Gilbert Adair (1944–2011)
Autor de The Holy Innocents
Sobre El Autor
Gilbert Adair was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on December 29, 1944. He wrote numerous books during his lifetime including A Night at the Pictures, Myths and Memories, Hollywood's Vietnam, Flickers, and Surfing the Zeitgeist. His novels, Love and Death on Long Island and The Dreamers, were adapted mostrar más into films, the later by Adair himself. He also helped write the screenplays The Territory, Klimt, and A Closed Book. He won the Author's Club First Novel Award for The Holy Innocents in 1988 and the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize for his book A Void in 1995. During the 1990s, he wrote a regular column for the Sunday Times. He died in early December 2011 at the age of 66. (Bowker Author Biography) mostrar menos
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Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Nombre canónico
- Adair, Gilbert
- Nombre legal
- Adair, Gilbert
- Fecha de nacimiento
- 1944-12-29
- Fecha de fallecimiento
- 2011-12-08
- Género
- male
- Nacionalidad
- Scotland
UK - País (para mapa)
- UK
- Lugar de nacimiento
- Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
- Lugar de fallecimiento
- London, England, UK
- Lugares de residencia
- London, England, UK
Paris, France - Ocupaciones
- novelist
poet
film critic
journalist
literary theorist
translator - Premios y honores
- The Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize (1995)
- Biografía breve
- Gilbert Adair was a Scottish novelist, poet, film critic and journalist. Born in Edinburgh, he lived in Paris from 1968 through 1980. He is most famous for such novels as Love and Death on Long Island (1997) and The Dreamers (2003), both of which were made into films, although he is also noted as the translator of Georges Perec's postmodern novel A Void, in which the letter e is not used. Adair won the 1995 Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize for this work.
In 1998 and 1999 Adair was the chief film critic for The Independent on Sunday, where in 1999 he also wrote a year-long column called "The Guillotine." In addition to the films made from his own works, Adair worked on the screenplays for a number of Raúl Ruiz films. Although he rarely spoke of his sexual orientation in public, not wishing to be labelled, he acknowledge in an interview that there were many gay themes in his work. He died from a brain hemorrhage in 2011.
(source: Wikipedia)
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This is an early work on cinema and the Vietnam War. The war itself ended but six years before publication. Adair's study, therefore, was one of the first to assess the body of cinematic work produced during the entirety of the war and soon thereafter. It ends with analyses of The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now. But the large wave of Vietnam War related cinema that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s came to late for inclusion. On the other hand, Adair does great service in going back and picking up on early post World War II American films on Indochina, notably Saigon, Jump into Hell, and China Gate. Too, films in which the war figures as dramatic influence or background come into play, such as Taxi Driver and the cult film, Billy Jack. If there is one problem with Adair, it is that he is still too close to his subject matter in 1981. He is too engaged. And often times ends up being preachy or doctrinaire. Still, I can't think of a better volume of work that captures the response to these films during the late 1970s and early 1980s.… (más)
When I read something like this, I marvel at how exquisite Lewis Carroll's originals were. I suppose it's easier to transform Alice into another medium (opera, film, painting) rather than try to replicate the will-o-the-wisp genius of those first two books. Gilbert Adair does a fair job, but I end up being disappointed at times by how similar it is, and at other times by how dissimilar it is--you can't win for trying. Some of the conceptions didn't seem quite right, to me, and I think he's better with wordplay than with characterization: most of his puns worked, but none of the new introductions had anywhere near half the panache of even a minor original character.
So worth reading if you're curious, but I was never in a place where I felt "golly, I can't wait to return to this book because I'm enjoying it so much," that never happened.
(I feel much the same reading other Carroll works--Sylvie and Bruno aren't a match for the Alice books, not by a long shot).
(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s).… (más)
So worth reading if you're curious, but I was never in a place where I felt "golly, I can't wait to return to this book because I'm enjoying it so much," that never happened.
(I feel much the same reading other Carroll works--Sylvie and Bruno aren't a match for the Alice books, not by a long shot).
(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s).… (más)
1 
ashleytylerjohn | 2 reseñas más. | Sep 19, 2018 |
ashleytylerjohn | 2 reseñas más. | Sep 19, 2018 | 
Deze sprankelende tekst van Gilbert Adair – met dezelfde titel als het befaamde essay van Roland Barthes – kon me wel boeien. De these dat de intenties van de schrijver er bij het interpreteren van een tekst in het geheel niet toe doen wordt door Adair op vermakelijke wijze ‘ondergraven’ (in hoeverre hij dat ook op academisch sluitende wijze doet, is voor u een weet en voor mij een raadsel …) door een amper te vertrouwen auteur/professor op te voeren, wiens voornaamste drijfveer het is vooral zichzelf letterlijk uit elke interpretatie van zijn eigen teksten te wissen.
Het eindigt met een moordmysterie, en een face-to-face tussen schrijver(?) en lezer.
Een boek om ooit, aandachtiger, te herlezen.… (más)
Het eindigt met een moordmysterie, en een face-to-face tussen schrijver(?) en lezer.
Een boek om ooit, aandachtiger, te herlezen.… (más)
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- #17,649
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So I bought this book on a whim in first year at University, after hearing about the Roland Barthes theory with the same name. I’m fascinated by Barthes and thought this would be a book that looks at that theory from a literary point of view. I read the blurb, realized it was better than that, and bought it. In third year at University, I was given the opportunity to write an assignment about the book (and several other books too) for a class about Contemporary British Fiction. Naturally, being the kind of person that I am, I jumped at the chance.
Have you heard of Paul de Man? He was a literary scholar in the United States who, after his death, was found to be an anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizer in his youth, and had published various popular articles about his views under a pseudonym. This caused a huge outrage in the scholarly community at the time.
This book takes inspiration from the real life events surrounding de Man’s death, and the author – speaking in first person the entire way through – is going through a similar situation. When he was younger, living in France during World War II and the Nazi occupation of Paris, the young aspiring writer was approached by the Nazis to use his skill with a pen to write articles for their newspapers. He did not necessarily believe most of what he was writing, but he reasoned that he could either do that, or get himself punished for not obeying orders from the people in charge at the time. In order to save his own skin, the author writes the articles. Years later, when he has finally moved to America and become a literary scholar of his own regard, the author finds that his past has come back to haunt him in the form of a student of his and her aggressive boyfriend.
This novel is absolutely wonderful and a brisk short read. It has a brilliant amount of drama in it that isn’t too much, and really keeps the story going all the way through. It also gives you insight into the possible situation in the de Man scandal. Because his articles were discovered after his death, nobody can ever confirm that he ever really was a Nazi sympathizer. Through this novel, Adair gives us the chance to explore the perspective that maybe he wasn’t a terrible person; just somebody who wanted to save himself from one of the worst situations he could have been in.
Final rating: 4/5. I just wish this book had been longer, but it’s length is also a part of this charm.… (más)