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Cargando... Buenas Noches, Buenos Airespor Gilbert Adair
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Gideon is a lonely, horny young Englishman who arrives in Paris to take up a teaching post in the local Berlitz, and becomes increasingly fascinated by the intoxicating atmosphere of erotic banter and bragging in the school's all-male and virtually all-gay common room. The moment has surely arrived for him, too, to overcome his own chronic timidity and actually do what he has only ever dared fantasize about. Yet Gideon has a secret - one he is prepared to share with nobody but the reader, a secret he is finally obliged to confront, with surprising results. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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The French language and explanations thereof are a major problem. Like many cookery articles, Adair liberally sprinkles his novel with French phrases and sentences, often translating even quite simple things. And, OK, it’s perhaps amusing for non-French speakers to learn what ‘bite’ means in French: I once taught English in France for a few years and well remember a large group of French teenagers I took on holiday to England rolling about the coach with laughter on seeing a billboard which called a Mars bar (or something similar) ‘The Big Bite’. But then why doesn’t Adair also translate ‘mes semblables, mes frères’ on the final page of the novel? Perhaps because Gideon/Gilbert would then have to explain that this is a slight mis-quotation from Baudelaire and… No, that would be advertising one’s cleverness, pasting it on the wall for all to see.
In the end, it’s the tedious (and very unfunny) jokes that destroy the book: if we generously suggest that they come from the timid Gideon himself, desperate to impress with his perceived sparkling wit, then one or two jokes would have been enough; but as I feel that it’s Adair’s sense of humour we’re reading, this is a more serious matter. What kind of readership is Adair aiming at with this novel? One of the jokes that, er, stands out for me is the gay club called 'The 400 Blow Jobs', a pun on Truffaut's famous New Wave film The 400 Blows. Tee-hee, snigger, but surely he wasn't imagining that early adolescents would read this? And presumably he didn't give the French because the joke doesn't work in translation: an example of what Gideon would perhaps have called 'having your gâteau and eating it'. As another example, an encounter with a short-tongued beau is pondered on afterwards: ‘Was I sexy, though? Wath I theckthy?' This is just one of a number of witticisms based on the way people pronounce words, and the novel would have been so much less worse for their omission.
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