The Pope's Rhinoceros: A Novel - Couverture souple

Norfolk, Lawrence

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0802139884 ISBN 13 : 9780802139887

Editeur : Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003

Synopsis

The Pope's Rhinoceros is a vivid, antic, and picaresque novel spun around one of history's most bizarre chapters: the sixteenth-century attempt to procure a rhinoceros as a bribe for Pope Leo X. In February 1516, a Portuguese ship sank off the coast of Italy. The Nostra Senora de Ajuda had sailed fourteen thousand miles from the Indian kingdom of Gujarat. her mission: to bribe the "pleasure-loving Pope" into favoring expansionist Portugal over her rival Spain with the most exotic and least likely of gifts--a living rhinoceros. Moving from the herring colonies of the Baltic Sea to the West African rain forest, with a cast of characters including an order of reculsive monks and Rome's corrupt cardinals, courtesans, ambassadors, and nobles, The Pope's Rhinoceros is at once a fantastic adventure tale and a portrait of an age rushing headlong to its crisis.

A propos du livre

Revue de presse

"Bawdy baroque-punk prose of marvellous fluency, overlaid with a gloss of heavy-weight erudition... an astonishing achievement, little short of a masterpiece" (William Dalrymple Independent on Sunday)

"A gargantuan, dazzling fable by Britain's brightest young writer" (Steven Poole Guardian)

"A story of adventure enthralling in its scope and inventiveness, by turns comic and horrific, zestful and elegaic, involving a reclusive order of monks whose church is slowly sliding into the sea; Renaissance Rome with its sexual license and political rivalries; war and atrocity in the Central Italian States; and a remote tribe in the West African rain forest. Running through this variegated fable is the search for the rhinoceros. The exuberance, the sheer proliferation of incident and scene, are disciplined and controlled by unerring narrative pace and cunning" (Barry Unsworth Daily Telegraph)

"A truly fabulous piece of new British fiction" (James Saynor Observer)

Présentation de l'éditeur

In February 1516, a Portugese ship sank with the loss of all hands a mile off the coast of Italy. The Nostra Senora da Adjuda had sailed 14000 miles from the Indian kingdom Gujarat: her mission, to deliver a rhinoceros to the Pope. The Pope's Rhinoceros tells the stories which culminate in this bizarre incident. Ranging from the Baltic Sea to a flyblown colony in India, from a tribe hidden in the African rain forest to atrocities committed in an obscure town in Tuscany, Norfolk's brilliant novel holds up the true history of the rhinoceros as a mirror to the fantasies and obsessions of the Renaissance.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press
• Date d'édition: 2003
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0802139884
• ISBN 13: 9780802139887
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 574
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible