Picture This: A Novel - Couverture souple

Heller, Joseph

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0684868199 ISBN 13 : 9780684868196

Editeur : Simon & Schuster, 2000

Synopsis

Picture this: Rembrandt is creating his famous painting of Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer. As soon as he paints an ear on Aristotle, Aristotle can hear. When he paints an eye, Aristotle can see. And what Aristotle sees and hears and remembers from the ancient past to this very moment provides the foundation for this lighthearted, freewheeling jaunt through 2,500 years of Western Civilization.
Picture This is an incisive fantasy that digs deeply into our illusions and customs. Nobody but Joseph Heller could have thought of a novel like this one. Nobody but Heller could have executed it so brilliantly.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn in 1923. In 1961, he published Catch-22, which became a bestseller and, in 1970, a film. He went on to write such novels as Good as Gold, God Knows, Picture This, Closing Time, and Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man. Heller died in 1999.

À propos de la quatrième de couverture

"Heller once again comments on all of society and history with this whirlwind tour through the minds of Aristotle and Rembrandt. . . . History as told by Heller is so comic and heartbreaking that you wonder why anyone would want to live there."--"San Francisco Chronicle."

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Chapter 1

Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer thought often of Socrates while Rembrandt dressed him with paint in a white Renaissance surplice and a medieval black robe and encased him in shadows. "Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius," Plato has Socrates saying after he had swallowed his cup of poison and felt the numbing effects steal up through his groin into his torso and approach his heart. "Will you remember to pay the debt?"

Now Socrates, of course, did not owe a cock to Asclepius, the god of medicine.

And the leather merchant Asclepius, you will find written here, son of the physician Eurymynedes, was as baffled as anyone to learn of the bequest from the slave who appeared on his doorstep in the morning with a live rooster in his arms. The authorities were curious also and took him into custody for questioning. They put him to death when he continued to profess his ignorance and would not reveal the code.

Copyright © 1998 by Joseph Heller

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Simon & Schuster
• Date d'édition: 2000
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0684868199
• ISBN 13: 9780684868196
• Reliure: Broché
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 351
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Pays-Bas