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A carregar... The Gilded Chalet: Off-piste in Literary Switzerland (2015)por Padraig Rooney
   Nenhum(a) Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. 1   Nickelini | Mar 17, 2019 |   The Gilded Chalet: Off-Piste in Literary Switzerland by Padraig Rooney is an interesting and well written book. Not only does the author delve on literary greats, but also about Swiss culture, their affinity for order, espionage, money laundering and, of course, neutrality. Mr. Rooney, an adopted child of Switzerland, likes his country very much. He writes about places and people in an easy to understand language, and paints a vivid pictures in the reader’s mind. The author uses contemporary culture icons (and pop-culture as well) to help the reader envision those he writes about (Jean-Jacques Rousseau is written of as the Salman Rushdie of the 18th Century). The book was written in English, but if I didn’t know better I could have sworn it was a translation. There is just some exotic about translated books, the language which tries to capture the original but no sound foreign, which this book has. For any lover of literature and trivia, this book is a gem. Not only about literary greats, but also about Switzerland and the morose atmosphere so conducive to espionage and financial shenanigans. As a fan of James Bond, I found the chapter about Ian Fleming fascinating, but to my surprise not necessarily my favorite, that was kept for the wonderful section about Isabelle Eberhardt, whom I never read but certainly want to now. For more reviews and bookish posts please visit: http://www.ManOfLaBook.com (  )2 ZoharLaor | Nov 2, 2017 | I liked the author very much; a Swiss resident for many years, he takes a pleasingly ambivalent view of his adopted home which is at variance with the over-reverent tone that a lot of these kinds of books take. Laconic and opinionated, and slightly shamefaced when discussing his day job as a teacher at an international school, Rooney seems like the sort of person I have met a hundred times in various expat worlds – these pragmatic, interesting drifters who end up in far-flung cities, working as journalists, teachers, press officers, all with unfinished drafts of a novel stuffed in the dresser drawer, ‘middle-aged humanists skulking along the edges of a managerial culture’ (as he puts it himself). His sketches of people and places are excellent, which is just as well because sketches are really all you get in a book like this. So censored, persecuted Rousseau is presented as an ‘eighteenth-century Salman Rushdie’; Geneva-born Nicolas Bouvier, whose travelogues are often tinged with a love of eastern mysticism, is summed up neatly as ‘Calvin under the bodhi tree’. Some are described using well-chosen quotes from other people: so Patricia Highsmith is introduced as ‘a sort of sapphic Dennis the Menace’ (according to Terry Castle) who ‘thought having an espresso machine made her sophisticated’ (according to her agent). It's hard to read his quick portrait of cross-dressing traveller Isabelle Eberhardt without needing to read her at once, immediately: She might have been attractive as a boy, but as a woman the desert took its toll. She was drawn to sex, to the port cities of Marseilles, Algiers, Bône, Tunis, to the seedy lives of stevedores and garrison recruits. Her writing is full of people down on their luck, fallen women, sex as a currency of trade. She was an aficionado of the quickie. A smoker, a drinker and a habitual user of kif – hashish – staid, abstemious Geneva produced her, like a rare orchid from her father's greenhouse. I was hammering my credit card details into Amazon before I got to the end of the paragraph, despite its dangling modifier. And yet Eberhardt wrote virtually nothing about Switzerland itself, apart from occasionally in her letters – the inclusion of people like this makes you wonder what criteria exactly Rooney is applying. If it were just a look at foreign writers in Switzerland then it might be understandable, but once you start including interesting literary natives (and this book also takes in Dürrenmatt, Frisch and Peter Stamm), then you have to ask – where is Gottfried Keller or Regina Ullmann or Arno Camenisch or Franz Hohler or Martin Suter or…etc. I was also mildly scandalised to see him breezily admit to abandoning The Magic Mountain halfway through, in the middle of a chapter arguing for its importance no less. Nevertheless there are lots of gems in here – a sensitive look at how multilingual Zürich informed Joyce's use of language in Ulysses, for example, or a moody consideration of why Switzerland's murky financial activities and rich corporate residents make it such a rich subject for writers of noir. Many of the most interesting chapters are about people whose attitude to Switzerland was never crystallised into a particular work – the essays on Annemarie Schwarzenbach, or the rich literary expats like Rilke or Anthony Burgess, have lots to say that was new to me. And for an English-speaking audience, it's all designed to add up to a powerful argument that [m]ultilingual, multicultural Swiss cities are at the heart of Europe in a way that renders the Anglo world provincial, with its Costa coffee and easyJet swagger —something which I hadn't really believed going in, but which Rooney ended up convincing me of. And if you're just in it for ideas to expand your TBR pile, then I can save you some time. Boiling it down into a reading list, I reckon, would give you something like the following…. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, [book:Julie, or the New Heloise|27788]( )3 Widsith | Apr 27, 2016 | sem críticas | adicionar uma crítica
In the summer of 1816 paparazzi trained their telescopes on Byron and the Shelleys across Lake Geneva. Mary Shelley babysat and wrote Frankenstein. Byron dieted and penned The Prisoner of Chillon. His doctor, Polidori, was dreaming up The Vampyre. Together they put Switzerland on the map. From Rousseau to Nabokov, le Carré to Conan Doyle, Hemingway to Hesse to Highsmith, Switzerland has always provided a refuge for writers as an escape from world wars, oppression, tuberculosis... or marriage. For Swiss writers from the country was like a gilded prison. The Romantics, the utopians and other spiritual seekers viewed Switzerland as a land of milk and honey, as nature's paradise. In the twentieth century, spying in neutral Switzerland spawned the finest espionage and crime fiction. Part detective work, part treasure chest, The Gilded Chalet takes you on a grand tour of the birthplace of our best-loved stories, revealing how Switzerland became the landscape of our imagination. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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 Google Books — A carregar...GénerosSistema Decimal de Melvil (DDC)809.89494Literature By Topic History, description and criticism of more than two literatures By or for groups of personsClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos EUA (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia: (3.79)
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One thing I appreciated about this that he did a decent job of spreading himself geographically around the country, and linguistically he covered all the official languages, and 3 of the 4 national languages (not sure why he didn't read the acclaimed Arno Camenisch so he could tick the Romansch box).
If you go to www.padraigrooney.com > The Gilded Chalet, you'll find a map of Switzerland, with all the pertinent places tagged with a literary explanation. I just discovered this, but it looks like a time-sink for tomorrow afternoon. http://www.padraigrooney.com/home_blog/?page_id=92
Recommended for: I think this is written for a very specific audience, and I can only recommend it to someone who loves books and is really interested in Switzerland. Reader reviews on it though are really high, so if this is an area of interest, you'll probably love it. It went off on tangents, and I find that a lot of fun. (