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A carregar... Academy Street (2014)por Mary Costello
A carregar...
Adira ao LibraryThing para descobrir se irá gostar deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. In the opening sequence of Academy Street, Mary Costello’s moving and minutely observed debut novel, seven-year-old Tess Lohan’s mother has died. The setting is a farm in the west of Ireland in the 1940s. Tess is heartbroken, her father devastated. Times are tough already, but, for the Lohan family, they are about to get tougher. Over the next 145 pages, Costello’s novel follows Tess from her bleak rural childhood to a career as a nurse in New York City, and through to old age in the new century. After her mother’s death, the household is shrouded in an atmosphere of penitential dreariness, from which it never wholly emerges. Tess comes of age, but she is a socially awkward, inward-looking young woman, painfully conscious of her deficiencies, unsure of the kind of life she wants to live. That life, it turns out, is elsewhere. In 1962, at about age 20, having completed her nursing training, she follows her older sister Claire to New York and finds a position. Gradually, haltingly, she builds a life of her own in the city and grows less dependent on family. She moves into an apartment—“a fifth-floor walk-up, at 471 Academy Street, in Inwood”—with Anne, another nurse, also from Ireland. The two become friends and often venture out to explore the city’s night life. But Tess is dissatisfied. Her reticent nature is constantly at odds with a yearning for companionship and love. Then she meets Anne’s cousin David. The attraction is immediate, profound and all-consuming. But when their brief affair ends, Tess is once again alone and her life is forever changed. This is a novel that swells with emotion. Costello’s depiction of Tess’s private inner world is intimate, often painfully so. We are in her head throughout the book, privy to every notion passing through her mind, every moment of confusion or regret, every agony of self-doubt. We share the sting of her distress over tragic and bewildering personal losses and guilt over what she sees as shameful moral failures. Costello’s haunting, elegant prose is stunningly evocative of the rhythms of daily life in rural Ireland of the 1940s and 50s and New York in the raucous latter half of the 20th-Century. From the first page, Academy Street grips the reader by the throat and immerses him in a life in a constant state of flux. Costello, from Galway, is also the author of a book of stories, The China Factory. This novel, which won the Irish Book of the Year Award in 2014, solidifies Mary Costello’s status as a writer of understated yet powerful and emotionally authentic fiction. ( ) Initially I didn't feel much involvement with Tess Lohan, partly due to the third person narrative. However her story grew on me as it moves from her mother's death in Ireland, when Tess was seven years old, through to her retirement years, living in New York. Hers was a life lived quietly and largely isolated apart from a few close friends. The tragic turn of events was unexpected as it was for so many other people. A very poignant story in the end. A favorite....the life of Tess Lohan from a child in Ireland to an adult in New York. Just Tess's story...the writing is beautiful and observations by Tess and others are so interesting and relatable. 'There did not seem to be enough hours or days or years left in her life to read all she wanted to read.' 'She became herself, her most true self, in those hours among books. I am made for this she thought.' 'Years before, she had thought poetry beyond her.' There are many more beautiful quotes to find in this book. I've started 2021 with a wonderful, concise, emotional novel. Academy Street follows the life of Tess Lohan, from the death of her mother when Tess is six, through her old age. Tess is born in Ireland and immigrates to America when she is in her 20s. Costello describes Tess's life - both her internal character and her outward connections with others - in a series of what I would call vignettes of her life. Large time periods are skipped and events don't always seem completely explored, but in spite of this, or maybe because of it, I got to know Tess inside and out in just 179 pages. sem críticas | adicionar uma crítica
"A vibrant, intimate, hypnotic portrait of one woman's life, from an important new writer. Tess Lohan is the kind of woman that we meet and fail to notice every day. A single mother. A nurse. A quiet woman, who nonetheless feels things acutely--a woman with tumultuous emotions and few people to share them with. Academy Street is Mary Costello's luminous portrait of a whole life. It follows Tess from her girlhood in western Ireland through her relocation to America and her life there, concluding with a moving reencounter with her Irish family after forty years of exile. The novel has a hypnotic pull and a steadily mounting emotional force. It speaks of disappointments but also of great joy. It shows how the signal events of the last half century affect the course of a life lived in New York City. Anne Enright has said that Costello's first collection of stories, The China Factory, "has the feel of work that refused to be abandoned; of stories that were written for the sake of getting something important right. Her writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems demand" (The Guardian). Academy Street is driven by this same urgency. In sentence after sentence it captures the rhythm and intensity of inner life"-- Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Google Books — A carregar... GénerosSistema Decimal de Melvil (DDC)823.92Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 2000-Classificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos EUA (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
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