Umbrella - Couverture rigide

Self, Will

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0802120725 ISBN 13 : 9780802120724

Editeur : Grove Pr, 2013

Synopsis

Book by Self Will

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2012
A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella. James Joyce, Ulysses

Recently having abandoned his RD Laing-influenced experiment in running a therapeutic community - the so-called Concept House in Willesden - maverick psychiatrist Zack Busner arrives at Friern Hospital, a vast Victorian mental asylum in North London, under a professional and a marital cloud. He has every intention of avoiding controversy, but then he encounters Audrey Dearth, a working-class girl from Fulham born in 1890 who has been immured in Friern for decades.

A socialist, a feminist and a munitions worker at the Woolwich Arsenal, Audrey fell victim to the encephalitis lethargica sleeping sickness epidemic at the end of the First World War and, like one of the subjects in Oliver Sacks' Awakenings, has been in a coma ever since. Realising that Audrey is just one of a number of post-encephalitics scattered throughout the asylum, Busner becomes involved in an attempt to bring them back to life - with wholly unforeseen consequences.

Is Audrey's diseased brain in its nightmarish compulsion a microcosm of the technological revolutions of the twentieth century? And if Audrey is ill at all - perhaps her illness is only modernity itself? And what of Audrey's two brothers, Stanley and Albert: at the time she fell ill, Stanley was missing presumed dead on the Western Front, while Albert was in charge of the Arsenal itself, a coming man in the Imperial Civil Service. Now, fifty years later, when Audrey awakes from her pathological swoon, which of the two is it who remains alive?

Radical in its conception, uncompromising in its style, Umbrella is Will Self's most extravagant and imaginative exercise in speculative fiction to date.

Revue de presse

A dazzling feat of imagination and structure: a sprawling, lyrical, stream-of-consciousness narrative that squares up to modernism and brings it kicking and screaming into the 21st century ... stomach-lurchingly ambitious. --Observer

Umbrella is such a linguistically adept, emotionally subtle and ethically complex novel that this could and should be his year. --Guardian

Few writers would have the artistic effrontery to offer us a novel as daring, exuberant and richly dense as Umbrella. Will Self has carried the Modernist challenge into the twenty-first century, and worked a wonder. --John Banville

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Grove Pr
• Date d'édition: 2013
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0802120725
• ISBN 13: 9780802120724
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 397
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible