Джонатан Сафран Фоер3.9 "Юмор — это единственный правдивый способ рассказать печальный рассказ", — утверждает Джонатан Фоер устами своего героя. В печально-смешном путешествии двух подростков — американца и украинца — сплелись воедино события Второй мировой войны, традиции еврейского народа и взгляд на современную молодежь, которая цинизмом и бахвальством скрывает свои по-детски тонкие, ранимые души.
Роман был переведен на 15 языков. А после экранизации 2005 года книга стала по-настоящему культовой.
Моник Труонг0.0
"[He] came to us through an advertisement that I had in desperation put in the newspaper. It began captivatingly for those days: 'Two American ladies wish...' " It was these lines in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook that inspired The Book of Salt, a brilliant first novel by a talented young Vietnamese American writer about the taste of exile. Paris, 1934, 'Thin Bin', as they call him, has accompanied his employers, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, to the station for their departure to America. His own destination is unclear: will he go with 'the Steins', stay in France, or return to his native Vietnam? Binh fled his homeland in disgrace, leaving behind his malevolent charlatan of a father and his self-sacrificing mother. For five years, he has been the personal cook at the famous apartment on the rue de Fleurus. Before Binh's decision is revealed, we are catapulted back to his youth in French-colonized Indo China, where he learned to cook in the embassy kitchens, his years as a galley hand at sea, and his days turning out fragrant repasts for the doyennes of the Lost Generation. Binh knows far more than what the Steins eat: he knows their routines and intimacies, their food and follies. With wry insight, we see Stein and Toklas ensconced in rueful domesticity. But is Binh's account reliable? A lost soul, he is a late-night habitue of the Paris demi-monde, an exile and an alien, a man of musings, memories, and possibly lies, susceptible to drink and occasional self-mutilation with a kitchen knife...Love is the prize that has eluded him, from his family to the men he has sought out in his farflung journeys, often at his peril and more recently with risk to Stein's manuscript notebooks. Intricate, compelling, and witty, the novel weaves in historical characters, from Stein and Toklas to Paul Robeson and Ho Chi Minh, with remarkable originality. Tastes, oceans, sweat, tears -- The Book of Salt is an inspired novel about food and exile, love and betrayal.
Уилл Генрих0.0 Joseph Malderoyce is a philosophical man with a taste for Mondrian and something of an obsession with tuberculosis. When he inherits a large sum of money, Joseph leaves his stultifying job at a law firm and moves to an unremarkable town in the far north of an unnamed country. There, in a house on the edge of a pine forest, he lives in solitude until the morning he finds a badly beaten young boy asleep on his porch. Abel, apparently a helpless orphan, gradually insinuates himself into Joseph's life, becoming his closest confidant. But as their relationship deepens, Abel's behavior turns cruel and even sadistic, and Joseph is forced to confront a growing evil in his house -- a darkness that seems to emanate as much from him as from the child. Soon Joseph begins to be visited by fantasies of violence he may not be able to control.
Meticulously crafted and irresistibly creepy, The King's Evil is a provocative and unsettling modern morality tale that probes man's intrinsic nature and the unilluminated recesses of his psyche. It is a mesmerizing debut from a brilliant young writer.
