Жан-Ноэль Панкраци0.0 Alors qu'il neige sur Paris, le narrateur se rend au bar de la rue Thérèse. Depuis, son tiroir-caisse, le vieil Auguste veille sur son petit monde : l'aveugle qui rêve encore aux Ephèbes dont il a été dépossédé ; Lucrèce, l'ancienne vedette de l'Heure bleue, le jeune Amer en quête d'un protecteur ; Lydia, la chanteuse canaille ; la bande de Gilles qui forme une élite extravagante de la nuit. Pourtant, cette semaine-là de janvier, tout s'accélère. Est-ce le souvenir de ceux qui ont pris leurs quartiers d'hiver et ne franchissent plus le seuil de velours noir ? La ronde des séductions s'emballe, les rivalités s'aiguisent, des exclusions sont décrétées, comme si, dans le crescendo des scènes d'euphorie anxieuse et de jouissance panique, tous se hâtaient de conjurer le déclin du plaisir.
Amitav Ghosh0.0 A saga of flight and pursuit, this novel chronicles the adventures of Alu, a young weaver who is wrongly suspected of being a terrorist. Chased from Bengal to Bombay and on through the Persian Gulf to North Africa by a bird-watching police inspector, Alu encounters along the way a cast of characters as various and as colourful as the epithets with which the author adorns them. The reader is drawn into their lives by incidents tender and outrageous and all compellingly told. Ghosh is as natural a weaver of words as Alu is of cloth, deftly interlacing humour and wisdom to produce a narrative tapestry of surpassing beauty.
Рене Жирар4.8 In this groundbreaking work, one of our foremost literary and cultural critics turns to the major figure in English literature, William Shakespeare, and proposes a dramatic new reading of nearly all his plays and poems. The key to A Theater of Envy is Rene Girard's novel reinterpretation of "mimesis." For Girard, people desire objects not for their intrinsic value, but because they are desired by someone else--we mime or imitate their desires. This envy--or "mimetic desire"--he sees as one of the foundations of the human condition.
Bringing such provocative and iconoclastic insights to bear on Shakespeare, Girard reveals the previously overlooked coherence of problem plays like Troilus and Cressida, and makes a convincing argument for elevating A Midsummer Night's Dream from the status of a chaotic comedy to a masterpiece. The book abounds with novel and provocative interpretations: Shakespeare becomes "a prophet of modern advertising," and the threat of nuclear disaster is read in the light of Hamlet. Most intriguing of all, perhaps, is a brief, but brilliant aside in which an entirely new perspective is brought to the chapter in Joyce's Ulysses in which Stephen Dedalus gives a lecture on Shakespeare. In Girard's view only Joyce, perhaps the greatest of twentieth-century novelists, comes close to understanding the greatest of Renaissance playwrights.
Throughout this impressively sustained reading of Shakespeare Girard's prose is sophisticated, but contemporary, and accessible to the general reader. Anyone interested in literature, anthropology, or psychoanalysis will want to read this challenging book. And all those involved in theatrical production and performance will find A Theater of Envy full of suggestive new ideas.
