Coda - Couverture rigide

Gray, Simon

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1847080944 ISBN 13 : 9781847080943

Editeur : Granta Books, 2008

Synopsis

It's coming up to 4 am on a Friday morning, and I've just promised myself, a self loaded with and lightened by a couple of sleeping pills, that I will go on with this tomorrow.So begins Simon Gray's powerful account of the year in which he struggles to come to terms with terminal cancer. From heartbreaking reflections on his own mortality to characteristically outrageous asides - 'everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who was given six months to live, and here they are, only just dead, eight years later or, in exceptional cases, here they still are, eating oysters and boring the shit out of people' - Gray's self-proclaimed 'last written words on the subject of myself' records his extraordinary emotional journey.Darkly comic depictions of the medical team - there's the Chipmunk of Doom, who spells out Gray's woeful prognosis uninvited; the charming, floppy-haired neurologist, aka 'Mummy's delight'; the 'mortifyingly pretty doctor' who arrives to fit his catheter; and the elegant nurse who breezily observes he smells of urine - are set against joyful accounts of sunlit days with this beloved wife, Victoria, in Crete and a beautiful early summer in Suffolk. Woven into the narrative are arguments with himself, 'Dialogue between a Thicko and a Sicko', a shameful childhood memory and a masterfully tense 'distraction', written in real time while waiting for his final prognosis - and smoking one last cigarette.Written with exceptional candour and a poignant reluctance to leave this world behind, Simon Gray's "Coda" is as life-affirming as it is heartrending.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Simon Gray was born in 1936. He began his writing career with Colmain, the first of five novels published by Faber. He is the author of many plays for TV and radio and films, including After Pilkington, which won the Prix Italia, and the Emmy Award-winning Unnatural Pursuits. He wrote more than thirty stage plays, among them Butley and Otherwise Engaged, which both received Evening Standard Awards for Best Play, and The Late Middle Classes, winner of the Barclay's Best Play Award. His plays Little Nell and Missing Dates were both broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and The Last Cigarette, which he adapted with Hugh Whitemore from The Smoking Diaries, premiered in March 2009. In 1991 he was the BAFTA Writer of the Year. His acclaimed works of non-fiction include An Unnatural Pursuit, How's That for Telling 'Em, Fat Lady? and, published by Granta, Fat Chance, Enter a Fox, The Smoking Diaries, The Year of the Jouncer and The Last Cigarette. He was appointed CBE in the 2005 New Year's Honours for his services to drama and literature. Simon Gray died in August 2008.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Granta Books
• Date d'édition: 2008
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1847080944
• ISBN 13: 9781847080943
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 251
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible