Ragnarok: the End of the Gods - Couverture rigide

Byatt, A.S.

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1847670644 ISBN 13 : 9781847670649

Editeur : Canongate Books, 2011

Synopsis

Recently evacuated to the British countryside and with World War Two raging around her, one young girl is struggling to make sense of her life. Then she is given a book of ancient Norse legends and her inner and outer worlds are transformed. Intensely autobigraphical and linguistically stunning, this book is a landmark work of fiction from one of Britain's truly great writers. Intensely timely it is a book about how stories can give us the courage to face our own demise. The Ragnarok myth, otherwise known as the Twilight of the Gods, plays out the endgame of Norse mythology. It is the myth in which the gods Odin, Freya and Thor die, the sun and moon are swallowed by the wolf Fenrir, the serpent Midgard eats his own tale as he crushes the world and the seas boil with poison. It is only after such monstrous death and destruction that the world can begin anew. This epic struggle provided the fitting climax to Wagner's Ring Cycle and just as Wagner was inspired by Norse myth so Byatt has taken this remarkable finale and used it as the underpinning of this highly personal and politically charged retelling

A propos du livre

Revue de presse

"Byatt's prose is majestic, the lush descriptive passages - jewelled one minute, gory the next - a pleasure to get lost in" (Sunday Telegraph)

"Byatt paints beautiful and fantastic word-pictures, glittering verbal special effects" (ALLAN MASSIE Scotsman)

"Colour and sensation flood Byatt's writing . . . One of the most brilliant minds and speakers of our generation." (Independent)

"Byatt's prose, compact and lyrical, treats [the gods] with dignity...Ragnarok is a clever, lucid, lovely book" (Guardian)

"Thanks to a rare fusion of imagination and intellect, sensual poetry and cerebral prose, youthful joy and elderly wisdom [,Byatt has made]...an entire world, compressed but energetically alive in all its details. When we have artists like this, who needs gods?" (Peter Conrad Observer)

"Byatt peels back the cover of the book that the girl reads and takes us deep inside it as she delights in reimagining the twilight of the gods and the destruction of the world. ... Like Wagner before her, [she] dares to dream how the world might end ... this rewriting of the Ragnarok is a story for our time of overpopulation and anthropomorphic climate change, and of all time" (Financial Times)

"Surely among the most beautiful and incisive [pages] Byatt has ever written" (Independent)

"Byatt's retelling of Ragnarok is permeated with the loving familiarity of long acquaintance. Her language is lapidary. The terrible archness that can infest the narratives of sophisticated writers who attempt to master myth is resoundingly absent. ... It is pleasant to imagine some lonely, bookish child discovering it and becoming entranced" (Jane Shilling Evening Standard)

"A brilliant, highly intelligent, fiercely personal rendition of the Scandinavian mythology...a gorgeous enrichment and interpretation" (Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Review)

"Byatt's writing, impassioned and liberated from the strictures of the novel, has never been so beautiful" (Telegraph)

"Byatt's prose is majestic, the lush descriptive passages - jeweled one minute, gory the next - a pleasure to get lost in." (Sunday Telegraph)

"In her addition to Canongate's series of "Myths", Byatt dramatically retells Nordic legends of the twilight of the gods." (Independent) --Scotsman

"Energy and power drip from Byatt's writing. ... There are too many glittering sentences to quote here in full." (New Humanist) --New Humanist

"Crafted prose captures the mellifluous cadences of the heroic saga" (James Urquhart Financial Times Life and Arts) --Financial Times

Présentation de l'éditeur

Greedy, cruel and foolish, the Gods deserve to die . . .

From the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession and The Children's Book comes a mesmerising tale of the end of the gods and the destruction of life on this planet. Into her version of Ragnarok, surely one of the most thrilling and apocalyptic of myths, A.S. Byatt weaves the story of a young girl evacuated to the British countryside during the Second World War. Struggling to make sense of her life, she is given a book of Norse myths, and her inner and outer worlds are transformed.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Canongate Books
• Date d'édition: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1847670644
• ISBN 13: 9781847670649
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 192