The Angel's Game - Couverture rigide

Ruiz Zafon, Carlos

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0385667639 ISBN 13 : 9780385667630

Editeur : Doubleday Canada, 2009

A propos du livre

Extrait :

A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.

My first time came one faraway day in December 1917. I was seventeen and worked at The Voice of Industry, a newspaper that had seen better days and now languished in a barn of a building that had once housed a sulfuric acid factory. The walls still oozed the corrosive vapor that ate away at furniture and clothes, sapping the spirits, consuming even the soles of shoes. The newspaper's headquarters rose behind the forest of angels and crosses of the Pueblo Nuevo cemetery; from afar, its outline merged with the mausoleums silhouetted against the horizon - a skyline stabbed by hundreds of chimneys and factories that wove a perpetual twilight of scarlet and black above Barcelona.

On the night that was about to change the course of my life, the newspaper's deputy editor, Don Basilio Moragas, saw fit to summon me, just before closing time, to the dark cubicle at the far end of the editorial staff room that doubled as his office and cigar den. Don Basilio was a forbidding-looking man with a bushy moustache who did not suffer fools and who subscribed to the theory that the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or someone with a vitamin deficiency. Any journalist prone to florid prose would be sent off to write funeral notices for three weeks. If, after this penance, the culprit relapsed, Don Basilio would ship him off permanently to the "House and Home" pages. We were all terrified of him, and he knew it.

"Did you call me, Don Basilio?" I ventured timidly.

The deputy editor looked at me askance. I entered the office, which smelled of sweat and tobacco in that order. Ignoring my presence, Don Basilio continued to read through one of the articles lying on his table, a red pencil in hand. For a couple of minutes, he machine-gunned the text with corrections and amputations, muttering sharp comments as if I weren't there. Not knowing what to do, and noticing a chair placed against the wall, I slid toward it.

"Who said you could sit down?" muttered Don Basilio without raising his eyes from the text.

I quickly stood up and held my breath. The deputy editor sighed, let his red pencil fall, and leaned back in his armchair, eyeing me as if I were some useless piece of junk.

"I've been told that you write, Martin."

I gulped. When I opened my mouth only a ridiculous, reedy voice emerged.

"A little, well, I don't know, I mean, yes, I do write..."

"I hope you write better than you speak. And what do you write - if that's not too much to ask?"

"Crime stories. I mean..."

"I get the idea."

The look Don Basilio gave me was priceless. If I'd said I devoted my time to sculpting figures for Nativity scenes out of fresh dung I would have drawn three times as much enthusiasm from him. He sighed again and shrugged his shoulders.

"Vidal says you're not altogether bad. He says you stand out."

"Of course, with the sort of competition in this neck of the woods, one doesn't have to run very fast. Still, if Vidal says so."

Pedro Vidal was the star writer at The Voice of Industry. He penned a weekly column on crime and lurid events - the only thing worth reading in the whole paper. He was also the author of a dozen modestly successful thrillers about gangsters in the Raval quarter carrying out bedroom intrigues with ladies of high society. Invariably dressed in impeccable silk suits and shiny Italian moccasins, Vidal had the looks and the manner of a matinee idol: fair hair always well combed, a pencil moustache, and the easy, generous smile of someone who feels comfortable in his own skin and at ease with the world. He belonged to a family whose forebears had made their pile in the Americas in the sugar business and, on their return to Barcelona, had bitten off a large chunk of the city's electricity grid. His father, the patriarch of the clan, was one of the newspaper's main shareholders, and Don Pedro used its offices as a playground to kill the tedium of never having worked out of necessity a single day in his life. It mattered little to him that the newspaper was losing money as quickly as the new automobiles that were beginning to circulate around Barcelona leaked oil: with its abundance of nobility, the Vidal dynasty was now busy collecting banks and plots of land the size of small principalities in the new part of town known as the Ensanche.

Pedro Vidal was the first person to whom I had dared show rough drafts of my writing when, barely a child, I carried coffee and cigarettes round the staff room. He always had time for me: he read what I had written and gave me good advice. Eventually, he made me his assistant and would allow me to type out his drafts. It was he who told me that if I wanted to bet on the Russian roulette of literature, he was willing to help me and set me on the right path. True to his word, he had now thrown me into the clutches of Don Basilio, the newspaper's Cerberus.

"Vidal is a sentimentalist who still believes in those profoundly un-Spanish myths such as meritocracy or giving opportunities to those who deserve them rather than to the current favorite. Loaded as he is, he can allow himself to go around being a free spirit. If I had one hundredth of the cash he doesn't even need I would have devoted my life to honing sonnets and little twittering nightingales would come to eat from my hand, captivated by my kindness and charm."

"Senor Vidal is a great man!" I protested.

"He's more than that. He's a saint, because although you may look scruffy he's been banging on at me for weeks about how talented and hardworking the office boy is. He knows that deep down I'm a softy and, besides, he's assured me that if I give you this break he'll present me with a box of Cuban cigars. And if Vidal says so, it's as good as Moses coming down from the mountain with the lump of stone in his hand and the revealed truth shining from his forehead. So, to get to the point, because it's Christmas and because I want your friend to shut up once and for all, I'm offering you a head start, against wind and tide."

"Thank you so much, Don Basilio. I promise you won't regret it."

"Don't get too carried away, boy. Let's see, what do you think of the indiscriminate use of adjectives and adverbs?"

"I think it's a disgrace and should be set down in the penal code," I replied with the conviction of a zealot.

Don Basilio nodded in approval.

"You're on the right track, Martin. Your priorities are clear. Those who make it in this business have priorities, not principles. This is the plan. Sit down and concentrate, because I'm not going to tell you twice."

The plan was as follows. For reasons that Don Basilio thought best not to set out in detail, the back page of the Sunday edition, which was traditionally reserved for a short story or a travel feature, had fallen through at the last minute. The content was to have been a fiery narrative in a patriotic vein about the exploits of Catalan medieval knights who saved Christianity and all that was decent under the sun, starting with the Holy Land and ending with the banks of our Llobregat delta. Unfortunately, the text had not arrived in time or, I suspected, Don Basilio simply didn't want to publish it. This left us, only six hours before deadline, with no other substitute for the story than a full-page advertisement for whalebone corsets that guaranteed perfect hips and full immunity from the effects of buttery by-products. The editorial board had opted to take the bull by the horns and make the most of the literary excellence that permeated every corner of the newspaper. The problem would be overcome by publishing a four-column human interest piece for the entertainment and edification of our loyal family-oriented readership. The list of proven talent included ten names, none of which, needless to say, was mine.

"Martin, my friend, circumstances have conspired so that not one of the champions on our payroll is on the premises or can be contacted in time. With disaster imminent, I have decided to give you your first crack at glory."

"You can count on me."

"I'm counting on five double-spaced pages in six hours, Don Edgar Allan Poe. Bring me a story, not a speech. If I want a sermon, I'll go to Midnight Mass. Bring me a story I have not read before and, if I have read it, bring it to me so well written and narrated that I won't even notice."

I was about to leave the room when Don Basilio got up, walked round his desk, and rested a hand, heavy and large as an anvil, on my shoulder. Only then, when I saw him close up, did I notice a twinkle in his eyes.

"If the story is decent I'll pay you ten pesetas. And if it's better than decent and our readers like it, I'll publish more."

"Any specific instructions, Don Basilio?" I asked.

"Yes. Don't let me down."

. . .

I spent the next six hours in a trance. I installed myself at a table that stood in the middle of the editorial room and was reserved for Vidal, on the days when he felt like dropping by. The room was deserted, submerged in a gloom thick with the smoke of a thousand cigarettes. Closing my eyes for a moment, I conjured up an image, a cloak of dark clouds spilling down over the city in the rain, a man walking under cover of shadows with blood on his hands and a secret in his eyes. I didn't know who he was or what he was fleeing from, but during the next six hours he was going to become my best friend. I slid a page into the typewriter and wit...

Revue de presse :

“Very rarely are readers allowed to discover greatness on their own, to get caught up in the story at a visceral level, immersed in a fictional world, and eventually to emerge blinking wide-eyed into the ‘real’ world, putting the book down, sated and energized, surprised to find that they have read something, unknowingly, that can hold its own with the classics.... [The Angel’s Game] is this sort of rarity, a book that is utterly new, defiantly, nay, irresistibly readable, yet possessing the sense of depth and significance one usually finds only in the vaunted, self-consciously ‘great’ novels, past and present.... It belongs to no genre, while seeming to ruthlessly pilfer from many of them. It’s part mystery, part ghost story, part bildungsroman, part romance, part tragedy, part blood-soaked noir.... It constantly surprises, at a narrative level, and provides the sort of breakneck, can't-put-it-down reading experience that one usually finds only in genre writing.”
— The Globe and Mail

“A hypnotically chilling gothic thriller.... Tightly wound in an aura of mystery.... The great strength of Zafón’s writing, as with Poe or Roland Topor ... is in his ability to weave a mood of foreboding around his plot.... A book that is so beautifully constructed and, finally, memorable.”
— The Gazette (Montreal)

“In The Angel’s Game, as in his previous novel, The Shadow of the Wind, [Zafón] spins a fantastically elaborate plot from a slender, whimsical idea. Here it’s the notion that a writer might, on a bad day, succumb to a sense of futility about the value of his calling, might begin to believe that the act of telling a story isn’t just vain, but positively diabolical.... The pleasures of The Angel’s Game are guilty ones. As he did in The Shadow of the Wind, Ruiz Zafón provides, along with sex and death, a nice slide show of old Barcelona, a handful of affectionate riffs on favorite books (among them that other, very different mysterious-benefactor tale Great Expectations) and a pervasive sense of the childish joy of credulity – of surrendering to a story and letting it take you where it will, whatever the consequences.”
— The New York Times

“Zafón’s novel is detailed and vivid, and David’s narration is charming and funny, but suspect. Villain or victim, he is the hero of and the guide to this dark labyrinth that, by masterful design, remains thrilling and bewildering.”
— Publishers Weekly

“[A] gothic tale about the magic of books and the darkest corners of the human soul.”
— The Independent (Ireland)

“Zafón thrillingly tiptoes along the fine line between paranormal events and psychological delusion that modern pioneers of the uncanny ... had trod.”
— The Independent

“Scintillating... A heady brew of detective thriller, supernatural horror tale, magical realist fable and heartbreaking love story. It explores life, death, religious belief and — more than anything — the lonely, bitter-sweet self-torture that it is to be a writer, and the central role of books, especially fiction, in our understanding of the human condition.”
— Daily Mail

“The breeze from Charles Dickens and his Great Expectations blows through this novel from the start.... Zafón constantly invites us to see Barcelona, his ‘city of the damned,’ from above. He takes us into sinful corners, indulging fantasies that are erotic, magical or violent. In the end Zafón is the tempter. Many will fall for his vigorous and exhaustingly relentless story-telling.”
— The Guardian (UK)

“Often novelist heroes grate, but The Angel’s Game makes the most of the choice, playfully invoking a range of authorial gripes [and] taking a gleeful dig at the capriciousness of critics.”
— Lionel Shriver, The Daily Telegraph

“If you’ve been doubting Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s ability to produce an entire quartet of books about books, don’t. It’s my guess that he has acres upon acres of tales still to tell.”
— Irish Times

“Carlos Ruiz Zafón writes like an angel in The Angel’s Game.”
— USA Today

“A masterfully written love affair with books and words as well as an obsessive tribute to passionate love.... Eerie, gothic ... A multi-layered confection that combines undying love, magical realism, meditations on religion, the importance of books and a love affair with the vibrant city of Barcelona. Zafón hits the reset button on what it means to be a great writer. His visionary storytelling prowess is a genre unto itself.”
— USA Today

“Zafón has a gift for setting the writing life ... against a tapestry of political events.... It is ... a reader’s considerable pleasure to roam the streets of Barcelona once again and hear their whispered stories.”
— New Orleans Books News and Reviews

“You are in exceptionally good hands the whole way. Zafón can write up a storm. In fact, he can write up all sorts of storms: rain, ice, fire. It’s hard, really, to find anything missing from his arsenal: zesty atmosphere, crackling dialogue, arresting epigrams.”
— The Washington Post

“Zafón is a master of the atmospheric.... Its faith in the power of fiction is endearing, and addictive.”
— Financial Times

“Zafón seals the deal with a wickedly clever tale that turns readers into accomplices of his obsession with books, the quixotic characters who pen and peddle them and mystical Barcelona.... Vivid ... The city makes the writer, and Zafón once more creates a tale — a Harry Potter for grown-ups, a mammoth parable, and operative morality play — worthy of Barcelona.”
— Miami Herald

“In Zafón’s imagination, the city, where fading grandeur coexists with Gaudi’s strange and surreal constructions, takes on as much character and menace as Dickens’ London.... Zafón’s fascination with the nature of faith and storytelling ... can’t help but engage anyone who believes that life can be shaped by books.... The Angel’s Game draws with relish on all the conventions beloved of Wilkie Collins, Dickens and even the penny dreadfuls that David despises, then weaves them into something entirely original and surprisingly moving that holds the reader’s expectation until the final twist.”
— The Observer

“Pulpy, melodramatic and compulsively readable.”
— Time

“Moody, seductive ... Zafón provides, along with sex and death, a nice slide show of old Barcelona, a handful of affectionate riffs on favourite books — and a pervasive sense of the childish joy of credulity — of surrendering to a story and letting it take you where it will.”
— The Times

“Zafón is expert at introducing twists to his story; his dialogue sparkles; and he knows how to string together emotional and narrative incident.”
— Times Literary Supplement

“It’s safe to say The Angel’s Game won’t be forgotten anytime soon.”
— The Washington Post Book World

“If you're waiting for Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, then Zafón offers the best way to bide your time until its release. He offers not only plenty of plot intricacies and mystery but also a lyrical, melancholic style of writing. The Angel's Game is a strange creature, a literary centaur in which a meditation on the craft of writing is combined with a thriller about David Martin, a master of pulp and Grand Guignol.”
— Los Angeles Times

“The Angel’s Game will keep you glued to your deck chair. It may give you nightmares, but if this book was meant to be a testament to how a book can engage the imagination like nothing else, Zafón’s mission can be truly called accomplished.”
— Seattle Times

“Spanish novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafón has followed up his masterly debut, The Shadow Of The Wind, with a work of no less brilliance. The setting is Barcelona in the Twenties, the main character a writer of crime novels whose own life takes a spooky turn. There are nods in the direction of Dickens, Dumas and Edgar Allan Poe; but don't get the idea that this is one of those bookish, dry-as-dust yarns fit only for academics. It has wit, style, great sex and a hugely entertaining plot.”
— The Mail on Sunday (UK)

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Doubleday Canada
• Date d'édition: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0385667639
• ISBN 13: 9780385667630
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 544