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Henry Williamson (1) (1895–1977)

Autor(a) de Tarka the Otter

Para outros autores com o nome Henry Williamson, ver a página de desambiguação.

71+ Works 1,839 Membros 23 Críticas 2 Favorited

Séries

Obras por Henry Williamson

Tarka the Otter (1927) 873 exemplares
Salar the Salmon (1935) 94 exemplares
The Patriot's Progress (1930) 57 exemplares
The Dark Lantern (1800) 45 exemplares
The Henry Williamson Animal Saga (1960) 45 exemplares
The Beautiful Years (1921) 41 exemplares
Dandelion Days (1930) 33 exemplares
How Dear is Life (1954) 31 exemplares
Donkey Boy (1952) 29 exemplares
The Golden Virgin (1957) 29 exemplares
A Test to Destruction (1960) 28 exemplares
Young Phillip Maddison (1953) 27 exemplares
The Innocent Moon (1961) 26 exemplares
Phoenix Generation (1965) 26 exemplares
Love and the Loveless (1974) 26 exemplares
The Power of the Dead (1963) 25 exemplares
It Was the Nightingale (1962) 25 exemplares
A Fox Under My Cloak (1955) 23 exemplares
Lucifer Before Sunrise (1967) 23 exemplares
The Pathway (1928) 22 exemplares
The Phasian Bird (1950) 16 exemplares
The Old Stag (1926) 16 exemplares
The Dream of Fair Women (1943) 16 exemplares
The Gale of the World (1969) 16 exemplares
The Scandaroon (1972) 14 exemplares
Life in a Devon Village (1945) 12 exemplares
The Story of a Norfolk Farm (1941) 11 exemplares
The Wet Flanders Plain (1987) 10 exemplares
Tales of a Devon Village (1944) 9 exemplares
Christmas Book at Bedtime (2000) 9 exemplares
The Children of Shallowford (1978) 8 exemplares
Tales of Moorland and Estuary (1953) 8 exemplares
A Clear Water Stream (1958) 8 exemplares
The Ackymals 7 exemplares
The Sun in the Sands (1945) 7 exemplares
The Village Book (1930) 7 exemplares
The Flax of Dream (1935) 5 exemplares
My Favourite Country Stories (1966) 5 exemplares
Norfolk Life (1943) 5 exemplares
The Star Born (1973) 5 exemplares
Goodbye, west country, (1938) 5 exemplares
As the Sun Shines (1944) 5 exemplares
Village Tales (1986) 4 exemplares
The Lone Swallows (2010) 3 exemplares
Devon Holiday 2 exemplares
A Breath of Country Air Part 1 (1990) 2 exemplares
Sun brothers 1 exemplar
Scribbling Lark 1 exemplar
Days of Wonder (1987) 1 exemplar

Associated Works

Winged Victory (1934) — Tribute and Preface, algumas edições150 exemplares
Famous and Curious Animal Stories (1982) — Contribuidor — 29 exemplares
English farming (1941) — Introdução, algumas edições20 exemplares
The Country Child (1992) — Contribuidor — 10 exemplares
A Soldier's Diary of the Great War (1929) — Introdução — 4 exemplares
West Country Short Stories (1949) — Contribuidor — 2 exemplares
Stories for girls — Contribuidor — 1 exemplar
水の誘惑―釣魚文学大全 (1983年) (1983) — Contribuidor — 1 exemplar

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Outros nomes
Tonson, Jacob
Madison, William
Williamson, Harry
Data de nascimento
1895-12-01
Data de falecimento
1977-08-13
Sexo
male
Nacionalidade
UK
Local de nascimento
Brockley, London, England
Locais de residência
Georgeham, Devon, UK
Educação
Colfe's School
Ocupações
naturalist

Membros

Críticas

Super-dense prose, unrelenting in its exact description. Many things happen, but they're mostly the same things over and over. Admirable writing, but also lots of work required from the reader. I can't imagine what people who don't see pictures in their heads would make of this book.
 
Assinalado
judeprufrock | 14 outras críticas | Jul 4, 2023 |
"Pity acts through the imagination, the higher light of the world, and imagination arises from the world of things, as a rainbow from the sun."

Starting with his birth, the book takes us almost day by day through Tarka's life — learning to swim and fish, wrestling and sliding down riverbanks with his sisters and mother, before heading off alone to find himself a mate, around the estuaries of Devon.

This is one of the best known nature novels but its not a sanitised Disneyesque nature. There is beauty is everywhere but there is also danger everywhere. Everything tries to eat everything else and the local farmers and water-bailiffs hunt otters, which they see as vermin. The sub-title of the novel, 'His Joyful Water-Life and Death' , tells us what the inevitable ending will be but beforehand gives a highly realistic insight into an otter’s life, its joys and perils. Williamson spent years tramping the riverways of Devon studying otters so whilst this is fiction its based on fact and close observation.

The writing is beautiful, in particular when Tarka was in the water, I could almost visualise it. Its sometime easy to think of otters as cute fish eating creatures but we mustn't forget that they are carnivores that will eat birds, frogs and other mammals as well. The book was first published in 1927 and thankfully attitudes have changed and despite the ending is neither sad nor depressing. It's a classic for a reason. My only real grumble was the constant use of local slang for many of the creatures that featured, whilst he initially tells us what the proper name is when they reoccurred later on I had forgotten it. The glossary could have been more expansive I felt.

“Time flowed with the sunlight of the still green place. The summer drake-flies, whose wings were as the most delicate transparent leaves, hatched from their cases on the water and danced over the shadowed surface.”
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
PilgrimJess | 14 outras críticas | Apr 23, 2023 |
Classic fiction, otters
 
Assinalado
sbodmer | 14 outras críticas | Jan 5, 2023 |
This is the most uncompromisingly "animal" of all animal stories, more like a TV nature documentary than a novel. On the one hand, the writing itself is as beautiful as the place it describes: north Devon with its deep wooded valleys and rich farmland, its high moors where wild ponies graze under huge skies, its headland-fringed coast with the tallest sea-cliffs anywhere in England, are lovingly described by a Londoner who came to know every inch of it. But on the other hand, there's no moral, no "lesson", just life in the raw the way it really is for a wild animal: cubs, parents and mates disappear from the narrative and are simply never mentioned again.
   It's not a book about hunting. None of its otters die of disease or old age, most are killed and most of those by people - by the otter-hunt, or in gin-traps, or cornered and battered to death as "vermin"; yet Williamson's own attitude was to some extent contradictory. He admired the huntsmen themselves for their knowledge of otters and of Nature in general - he got to know them and followed the hunt himself; but in Tarka he also managed to get down on paper, better than almost anyone else I've read, the numbed outrage I feel at senseless cruelty to animals.
   Environmental campaigners such as Rachel Carson have taken inspiration from this book - and, for all I know, Tarka may even have helped to save the otter itself because much has happened since 1927 when it was written. Their numbers declined for decades until otters finally disappeared completely from most of England in the 1960s (due as much to pesticides running into rivers as to hunting) and they even made it into the Red Book as "vulnerable to extinction". But then in 1978 hunting was banned, and in 1981 the landmark Wildlife and Countryside Act was passed into law, with otters as one of the first animals to come under its protection. These days they're making a comeback and the future looks bright.
   Tarka isn't really about all that either though, neither about hunting nor conservation; in fact just for once, refreshingly, here we have a novel which isn't about us at all - and I think maybe that at least partly explains its enduring appeal. It's a story in which humans are peripheral figures, absent altogether for much of the time and only periodically erupting into Tarka's life like just another incomprehensible destructive phenomenon, like storms, like bad luck, like winter. And in the interludes we get glimpses of a different Earth (my favourite passage in the book: Tarka and a raven playing together), the way it must have been throughout almost all its history: no "moral", no "point" to it all, just life.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
justlurking | 14 outras críticas | Jul 4, 2021 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
71
Also by
11
Membros
1,839
Popularidade
#13,999
Avaliação
3.9
Críticas
23
ISBN
173
Línguas
4
Marcado como favorito
2

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