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Cargando... Cloudpor Eric McCormack
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. This is a peculiar novel. Its blending of magic realism and Gothicism just doesn’t appeal to me. Harry Steen finds an old book in a bookstore in Mexico; its title refers to an isolated village in Scotland where he lived briefly and where something happened which “would complicate the entire course of [his] life thereafter” (57). That book inspires him to chronicle his life from an impoverished childhood in the slums of Glasgow to his financially secure life in Canada as a successful businessman. The Wikipedia entry on McCormack states, “McCormack's heroes tend to have an academic/bookish bent, been born in Scotland, and have settled in the same part of Canada that he did. They also travel extensively, often by ship, and meet eccentric fellow travelers who relate to them their life stories and interests.” This is certainly the case with this novel’s protagonist. After graduating from university, he sails to Africa and South America but eventually settles in Camberloo, which seems to be a bizarre blending of Cambridge and Waterloo, two cities in southern Ontario where the author lived. In his travels Harry meets many odd fellows. It is the number of strange fellows which stretches credulity. There’s Jacob Nelson, a violinist with exhibitionist tendencies; Charles Dupont who becomes involved in horrific surgical/anthropological experiments; and Gordon Smith, a wealthy entrepreneur who enjoyed exotic sexual customs on remote tropical islands. Each of these men has considerable influence on Harry’s life. Harry is not a likeable character. He is so self-centred and seems to feel himself hard done by, a wronged victim. He admits that he spent his life blaming someone else for his “self-serving behaviour over the years” (384). It is difficult to feel much for someone so self-involved. Every time he drinks he repeats his story of a love lost and becomes maudlin. Yet everything falls into his lap: jobs, sexual encounters, marriage, and wealth. Women are constantly throwing themselves at him as if he were irresistible when there is little attractiveness in his personality. According to the Wikipedia entry, another characteristic of McCormack’s writing is the use of coincidence, with characters often meeting in unusual circumstances years after they have parted. Again, this is the case in this novel. Chance and coincidence are found in real life, but the amount of coincidence in the book is problematic. Apparently, McCormack is also known for self-references and those are found here as well. McCormack’s books include Inspecting the Vaults, The Paradise Motel, The Mysterium, First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, and The Dutch Wife. In the novel, the titles in a ship’s library include Inspecting the Faults, The Paladine Hotel, The Wysterium, Last Blast of the Cornet, and A Dutch Life (155). What is the purpose of parodying one’s own titles? According to the flyleaf, the book is about the “nature of love” and there are statements on that topic like, “’We all wish love would be eternal and exclusive . . . But it rarely seems to be the case’” (146) and “’first love is often a kind of self-love, a delight in the idea of being in love’” (383). At the end of the book, a cloud is lifted and Harry sees how he was wrong about love, but there are no new insights on the subject. This book will undoubtedly appeal to certain readers, but it failed to be compelling for me. It is not a difficult read by any means, but it lacks focus. There are so many tangents – do we really need to know the life stories of patients in a psychiatric institution specializing “’in artists and academics who’ve somehow gone wrong’” (374)? At one point, the narrator comments, “Book lovers naturally do feel a kind of possessiveness and protectiveness in how they relate to certain authors and books, as though they were pets” (413). This book is not one of my pets! Please check out my reader's blog (http://schatjesshelves.blogspot.ca/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski). This is the story of Harry Steen, from his childhood in Glasgow, a failed love affair that shaped his life in Duncairn, a successful if not passionate marriage in Canada and his travels throughout the world for his business. This is my first novel by Eric McCormack and I have to say that it didn't grab me. I found the characters hard to relate to. And, I'm not sure what the author was trying to write about. There were lots of stories about helping others, gruesome experiments, and strange sex. Most of the book was entertaining, but I could never find a thread that held it together...other than the character of Harry, whom I couldn't relate to or really understand.
Cloud is a powerful, magical book, rooted in tightly crafted characters thrust into larger-than-life events. In the past, McCormack’s endings, and his imagination, sometimes got away from him. That’s not the case here. With nary a soul-penetrating stare or disturbing sexual encounter out of place, Cloud is indisputably his best novel to date. Premios
"Why, when we take such care to disguise our true selves from others, would we expect them to be an open book to us?" Harry Steen, a businessman travelling in Mexico, ducks into an old bookstore to escape a frightening deluge. Inside, he makes a serendipitous discovery: a mid-nineteenth-century account of a sinister storm cloud that plagued an isolated Scottish village and caused many gruesome and unexplainable deaths. Harry knows the village well; he travelled there as a young man to take up a teaching post following the death of his parents. It was there that he met the woman whose love and betrayal have haunted him every day since. Presented with this astonishing record, Harry resolves to seek out the ghosts of his past and return to the very place where he encountered the fathomless depths of his own heart. With Cloud, critically acclaimed Canadian author Eric McCormack has written a masterpiece of literary Gothicism, a gripping, darkly imagined story about the nature of love in a world where menace hovers at every turn. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999ValoraciónPromedio:
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I listened to the audiobook, which was read extremely well by Robert Ian Mackenzie. ( )