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Cargando... Alpine Balladpor Vasil Bykov
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. Alpine Ballad is, as the title suggests, a beautiful book, uplifting and inspiring because it’s a testament to the human spirit even in times when it’s sorely tested. Vasil Bykau (1924-2003) is well-known in Belarus and beyond for war-themed novels based on his own personal experience. This translation of Alpiyskaya Balada is the first to be published without Soviet censorship – it had apparently attracted their displeasure because there are some minor criticisms of Soviet life, though you and I in the 21st century might find it hard to see what they were upset about. Alpine Ballad is the story of a Belarusian prisoner of the Nazis who manages to escape the camp when an allied bomb they were defusing went off. It’s towards the end of the war, and Ivan has been a prisoner for long enough to have witnessed some terrible things and to be very hungry. On the other hand, the privations he has experienced have toughened him up, which stands him in good stead for what lies ahead. He flees into the mountains followed by an Italian girl called Guilia, also from the same POW camp. She is loud, impulsive and sunny-natured and he tries to shed her company because her erratic behaviour puts his escape at risk. As the ‘target badges’ sewn onto his clothes attest, he has escaped before, and he knows the perils and the punishment he faces if he survives and is brought back to the camp. But before long they reach an uneasy companionship and travel together. To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/12/04/alpine-ballad-by-vasil-bykau-translated-by-m... sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
Towards the end of World War II, a Belarusian soldier and an Italian girl escape from a Nazi concentration camp. The soldier wonders if he should get rid of the girl; she is a burden and is slowing him down. However, he cannot bring himself to abandon her in the snowy wilderness. Somewhere along the way, the two develop feelings for each other, but their love is not destined to grow beyond the edge of the mountains. Yet their bond cannot be denied, and in the end it proves stronger than death itself. From the master of psychological narrative whose firsthand experience with World War II enabled him to re-create the ordeal on pages of his books, Alpine Ballad is Vasil Bykau's most heartfelt story. Bykau sends a powerful message to his readers: human values can be extrapolated and in the context of war people can still uphold their humanity. An altruistic, philanthropic project of Glagoslav Publications, Alpine Ballad is coming out as a gesture of peace and a reminder to all of the human cost of wars that ransack our planet to this day. Translated from Belarusian by Mikalai Khilo. The previous translations of Alpine Ballad were based on the Soviet-censored Russian version of the original manuscript. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Now, I say "on the face of it," because there's way more than just a simple escape going on here. The publishers released this particular edition in part as a reminder of the "human costs of war," a theme that just permeates this book. One major idea captured here is what Bykau refers to as "Entmenschung," referring to the dehumanizing practices of the Nazis, which he says is "the most dastardly of all evil deeds on earth," a concept Ivan totally understands. Once he was put into the camps and had the opportunity to observe what was going with "the underside of Nazism," he came to realize that "death was not the worst thing that could happen during the war."
How these ideas play out through the novel I will leave to others to discover. The story gives Ivan a chance for reflection in the form of flashbacks, which not only help us to understand who he is as a person, but which also offers a look at life in the USSR in the 1930s, most especially the famines that killed so many people in the Ukraine. While the journey embarked on by Giulia and Ivan is just downright brutal in so many places, this is not, as I said earlier, just another novel about an escape -- reading it that way sort of lessens the impact and importance of what the author has to say here.
recommended. ( )