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A carregar... The Yellow Birds: A Novel (original 2012; edição 2013)por Kevin Powers (Autor)
Informação Sobre a ObraThe Yellow Birds por Kevin Powers (Author) (2012)
A carregar...
Adira ao LibraryThing para descobrir se irá gostar deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. An excellent, but harrowing story of a soldier's experiences in Iraq and how he deals with the aftermath. Powers jumps back and forth between time in country, training and after at home to setup the trauma that the characters go thru and the PTSD that the narrator experiences. Excellent read. What happened? What fucking happened? That's not even the question, I thought. How is that the question? How do you answer the unanswerable? To say what happened, the mere facts, the disposition of events in time, would come to seem like a kind of treachery. The dominoes of moments, lined up symmetrically, then tumbling backward against the hazy and unsure push of cause, showed only that a fall is every object's destiny. It is not enough to say what happened. Everything happened. Everything fell Written in a somewhat poetic style where the sentences may be like this one: "But home, too, was hard to get an image of, harder still to think beyond the last curved enclosure of the desert, where it seemed I had left the better portion of myself as one among innumerable grains of sand, how in the end the weather-beaten stone is not one stone but only that which has been weathered, a result, an example of slow erosion on a thing by wind or waves that break against it, so that the else of anyone involved ends up deposited like silt spilling out into an estuary, or gathered at the bottom of a river in a city that is all you can remember." The erosion "on" a thing and the "else" of anyone are quite characteristic.
A remarkable, beautifully understated, powerful, yet poised novel. The novel moves, fitfully, through Virginia and Iraq and Germany and New Jersey and Kentucky, from 2003 to 2009. Recalling the war, Bartle says, is “like putting a puzzle together from behind: the shapes familiar, the picture quickly fading, the muted tan of the cardboard backing a tease at wholeness and completion.” This serves the story in two ways. First, it turns readers into active participants, enlisting them in a sense as co-authors who fit together the many memories and guess at what terrible secret lies in wait, the truth behind Murphy’s death. Because they lean forward instead of back, because they participate in piecing together the puzzle, they are made more culpable. Then too, the fractured structure replicates the book’s themes. Like a chase scene made up of sentences that run on and on and ultimately leave readers breathless, or like a concert description that stops and starts, that swings and sways, that makes us stamp our feet and clap our hands — the nonlinear design of Powers’s novel is a beautifully brutal example of style matching content. War destroys. It doesn’t just rip through bone and muscle, stone and steel; it fragments the mind as a fist to a mirror might create thousands of bloodied, glittering shards. ...and while few will have expected the war in Iraq to bring forth a novel that can stand beside All Quiet on the Western Front or The Red Badge of Courage, The Yellow Birds does just that, for our time, as those books did for theirs. Pertence à Série da EditoraPrémiosDistinctions
In the midst of a bloody battle in the Iraq War, two soldiers, bound together since basic training, do everything to protect each other from both outside enemies and the internal struggles that come from constant danger. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Google Books — A carregar... GénerosSistema Decimal de Melvil (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos EUA (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
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La disgraziata storia di Bartle e Murph è inscritta nella disgraziata guerra in Iraq, che l'autore ha vissuto in prima persona e ha deciso di raccontarla tramite questo romanzo straziante di perdita. Bartle, infatti, insieme al suo amico e alla sua innocenza, perde i suoi ideali e qualunque cosa lo avesse definito prima di quella maledetta guerra.
Dire cos'è successo non basta. È successo tutto. È caduto tutto.
Io non credo di aver mai compreso cosa sia il DPTS che affligge i militari di ritorno da conflitti particolarmente violenti. Non credo di saperlo nemmeno adesso, non sul serio almeno, ma quelle due pagine nelle quali Bartle immagina di parlare ai suoi amici di quel grumo contratto che ha dentro sono state illuminanti (e dolorosissime da leggere, figuriamoci a viverle).
Non mi andava di sorridere e dire grazie. Non volevo fingere di aver fatto qualcosa più che sopravvivere.
Non è facile trovare un romanzo che racconti di guerra senza scadere nella retorica: la prosa di Powers, però, nella sua scarna essenzialità, è ricca di immagini, impressioni, colori, odori, emozioni.
Ma quando lei mi disse: «Oh, John, sei tornato a casa,» non le credetti. ( )