddell Hargreaves??s life has been a richly woven tapestry: As a young woman, wife, mother, and widow, she??s experienced intense passion, great privilege, and greater tragedy. But as she nears her eighty-first birthday, she knows that, to the world around her, she is and will always be only ??Alice.? Her life was permanently dog-eared at one fateful moment in her tenth year??the golden summer day she urged a grown-up friend to write down one of his fanciful stories. That story, a wild tale of rabbits, queens, and a precocious young child, becomes a sensation the world over. Its author, a shy, stuttering Oxford professor, does more than immortalize Alice??he changes her life forever. But even he cannot stop time, as much as he might like to. And as Alice??s childhood slips away, a peacetime of glittering balls and royal romances gives way to the urgent tide of war. For Alice, the stakes could not be higher, for she is the mother of three grown sons, soldiers all. Yet even as she stands to lose everything she treasures, one part of her will always be the determined, undaunted Alice of the story, who discovered that life beyond the rabbit hole was an astonishing journey. A love story and a literary mystery, Alice I Have Been brilliantly blends fact and fiction to capture the passionate spirit of a woman who was truly worthy of her fictional alter ego, in a world as captivating as the Wonderl Inga biblioteksbeskrivningar kunde hittas. |
Deltog i LibraryThing FörhandsrecensenterMelanie Benjamins bok Alice I Have Been delades ut via LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Pågående diskussionerIngen/ingaPopulära omslag
![]() GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyKlassifikation enligt LCBetygMedelbetyg:![]()
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I felt so many emotions when I was reading from disgust, heartbreak, annoyance, happiness, sadness you name it I probably felt it with this read. I enjoyed that the author used Alice's real events and created a story from her viewpoint. (