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Cargando... The Children's Book (2009 original; edición 2009)por A.S. Byatt (Autor)
Información de la obraThe Children's Book por A. S. Byatt (2009)
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Olive Wellwood, una famosa escritora, vive rodeada de sus hijos en una apartada mansión. Para cada uno de ellos escribe un libro encuadernado en un color distinto. En su laberíntica casa los niños juegan en un mundo de cuentos y fantasía pero sus vidas están ya marcadas por el misterio. Nacidos en el crepúsculo de la era Victoriana y los albores de la Gran Guerra, una generación entera creció ignorante de la oscuridad que se avecinaba. En su inocencia, fueron traicionados involuntariamente por los adultos que más les querían. Este es, sin duda, es el libro de los niños. A. S. Byatt es una autora inglesa nacida en 1936, filóloga de profesión que ha sido profesora de Universidad. Ya ha sido propuesta al Nobel, y aunque todavía no le he leído esta voluminosa novela (son casi mil páginas), la cual se desarrolla en la época victoriana, se trata de una autora altamente recomendable, a juzgar por la historia y el estilazo de "Possession", obra de ella que leí anteriormente en inglés y que ha sido también adaptada al cine, y en la que hace, por cierto, un notable homenaje a la filología. "El libro de los niños" transcurre durante el lento y destellante crepúsculo victoriano, esa apasionante época que va desde el final del siglo XIX hasta la primera guerra mundial. La protagonista de la novela es Olive Wellwood, una famosa escritora de libros infantiles. Ella y su numerosa familia viven en una casa de campo formando una especie de sociedad dedicada al culto del arte, la literatura, la conversación y la política. Cuando el hijo mayor de Olive sorprende a otro niño, de origen humilde, en una sala del Museo Victoria and Albert de Londres, dibujando un famoso candelabro, la vida de esas familias empezará a cambiar. El niño será adoptado por los Wellwood e ingresará así en un mundo deslumbrante, lleno de inquietantes misterios y fulgurantes deslumbramientos.
The novel has a tendency to sprawl, with too many characters and too much to say. Yet Byatt takes tender care with the reader. She is a careful guide, and though this entry is at times a lot to process, it’s a worthwhile journey. While Byatt’s engagement with the period’s overlapping circles of artists and reformers is serious and deep, so much is stuffed into “The Children’s Book” that it can be hard to see the magic forest for all the historical lumber — let alone the light at the end of the narrative tunnel. The action is sometimes cut off at awkward moments by ponderous newsreel-style voice-over or potted lectures in cultural history. Startling revelations are dropped in almost nonchalantly and not picked up again until dozens or even hundreds of pages later. Byatt’s coda on the Great War, dispatched in scarcely more pages than the Exposition Universelle, is devastating in its restraint. But too often readers may feel as if they’re marooned in the back galleries of a museum with a frighteningly energetic docent. Byatt’s characters are themselves her dutiful puppets, always squeezed and shaped for available meaning. The Children’s Book has a cumulative energy and intelligence, and the unavoidable scythe of the Great War brings its own power to the narration, but nowhere in its hundreds of pages is there a single moment like the Countess Rostova’s free and mysterious irritation. As in her Booker Prize–winning novel, Possession, here Byatt has constructed a complete and complex world, a gorgeous bolt of fiction, in this case pinned to British events and characters from the 1870s to the end of the Great War...the magic is in the way Byatt suffuses her novel with details, from the shimmery sets of a marionette show to clay mixtures and pottery glazes. It begins with the discovery of a boy hiding in a museum. The time is 1895, the boy is Philip Warren, and the museum is the precursor to the Victoria & Albert: the South Kensington Museum. And, oh, yes –there’s a remarkable piece of art that the boy is besotted with — the Gloucester Candlestick. However, while this may make many children’s book mavens think immediately of E. L. Konigsburg’s classical story for children, let me say straight out — A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book is a book for grown-ups. It is emphatically not a children’s book although it is about children, about books, about art, about the writing of children’s books, about the telling of children’s stories, about the clash between life and art, and about a whole lot more. A saga of a book teeming with complex characters, fascinating settings, intellectual provocations, and erudite prose, it gets under your skin as you get deeper and deeper into it and won’t let you go even after you reach the last page.... Pertenece a las series editorialesPremiosDistincionesListas de sobresalientes
When Olive Wellwood's oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of the new Victoria and Albert Museum--a talented working-class boy who could be a character out of one of Olive's magical tales--she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends--a world that conceals more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined and that will soon be eclipsed by far greater forces. 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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