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Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: In this comedic novel, an English professor collides with disaster at the peak of the Cold War Shortly after his plane first grazes the tarmac in the eastern European nation of Slaka, Dr. Angus Petworth is beset by a cavalcade of misadventures. A university lecturer and seasoned international traveler, Petworth is nevertheless unprepared for the oddities of culture and circumstance that await him on the other side of the iron curtain. In two eventful weeks, Petworth gives an incendiary interview, is seduced by a femme fatale, and becomes embroiled in a plot of international intrigue, all of which conspire to give the mild, unassuming professor way more than he bargained for. Satirizing everything from critics and diplomats to Marxism and academia, Malcolm Bradbury's Rates of Exchange is a witty and lighthearted novel of cultural interchange at the height of the Cold War.… (más)
I found this novel entertaining and enjoyable, given its academic protagonist on an European academic jaunt. Plausible and humorous barely-satirical situations worthy of a quiet afternoon read. ( )
This one is written pleasantly enough, but it has not aged well. In "Rates of Exchange," our hero, a professor who deBy als with less-than-pressing linguistic controversies at a third-rate British university, finds himself somewhat adrift during a two-week visit to an invented but vaguely Balkan Soviet satellite. Adventures with an irresponsible Foreign Office couple, an alluring, vaguely hippie-ish dissident writer, and, inevitably, his official guide, who easily slots herself into the role of a strict-but-fond mother, follow. By the time that this one came out, I can't imagine that most of the satire here hit too hard, and the dissident writer's impassioned paean to creative spontaneity seems a trifle romantic in the second decade in the twenty-first century. One gets the idea that "Rates of Exchange" is supposed to be about one rather bored British man's reawakening after a quiet midlife crisis, but Pettworth, our protagonist, is seldom interesting enough to sustain our interest, even in that context. How he manages to attract the amorous attentions of the Eastern European women he meets is another question without any real answers, though the relationship between him and his guide is left ambiguous enough -- and drawn well enough -- to give us a reason to keep reading. "Rates of Exchange" is good enough for a plane or a beach, but only just. Thank God I read it in quarantine. ( )
His last novel, ''The History Man'' (1975), was celebrated in England as an indictment of the excesses of the academic revolution of the 1960's. Its celebrity grew after it was adapted into a popular television serial.
''Rates of Exchange,'' which was a finalist in the prestigious Booker Prize competition in Britain this year, is a very different sort of book. Suddenly, here the professor of English is the theorist. This densely written book, in which dialogue appears on the page in unparagraphed chunks, is a novel about an idea. It is an astonishing tour de force. Mr. Bradbury has invented an entire country, essentially mythic although Eastern European in origin, to sustain a proposition laid out before us in various forms in the course of the book.... While ''Rates of Exchange'' may not be an altogether successful work, it is nevertheless one of the most exciting, original and worthwhile novels to appear in Britain recently.
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
'You have a quarrel on hand, I see,' said I, 'with some of the algebraists of Paris; but proceed.'
- Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter
The language of this country being always upon the flux, the Struldbruggs of one age do not understand those of another, neither are they able after two hundred years to hold any conversation (farther than by a few general words) with their neighbours the mortals, and thus they lie under the disadvantage of living like foreigners in their own country.
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
It seems to me the further east you go the more unpunctual are the trains.
- Bram Stoker, Dracula
Dedicatoria
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
For my brother Basil with all my love
Primeras palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
If you should ever happen to make the trip to Slaka, that fine flower of middle European cities, capital of commerce and art, wide streets and gipsy music, then, whatever else you plan to do there, do not, as the travel texts say, neglect to visit the Cathedral of Saint Valdopin: a little outside the town, at the end of the tramway-route, near to the power station, down by the slow, marshy, mosquito-breeding waters of the great River Niyt.
Citas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
"A pen. Please, your pen," says the man. Agleam with the glow of literate contact, Petworth reaches into his pocket and produces his silver Parker ballpoint: an old travelling companion.... the man bows, smiles, holds up the silver pen, and moves off into the crowd with it.
He is an expert on real, imaginary and symbolic exchange among skin-bound organisms working on the linguistic interface.
information without context becomes redundancy, or noise.
The car begins to move; Petworth notices a pair of human hands scraping at the window ... a small hand wriggles in, waving in the fingers a bright silvery pointed object ... "It's my pen," says Petworth.... "You lent to him this, your good pen?" ... "Well, I think you are lucky he brings it back to you. That is Parker, very good."
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: In this comedic novel, an English professor collides with disaster at the peak of the Cold War Shortly after his plane first grazes the tarmac in the eastern European nation of Slaka, Dr. Angus Petworth is beset by a cavalcade of misadventures. A university lecturer and seasoned international traveler, Petworth is nevertheless unprepared for the oddities of culture and circumstance that await him on the other side of the iron curtain. In two eventful weeks, Petworth gives an incendiary interview, is seduced by a femme fatale, and becomes embroiled in a plot of international intrigue, all of which conspire to give the mild, unassuming professor way more than he bargained for. Satirizing everything from critics and diplomats to Marxism and academia, Malcolm Bradbury's Rates of Exchange is a witty and lighthearted novel of cultural interchange at the height of the Cold War.
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