Articles liés à Perfume River

Perfume River - Couverture souple

Butler, Robert Olen

 
9781843449645: Perfume River

Synopsis

Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence 2017

Profound and poignant, Perfume River is an examination of relationships, personal choice, and how war resonates down the generations. It is the finest novel yet from the Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

Robert Quinlan and his wife Darla teach at Florida State University. Their marriage, forged in the fervor of anti-Vietnam-war protests, now bears the fractures of time, with the couple trapped in an existence of morning coffee and solitary jogging and separate offices. For Robert and Darla, the cracks remain below the surface, whereas the divisions in Robert's own family are more apparent: he has almost no relationship with his brother Jimmy, who became estranged from the family as the Vietnam War intensified. William Quinlan, Robert and Jimmy's father, a veteran of World War II, is coming to the end of his life, and aftershocks of war ripple across all their lives once again when Jimmy refuses to appear at his father's bedside. And a disturbed homeless man whom Robert at first takes to be a fellow Vietnam veteran turns out to have a devastating impact not just on Robert, but on his entire family.

'What I so like about Perfume River is its plainly-put elegance. Enough time has passed since Viet Nam that its grave human lessons and heartbreaks can be, with a measure of genius, almost simply stated. Butler's novel is a model for this heartbreaking simplicity and grace' - Richard Ford

'Movingly portrays a family still torn apart by a war that ended 40 years earlier' - Sunday Times

'This is a novel about the long shadows cast by war and trauma' - Daily Mail

'Perfume River is a highly accomplished novel. Butler s prose is polished and supple, his elegant voice capable of shifting from academia to the whoosh... and blare of combat, then to the lush immediacy of Vietnam' - Spectator

'Butler has not entered the significant and ever-growing canon of Vietnam-related fiction (he has long been a member); he has changed its composition forever' - Guardian

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À propos de l'auteur

Robert Olen Butler is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, five other short story collections, sixteen novels, and a book on the creative process, From Where You Dream. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, he also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has received two Pushcart Prizes. In 2013 he won the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He is the author of three historical novels, The Hot Country, The Star of Istanbul and The Empire of Night, all part of the Christopher Marlowe Cobb series published by No Exit Press. Reminiscent of Cobb, Robert Olen Butler trained as an actor, worked as a reporter, went to war and engaged in intelligence collection. He now teaches creative writing at Florida State University.

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