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Cargando... Harvest (2013)por Jim Crace
  
  ) zizabeph | May 7, 2023 |  The community attached to the manor has just finished harvesting the fields and look forward to the annual celebrations followed by a day of rest. However, some mischief makers have accidentally set fire to one of the farm buildings. When three strangers happen upon the community, they are seen as scapegoats and a chain of events is triggered which will bring about the collapse of their carefully managed rural idyll. Their kindly master has also been widowed and with no heirs, the title to the property falls into his wife's cousin's hands. He has plans to convert the land to sheep farming which requires limited man power. Walter Thirsk's world crumbles over a matter of days. The descriptive writing conjures strong images of life how it was lived in times past and of the grim reality experienced by these rural workers. (  ) HelenBaker | Apr 11, 2023 | During the celebrations, an act of arson occurs that burns down the Master's dovecote. While the villagers know who the guilty parties are, they allow the blame to be shifted to three itinerants camped on the outskirts of the village. This action gives rise to the second harvest in Crace's novel; a bitter harvest for the villagers of the consequences stemming from this flagrant injustice. Crace is clever in that he never locates his story temporally. We could be reading about a remote modern community or a community in the Middle Ages. In doing so he plays up the universality of some of his themes: the relentless march of progress, fear and resentment of outsiders and, above all, the love for the land itself and the deeper meaning of occupying a place beyond purely economic gain. Crace writes beautifully and conveys Walt's somewhat mixed feelings for his adopted village very well. Some of the descriptions of the land and the village lifestlye seen through Walt's eyes are truly lyrical. This is much more the sort of writing that I would expect to be winning prizes rather than the genre novels favoured more recently. (  ) gjky | Apr 9, 2023 |  ) siok | Sep 26, 2021 | powerlessness, the soil, the barley... Toward the end, the metaphors seemed to me a little heavy handed, but overall a tremendously moving book! audrey0510 | Aug 26, 2021 |
 In some ways, every novel by Jim Crace is about a sort of apocalypse; his characters are always faced with the shifting of the world, and the conflict arises from their attempts to either avoid change or adapt to it. What’s amazing is how varied his apocalyptic moments are, and The Harvest is no exemption. ... An amazing novel, The Harvest is both an historical piece and a reminder of how hard it is to adapt to change, and how quickly we will turn on those we perceive as “other" when we are threatened. Crace writes with a particular, haunting empathy for the displaced. Indeed, displacement doubles as his theme and as his storytelling strategy. By transposing contemporary anxieties onto distant times he allows us to feel them afresh. To say as much is not to pigeonhole him as an abstract or formulaic writer: his plots may be epic, but his sentences carry a sensual charge. “I slide my hand across the rough mattressing,” a sleepless Thirsk remarks, reaching out for the dependable past, “and find comfort in the hollows where my Cecily has slept (and died), where her shoulders and her hips have left their body ghosts.” “Harvest” is shadowed by body ghosts and soon-to-be-ghosted body politics. “I stand at the threshold of the gleaning field,” Thirsk tells us, “and wonder what the future has in mind for me.” From that threshold, he must adapt to cutthroat times or be scythed down by history. In his compassionate curiosity and his instincts for insurgent uncertainty, Crace surely ranks among our greatest novelists of radical upheaval, a perfect fit for our unstable, unforgiving age.  It’s a simple thing to get lost in British author Jim Crace’s stark, evocative prose. Lulling us with the poetic cadence of a story set in a rural landscape sometime in the past, he recreates an ancient Britain that’s surprisingly recognizable This is a novel with plenty of incident but little drama, creating its considerable power, instead, through Walter's mesmerising narrative. At the end, it may not be too fanciful to conflate Walter and Crace, as the narrator steps out of bounds and says farewell to a way of life.  (“I’m a very hard-line post-Darwinist atheist”), and we must take him at his word, despite the plethora of Christian symbols in the book. Which leaves us to wonder why he has written what amounts to a parable, almost quaint in its archaic diction and tone. If you like your stories with an epic flavour, and don’t mind archetypes for characters, Harvest is for you. But there’s something to be said for the straightforward realism of such works as Being Dead, Crace’s 1999 novel that begins with the brutal killing of a middle-aged couple and continues with a microscopic examination of their decomposing corpses, the narrative all the while echoing down through the 30 years of their relationship. It is far less ghoulish than it sounds, and much more compelling. PremiosDistincionesListas de sobresalientes
Fiction.
Literature.
Historical Fiction.
HTML:SHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year On the morning after harvest, the inhabitants of a remote English village awaken looking forward to a hard-earned day of rest and feasting at their landowner's table. But the sky is marred by two conspicuous columns of smoke, replacing pleasurable anticipation with alarm and suspicion. One smoke column is the result of an overnight fire that has damaged the master's outbuildings. The second column rises from the wooded edge of the village, sent up by newcomers to announce their presence. In the minds of the wary villagers a mere coincidence of events appears to be unlikely, with violent confrontation looming as the unavoidable outcome. Meanwhile, another newcomer has recently been spotted taking careful notes and making drawings of the land. It is his presence more than any other that will threaten the village's entire way of life... No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
Debates activosNingunoCubiertas populares
 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: (3.87)
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2013 Booker longlist: Harvest by Jim Crace
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