Дай Сы-цзе3.6 Дай Сы-цзе родился в Китае, а в 1984-м, получив именную стипендию, уехал во Францию, где закончил школу кинематографии, стал режиссером и поселился навсегда. Впрочем, думает и пишет он все равно о Китае. Первый из двух романов Сы-дзе, "Бальзак и портниха-китаяночка", имел огромный успех, был переведен на множество языков и лег в основу снятого им самим фильма, получившего в 2002 году на Каннском кинофестивале приз в номинации "Особый взгляд". Особый взгляд, который выработался под действием традиций многовековой китайской культуры, европейского образования и реалий современного Китая. Особым взглядом отмечен и второй роман Сы-цзе "Комплекс Ди", удостоенный премии "Фемина".
"Комплекс Ди" - роман ироничный и пародийный. Имя Ди отсылает к известному персонажу, символизирующему скрещение Востока и Запада, легендарному судье Ди, считавшемуся эталоном мудрости, справедливости и неподкупности, а также к его художественному воплощению в произведениях знатока китайского секса ван Гулика, тень которого маячит за спиной главного героя.
Magda Szabó4.0 A young writer, struggling for success, employs an elderly woman called Emerence to be her housekeeper.
From their first encounter it is clear that Emerence is no ordinary maid.
Although everyone in the neighbourhood knows and respects her, no one knows anything about her private life or has ever crossed her threshold. Only a great drama in the writer's life prompts Emerence to unveil glimpses of her traumatic past - a past which sheds light on her peculiar behaviour.
The Door brilliantly evokes the development of the bond between these two very different women, and the tragic ending to their relationship.
Jean Hatzfeld0.0 During the spring of 1994, in a tiny country called Rwanda, some 800,000 people were hacked to death, one by one, by their neighbors in a gruesome civil war. Several years later, journalist Jean Hatzfeld traveled to Rwanda to interview ten participants in the killings, eliciting extraordinary testimony from these men about the genocide they perpetrated. As Susan Sontag wrote in the preface, Machete Season is a document that "everyone should read . . . [because making] the effort to understand what happened in Rwanda . . . is part of being a moral adult."
Шанталь Тома4.0 It was once the job of Madame Agathe-Sidonie Laborde to read books aloud to Marie-Antoinette. Now exiled in Vienna, she looks back twenty-one years to the legendary opulence of Versailles and meticulously reconstructs July 14, 15, and 16 of 1789.
When Agathe-Sidonie is summoned to the Queen's side on the morning of the 14th, Versailles is a miniature universe, sparkling with every outward appearance of happiness and power, peopled with nobles of minutely calibrated rank, and run according to a hundred-year-old ritual called the Perfect Day. But with the shocking news that someone has woken the King in the night, order begins to disintegrate and word of the fall of the Bastille seeps into court. Soon Versailles's beauty is nothing more than a shell encasing rising panic and chaos. Agathe-Sidonie watches as the Queen's attempts to flee are aborted; her most intimate friend betrays her; and the King, appearing to sleepwalk through this crisis, never alters his routine of visiting the Apollo Salon several times a day to consult a giant crystal thermometer.
From the tiniest garret to the Hall of Mirrors, where Marie-Antoinette stands alone and terrified in the dark, Chantal Thomas shows us a world on the edge of oblivion and an intimate portrait of the woman who, like "fire in motion," was its center.
Erri De Luca0.0 This is a story told by a boy in his thirteenth year, recorded in his secret diary. His life is about to change; his world, about to open.
He lives in Montedidio—God’s Mountain—a cluster of alleys in the heart of Naples. He brings a paycheck home every Saturday from Mast’Errico’s carpentry workshop where he sweeps the floor. He is on his way to becoming a man—his boy’s voice is abandoning him. His wooden boomerang is neither toy nor tool, but something in between. Then there is Maria, the thirteen-year-old girl who lives above him and, like so many girls, is wiser than he. She carries the burden of a secret life herself. She’ll speak to him for the first time this summer. There is also his friendship with a cobbler named Rafaniello, a Jewish refugee who has escaped the horrors of the Holocaust, who has no idea how long he’s been on this earth, and who is said to sprout wings for a blessed few.
It is 1963, a young man’s summer of discovery. A time for a boy with innocent hands and a pure heart to look beyond the ordinary in everyday things to see the far-reaching landscape, and all of its possibilities, from a rooftop terrace on God’s Mountain.
Marie NDiaye0.0 La vie de Rosie Carpe commence à Brive-la-Gaillarde, entre son frère Lazare et ses deux parents Carpe qui sont encore, alors, dépourvus de toute espèce de fantaisie vénéneuse. Rosie conservera de Brive un souvenir confus et voilé de jaune, tandis que, pour son frère Lazare, le bonheur à Brive-la-Gaillarde gardera les couleurs d'un magnolia dont il est le seul à se rappeler la splendeur. Ensuite, à Anthony, Rosie Carpe est adulte. Elle met au monde Titi, travaille, et doucement chavire. Quand Rosie Carpe débarque en Guadeloupe, elle a perdu depuis longtemps la maîtrise de ce qu'elle fait. Et tout ce qui lui arrive, enfant ou désastres, concerne tout aussi bien quelqu'un qui n'est peut-être pas elle.
Кит Риджуэй0.0 Grace Quinn is an Englishwoman living in rural Ireland. Isolated by religion and circumstance, she endures both an abusive husband and a strained relationship with her son, Martin, whose open homosexuality her husband refused to accept. After an act of desperation, reeling with doubt and denial, she seeks out her son in Dublin. Keith Ridgway "affectingly renders the separate sanctuaries of mother and son . . .and lights the distance between them" (The New Yorker).
Эльвира де Бриссак0.0 L'avenir arrivera-t-il ? se demande Alphonse de Lamartine, la tête posée sur les genoux d'Elvire. L'avenir c'est lui, le Poète, l'Impatient, le Rongeur de frein. « Hâtons-nous, jouissons ! » - C'est aussi le frein du passé dont ce mystique veut libérer son pays: à près de soixante ans, durci au vent de souffrances intimes, rompu aux finesses politiques, jetant son argent par les fenêtres, devenu l'homme fort de la Bourgogne, Lamartine se hisse sur les éclairs de février 1848 pour dominer de sa haute stature dix inoubliables mois, ceux de la Seconde République.
Mais l'avenir c'est aussi ce monde où soudain tout est nié, les distances, les océans, la manière dont jusqu'ici on se déplaçait, on travaillait, on vivait. Le moyen de changer la planète ? La vapeur. Les instruments ? La locomotive, le paquebot, le télégraphe électrique, la fonte, l'acier. Survient Eugène Schneider. Rien ne lui fait froid aux yeux : l'époque à laquelle il achète Le Creusot - 1836 - avec son frère Adolphe est de celles qui font bondir un siècle en avant. La Saône-et-Loire devient son fief quel contraste avec Lamartine ! - le Second Empire son régime de prédilection.
L'avenir arrivera-t-il ? se demandent tous ceux, de Tocqueville à Marx, de Dickens à Sartre, qui ont les yeux fixés sur ce siècle enivré de révolutions et de spectacles : O dix-neuvième !
Camille Laurens4.2 An international bestseller translated into twelve languages and the winner of France’s prestigious Prix Femina
Our narrator, Camille, loves men. One might say she’s obsessed with them. The latest object of her affection is a psychiatrist, and what better way to seduce a psychiatrist than by laying bare the intricacies of her own mind? Camille becomes his patient and slowly unveils her romantic, sexual, and psychological secrets by telling the story of her life through the men she has known: father, teacher, lover, letch; husband, brother, boss, and friend.
In His Arms was a phenomenon in France, where it became an obsessive topic of conversation among women of all ages. In the tradition of Marguerite Duras’s The Lover and Susan Minot’s Rapture, it is a stylish, sensual novel about love in all its guises—first love and married love; secret love; adulterous love; frenzied, embarrassed, speechless love—and the story of Camille’s last conquest, one made not by hiding or distorting who she is but by revealing everything.
Jamaica Kincaid0.0 Jamaica Kincaid's brother Devon Drew died of AIDS on January 19, 1996, at the age of thirty-three. Kincaid's incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother's life and death is also a story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation centered on the powerful, sometimes threatening figure of the writer's mother. My Brother is an unblinking record of a life that ended too early, and it speaks volumes about the difficult truths at the heart of all families.
My Brother is a 1997 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.
Хитонари Цудзи0.0 Minoru Eguchi est sur le point de mourir. Tandis que sa mémoire s'effiloche, sa vie se déroule sous nos yeux depuis son enfance pendant la guerre russo-japonaise. Très jeune, il est sujet à d'étranges prémonitions et voit apparaître un bouddha protecteur de couleur blanche. Une saga familiale qui parle de la douceur du bouddhisme et de la fascination récurrente de la mort.
Франсуа Чен0.0 Lors d’un voyage en Chine, l’auteur retrouve le peintre Tian-yi, connu autrefois, qui lui remet ses confessions écrites. Tian-yi a vécu l’avant-guerre dans une Chine en plein bouillonnement. Plus tard, dans les années 1950, il est allé en Occident, où il a découvert une autre vision de l’art et de la vie.
De retour dans son pays soumis aux bouleversements de la révolution, il a voulu retrouver deux êtres chers : Yumei, l’amante, et Haolang, l’ami. Mais une histoire dramatique les a emportés dans des tourmentes où Tian-yi, à son tour, sera pris…
Poète, traducteur, essayiste, spécialiste des arts de son pays d’origine, François Cheng a su métamorphoser le témoignage vécu en une extraordinaire fresque
romanesque, saluée par toute la critique et couronnée par le prix Femina 1998.
Antonio Muñoz Molina5.0 Unos ojos que en este mismo instante miran en algún lugar de la ciudad, normales, serenos, como los ojos de cualquiera.
En una ciudad de provincias alguien con un rostro soluble en los demás rostros esconde el enigma de un espantoso crimen. Es preciso encontrar su mirada entre la multitud, descifrarla, para conjurar el horror.
En torno a la búsqueda, varios personajes, cada uno con un secreto royéndole el corazón, sueñan durante un instante con dar un nuevo sentido a sus vidas. En la hora mágica del plenilunio.
Plenilunio es la gran novela de madurez creadora de Antonio Muñoz Molina. Una narración eléctrica, llena de tensión, de rabia y de ternura, en la que el relato y la reflexión se funden magistralmente para hablarnos de lo que nos es más cercano. Ése es el privilegio de los libros inolvidables.
Доминик Ногез2.4 " Jamais je n'avais regardé ses yeux de si près.
Ils étaient d'un brun foncé, presque aussi sombres que leur pupille. Je ne pourrais pas écrire que je la regardais au fond des yeux car ces yeux-là n'avaient pas de fond. Ils n'étaient qu'une surface noire, désespérément opaque, des yeux inhumains, de rapace ou de lynx, d'une dureté de marbre ou de météorite, des yeux qui me regardaient mais ne me voyaient pas, qui ne m'aimaient pas, qui ne m'aimeraient jamais, qui n'aimaient ni n'aimeraient jamais personne, des yeux d'un autre monde."
Цзя Пинва5.0 When originally published in 1993, Ruined City (Fei Du) was promptly banned by China’s State Publishing Administration, ostensibly for its explicit sexual content. Since then, award-winning author Jia Pingwa’s vivid portrayal of contemporary China’s social and economic transformation has become a classic, viewed by critics and scholars of Chinese literature as one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Howard Goldblatt’s deft translation now gives English-speaking readers their first chance to enjoy this masterpiece of social satire by one of China’s most provocative writers.
While eroticism, exoticism, and esoteric minutiae—the “pornography” that earned the opprobrium of Chinese officials—pervade Ruined City, this tale of a famous contemporary writer’s sexual and legal imbroglios is an incisive portrait of politics and culture in a rapidly changing China. In a narrative that ranges from political allegory to parody, Jia Pingwa tracks his antihero Zhuang Zhidie through progressively more involved and inevitably disappointing sexual liaisons. Set in a modern metropolis rife with power politics, corruption, and capitalist schemes, the novel evokes an unrequited romantic longing for China’s premodern, rural past, even as unfolding events caution against the trap of nostalgia. Amid comedy and chaos, the author subtly injects his concerns about the place of intellectual seriousness, censorship, and artistic integrity in the changing conditions of Chinese society.
Rich with detailed description and vivid imagery, Ruined City transports readers into a world abounding with the absurdities and harshness of modern life.
Женевьева Бризак0.0 Nouk is gescheiden en woont met haar zoontje Eugenio in een eenkamerflat in Parijs. Elke dag levert ze een gevecht om zich staande te houden. Door de voortdurende aandacht die haar kind vraagt en de drukkende verplichting om een goede moeder te zijn, komt ze aan haar eigen leven nauwelijks toe. Als het kerstfeest voor de deur staat gaan Nouk en Eugenio in op de uitnodiging van een vriendin om enkele dagen bij haar in Bretagne door te brengen. Het blijkt een verkeerde beslissing.
Javier Marías0.0 "No one ever suspects," begins Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me, "that they might one day find themselves with a dead woman in their arms...." Marta has just met Victor when she invites him to dinner at her Madrid apartment while her husband is away on business. When her two-year-old son finally falls asleep, Marta and Victor retreat to the bedroom. Undressing, she feels suddenly ill; and in his arms, inexplicably, she dies.
What should Victor do? Remove the compromising tape from the phone machine? Leave food for the child, for breakfast? These are just his first steps, but he soon takes matters further; unable to bear the shadows and the unknowing, Victor plunges into dark waters. And Javier Marías, Europe's master of secrets, of what lies reveal and truth may conceal, is on sure ground in this profound, quirky, and marvelous novel. "Brilliantly imagined and hugely intricate," as La Vanguardia noted, "it is a novel one reads with enormous pleasure."
Эмманюэль Каррер3.8 Школьный автобус с детьми отправился в зимний лагерь накануне. Ещё десятью днями ранее произошла трагедия, репортаж о которой показали в выпуске новостей по телевизору: в результате столкновения грузовика со школьным автобусом от тяжелейших ожогов погибло несколько детей. На следующий день в школе проводилось собрание по подготовке к отъезду детей. Родители получили последние инструкции о наборе вещей, необходимых в лагере, об одежде, которую нужно пометить, о конвертах с марками, которыми нужно снабдить детей, чтобы они могли писать домой, а вот по телефону, как было сказано, лучше не звонить, разве только при чрезвычайных обстоятельствах: пусть все дети почувствуют, что они действительно в настоящем зимнем лагере, а не привязаны, словно невидимой нитью, к семейной среде. Эта последняя рекомендация очень не понравилась некоторым мамам: дети ж всё-таки ещё маленькие… Учительница терпеливо повторила, что всё делается для их блага. Ведь главная цель организации таких лагерей — приучить детей к самостоятельности…
Повесть Эмманюэля Каррера «Зимний лагерь» написана в 1995 году и отмечена премией «Фемина», по ней режиссёр Клод Миллер снял одноимённый художественный фильм.
Николя догадывался, что предчувствие начинает сбываться: зимний лагерь для него будет страшным испытанием.
Йерун Брауверс0.0 Samen met zijn moeder bracht Jeroen Brouwers zijn kleuterjaren door in het Japanse interneringskamp Tjideng op Java. In de roman Bezonken rood heeft hij op aangrijpende wijze zijn herinneringen verwerkt aan deze periode uit zijn jeugd.
Оливье Ролен3.4 Роман-воспоминание (1994), удостоенный премии "Femina" (третья по престижности литературная премия Франции), присуждаемой жюри, состоящим из писателей-женщин. Герой получает известие о смерти покончившего с собой друга, с которым расстался
Rose Tremain0.0 From the author of The Gustav Sonata
At the age of six, Mary Ward, the child of a poor farming family in Suffolk, has a revelation: she isn't Mary, she's a boy. So begins Mary's heroic struggle to change gender, while around her others also strive to find a place of safety and fulfilment in a savage and confusing world.
Over a million Rose Tremain books sold
‘A writer of exceptional talent ... Tremain is a writer who understands every emotion’ Independent I
‘There are few writers out there with the dexterity or emotional intelligence to rival that of the great Rose Tremain’ Irish Times
‘Tremain has the painterly genius of an Old Master, and she uses it to stunning effect’ The Times
‘Rose Tremain is one of the very finest British novelists’ Salman Rushdie
‘Tremain is a writer of exemplary vision and particularity. The fictional world is rendered with extraordinary vividness’ Marcel Theroux, Guardian
