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Cargando... The last garden (2017)por EVA HORNUNG
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. Eva Hornung is a Victorian-born author who now lives in rural South Australia, and her love of the bush environment dominates this intriguing novel. I’ve had The Last Garden on my TBR since I bought it last year, but it’s been long-listed for the 2018 ALS Gold Medal so this seems like a good time to read it. #Understatement I wasn’t very keen on Dog Boy (which won the 2010 Prime Minister’s Award, so I was well-and-truly out of step there!) but The Last Garden is a less confronting novel. It does, however, include grotesque elements that Hornung seems to favour. This is how it begins: On a mild Nebelung’s afternoon, Matthias Orion, having lived as an exclamation mark in the Wahrheit settlement and as the capital letter at home, killed himself. Horrific, yes, but irresistible too. There are puzzling elements in this striking introduction. A quick Google search told me that ‘Wahrheit’ is a German word meaning ‘Truth’, but I had to read on to confirm my suspicion that the Wagnerian-sounding ‘Nebelung’ was derived from an archaic calendar. Each chapter, one for each month of the year, is prefaced by a quasi-religious tract describing the climate, but if Nebelung, preceding the Old High German ‘Christmond‘, is November, then these events are not taking place in the northern hemisphere. The European calendar’s ‘Wintermond’ isn’t an appropriate name for a mild November like this: Now we have Nebelung, but what a Nebelung! The grass ripens at a marvellous height, the baby animals gambol at their mother’s sides, the heavens are mild, the rain enriching, the sun warm. Our gardens are places of praise. Our houses are places of worship, our fields ring with the songs of scythe and reaper and our children’s songs of joy. No fog or mist darkens our world, no ice bars our labours. No snow falls. We plan marriages and we harvest as we have sown. (p.1) This is a 19th century German religious settlement in South Australia… To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/03/22/the-last-garden-by-eva-hornung-bookreview/ sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
The settlement of Wahrheit, founded in exile to await the return of the Messiah, has been waiting longer than expected. Pastor Helfgott has begun to feel the subtle fraying of the community's faith. Then Matthias Orion shoots his wife and himself, on the very day their son Benedict returns home from boarding school. Benedict is unmoored by shock, severed from his past and his future. Unable to be inside the house, unable to speak, he moves into the barn with the horses and chooks, relying on the animals' strength and the rhythm of the working day to hold his shattered self together. The pastor watches over Benedict through the year of his crazy grief: man and boy growing, each according to his own capacity, as they come to terms with the unknowable past and the frailties of being human. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)829.3Literature English Old English literature, ca. 450-1100 BeowulfValoraciónPromedio:
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The community lives by the Book of Seasons: prescriptions from their founder about what they should be doing at all times of the year, in order to be prepared for the coming. The founder's son, Pastor Helfgott, continues to preach to his flock but lacks his father's zeal.
Matthias' son Benedict, who discovered his dead mother and father, begins a slow descent into madness. He moves from the house to the barn, lives with the animals and neglects the farm and the strictures of the Seasons. The community avoids contact with him because they cannot deal with the enormity of what happened. Benedict subsumes his need for human contact by looking after his horses and ceases to speak. Pastor Helfgott continues to visit him and worries that his madness may become worse. But Helfgott has a deeper worry: is Benedict some sort of harbinger of the Messiah that his father foretold? And what would that mean for Wahrheit?
This is a splendid book. Parts of it reminded me of Equus in the portrayal of Benedict's relationship with his horses. It is beautifully written, with bucolic descriptions of the changes in the countryside, the farming activities and the cultural events as the seasons shift. It also captures an important element of the immigrant experience; farmers from the other side of the world adjusting to a new reality. Finally, it tells a thoughtful story of religious doubt and the blights that can hide even in the gardens of paradise.
The Last Garden has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, and I think it would be a worthy winner. ( )