Эндрю Миллер3.6 Это книга о человеке, неспособном чувствовать боль. Судьба приговорила его родиться в XVIII веке - веке разума и расчета, атеизма, казней и революций. Движимый жаждой успеха, Джеймс Дайер, главный герой романа, достигает вершин карьеры, он великолепный хирург, но в силу своей особенности не способен сострадать пациентам... Роман Эндрю Миллера стал заметным событием в литературной жизни Великобритании, а переведенный на многие языки планеты, сделался мировым бестселлером. Его заслуженно сравнивают со знаменитым «Парфюмером» Патрика Зюскинда.
Харуки Мураками4.2 Роман "Хроники Заводной Птицы" Харуки Мураками - произведение поистине джойсовского масштаба. Ужас Второй мировой войны и судьба нашего современника в Японии, письма, мистические сны, воспоминания, журнальные статьи, закодированные файлы - цельное полотно, сотканное из невероятных событий, тонкой иронии и неподражаемой интонации Харуки Мураками.
Бернхард Шлинк4.2 Феноменальный успех романа современного немецкого писателя Бернхарда Шлинка "Чтец" (1995) сопоставим разве что с популярностью вышедшего двадцатью годами ранее романа Патрика Зюскинда "Парфюмер". "Чтец" переведен на тридцать девять языков мира, книга стала международным бестселлером и собрала целый букет престижных литературных премий в Европе и Америке.
Внезапно вспыхнувший роман между пятнадцатилетним подростком, мальчиком из профессорской семьи, и зрелой женщиной так же внезапно оборвался, когда она без предупреждения исчезла из города. Через восемь лет он, теперь уже студент выпускного курса юридического факультета, снова увидел ее - среди бывших надзирательниц женского концлагеря на процессе против нацистских преступников. Но это не единственная тайна, которая открылась герою романа Бернхарда Шлинка "Чтец".
Иэн Макьюэн3.6 Иэн Макьюэн один из правящего триумвирата современной британской прозы (наряду с Джулианом Барнсом и Мартином Эмисом), лауреат Букеровской премии за роман Амстердам. Невыносимая любовь это история одержимости, руководство для выживания людей, в уютную жизнь которых вторглась опасная, ирреальная мания. Став свидетелем, а в некотором смысле и соучастником несчастного случая при запуске воздушного шара, герой романа пытается совладать с чужой любовью безответной, безосновательной и беспредельной. Как удержать под контролем остатки собственного рассудка, если в схватке за твою душу сошлись темные демоны безумия и тяга к недостижимому божеству?
Jim Crace0.0 Two thousand years ago four travellers enter the Judean desert to fast and pray for their lost souls. In the blistering heat and barren rocks they encounter the evil merchant Musa, who holds them in his tyrannical power. Yet there is also another, afaint figure in the distance, fasting for forty days, a Galilean who they say has the power to work miracles ...
Don DeLillo4.5 While Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of the Russian peoples, DeLillo offers a stunning, at times overwhelming, document of the twin forces of the Cold War and American culture, compelling that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying.
Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter—the "shot heard around the world"—and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand.
"It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball, and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria.
Through fragments and interlaced stories—including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others—DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled.
Francisco Goldman0.0
The ordinary seaman is Esteban, a nineteen-year-old veteran of the war in Nicaragua who has come to America with fourteen other men to form the crew of the boat Urus. Docked on a desolate Brooklyn pier, the Urus turns out to be a wreck, the men - without the ability to return to their homes - become its prisoners, and the city of New York is transformed into a mysterious and alluring world they cannot penetrate. Esteban, haunted by his dead lover from the war, eventually gathers the courage to escape from the ship and embarks on a quest for a new life and love in the city. The Ordinary Seaman is both a richly human story of abandonment, loss, betrayal, and the power of love and a modern fable about America's hidden immigrant culture.
Cynthia Ozick0.0 With dashing originality and in prose that sings like an entire choir of sirens, Cynthia Ozick relates the life and times of her most compelling fictional creation. Ruth Puttermesser lives in New York City. Her learning is monumental. Her love life is minimal (she prefers pouring through Plato to romping with married Morris Rappoport). And her fantasies have a disconcerting tendency to come true - with disastrous consequences for what we laughably call "reality."
Puttermesser yearns for a daughter and promptly creates one, unassisted, in the form of the first recorded female golem. Laboring in the dusty crevices of the civil service, she dreams of reforming the city - and manages to get herself elected mayor. Puttermesser contemplates the afterlife and is hurtled into it headlong, only to discover that a paradise found is also paradise lost. Overflowing with ideas, lambent with wit, The Puttermesser Papers is a tour de force by one of our most visionary novelists.
"The finest achievement of Ozick's career... It has all the buoyant integrity of a Chagall painting." -San Francisco Chronicle
"Fanciful, poignant... so intelligent, so finely expressed that, like its main character, it remains endearing, edifying, a spark of light in the gloom." -The New York Times
"A crazy delight." -The New York Time Book Review
