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Cargando... Eight Hours from Englandpor Anthony Quayle
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"As I climbed on I thought, 'This is the end then. I have often wondered how it would come. Now I know. Any moment a bullet will smack into me, and a khaki bundle that was Overton will go tumbling down the hill on to the beach . . .' " Autumn 1943. Realizing that his feelings for his sweetheart are not reciprocated, Major John Overton accepts a posting behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied Albania. Arriving to find the situation in disarray, Overton attempts to overcome geographical challenges and political intrigues to set up a new camp in the mountains overlooking the Adriatic. As he struggles to complete his mission against the chaotic backdrop of battle, Overton is left to ruminate on loyalty, comradeship, and the futility of war. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)823.914Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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The reason for the lack of direct, attention-grabbing action between British commandos, Albanian partisans and German soldiers is that Eight Hours from England is more memoir than novel. Quayle, later a famous actor perhaps best known to the target audience of this book for his role in The Guns of Navarone, had the very job within the SOE that he gives his protagonist here: to infiltrate Nazi-occupied Albania and co-ordinate the resistance movement there to ensure it's in line with the British war effort. Hewing very, very close to Quayle's own experiences – he even gives his protagonist, John Overton, his mother's maiden name – Eight Hours from England is restricted from some of the more thrilling avenues it might have pursued in the name of fiction and imagination. An early reference to Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (pg. 29), which had a similar scenario of an English-speaking man employed on partisan duty in a foreign land, only shows these limitations more starkly.
That said, if you accept Eight Hours from England as a war memoir rather than a novel, its qualities become much more evident. Quayle/Overton has a damned hard time negotiating with the various resistance groups in his littoral corner of Albania, and we witness a more nuanced take on resistance operations during the war than the usual depiction of co-ordinated patriots desperate to kill Nazis and sabotage rail lines. Quayle's Albanians need coaxing, bribing, flattering, and all of the other natural things that get airbrushed out of the historical record, and while his protagonist's need to politick and "haggle with a lying shepherd over the price of a goat" (pg. 210) is less stimulating than emptying a tommy-gun, Where Eagles Dare-like, in the direction of a German patrol, it is more realistic. Frustration and disappointment might be unusual choices for a writer to seek to evoke in the story they tell, but Quayle gives a valuable record of what the war was really like for people in such circumstances. ( )