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A carregar... Dandelion Winepor Ray Bradbury
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All of Bradbury's writing transports me to another place. ( ) Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury, made a deep and lasting impression on me. It is already, after one reading, on my ever-mutating list of favourite books. It was powerful. I smiled cheerily at most of it, cried twice, and laughed out loud once. That's a lot of feeling from a woman with a locked-up heart, and a mind closed to love forever. I think this book may have changed the way I plan to live the rest of my days. At the very least, it has given me the impetus to think about leaving this sofa where I've weathered heartbreak and hid from a global pandemic, and mourned the death of both of my parents, and suffered more heartbreak and unemployment. It's become a hermit's cave, this old brown sofa. I'm so glad I encountered this book. Dandelion Wine takes place in the summer of 1928, in Greentown, Illinois, and focuses on the lives of two brothers, Doug and Tom. These boys really know how to spend every moment of summer, and in the years before helicopter parenting, they had a summer like I used to have, outdoorsy, unsupervised, and mainly happy. The tales of new sneakers and matinees provide a lovely backdrop to the real power of this story, which points out that you can't get time back. In between cavorting and planning, the town where Doug and Tom live undergoes deaths, old romances, a serial killer (that was a surprise!), secrets, fears, and the bottling of dandelion wine, which is the very essence of childhood summers. I could smell grass and Coppertone sun lotion and heat while I read. I could hear cicadas droning, noisy children, and crickets, to whose music I fell asleep almost every night of my childhood summers. I don't know when I've read a book so evocative of my youth. I expected science fiction. It is what Bradbury's known for. It wasn't. It veered briefly into horror when a serial killer comes to town, an event so tautly writtien that at one point I screamed out loud, but it is not science fiction in any discernable way. I find myself comparing it, even while reading it, to my beloved A Death in the Family by James Agee, a masterpiece of American fiction, perhaps the finest of the twentieth century. Dandelion Wine stands next to it, proudly. The narrator was excellent. He had a fine voice and dramatized with excellence. His name is David Aaron Baker. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I have never tasted dandelion wine, but I feel like I can conjure it to my lips. The aroma from the old, cloudy bottle is redolent of nostalgia; a cloying scent of freshly cut grass and your nan's culinary magic undercut by a sweaty, fetid, almost smegmacious, stench that coats the sinuses. The first sip effervescing on the tongue; an explosion of ecstacy, as if standing in Wonka's factory as the bombs fall. Every sweet and sour taste is there, so perfectly overwhelming in their apotheosis. Now the nose is running, mouth watering, tastebuds fizzing. The palette, now roused by this wondrous sensation, yawns and stretches, before rolling over and awaiting the flavours to bathe it. Boiling treacle reaches out with tentacles of nostalgia, strangling the palette, coating it in choking oil, even as the bittersweet bit in its mouth keeps it distracted. Your mouth is held open, a foie gras funnel forced down your gullet as the sickly, gritty substance is pushed inside. You choke and splutter, while faceless family members and your imaginary friends comfort you, whispering the exact exquisite words you always needed to hear to be complete. You feel calm for a moment, enjoying the embrace and savouring the sugary alcoholic bite, and what it's doing to you. The spigot is turns all the way, filling you with gloop, until you explode and lay among the tatters of everything else that wasn't in the recipe. Sometimes when you re-read something after a gap of many years, especially something read when you were a teen, you are disappointed so I was braced for that, but need not have worried. This is an extended prose poem, evoking emotion, atmosphere, the experiences of a young boy growing up, and the setting of a small American town off the beaten track in the state of Illinois, pre WWII - eventually we find out it is 1928. The timespan is just the three months from June to end August, basically the children's summer holiday from school, and the main characters are Douglas Spaulding and his 10-year-old brother Tom. The book is nostalgic - for the author's own childhood I imagine - and some of it does not quite come off - the Happiness Machine section I found a bit silly - but it is a set of vignettes and short stories exploring various aspects of summer and the small town characters. During these short three months, Douglas' life changes irrecovably as he first really feels alive and then suffers a series of losses - his best friend leaves town due to the father's job change and various older characters pass on, though not without affecting their friends and families and leaving traces of themselves behind. Douglas records his experiences in a notebook and discusses them with his younger brother though he finds it impossible to convey the sense of his own mortality and the depression that descends on him, which at one point nearly becomes his undoing. There are a few sections from other character's POVs and among these, the section about the women who attend an evening film performance and the one who comes home alone - bearing in mind there is a serial killer who comes into town occasionally and targets women - is one of the most effective. I think though, that the sections concerning the coming to terms by older people with their own looming end are much more poignant on this re-read, given the passage of time. Anyway, in view of the slight niggle mentioned above, 4.5 stars which translates into 5 on Goodreads. sem críticas | adicionar uma crítica
Está contido emFahrenheit 451 - The Illustrated Man - Dandelion Wine - The Golden Apples of the Sun & the Martian Chronicles por Ray Bradbury The October Country / Dandelion Wine / The Martian Chronicles / The Illustrated Man por Ray Bradbury Tem a sequela (não de série)Tem a adaptaçãoTem um guia de estudo para estudantes
Fantasy.
Fiction.
Short Stories.
Historical Fiction.
HTML: Ray Bradbury's moving recollection of a vanished golden era remains one of his most enchanting novels. Dandelion Wine stands out in the Bradbury literary canon as the author's most deeply personal work, a semiautobiographical recollection of a magical small-town summer in 1928. Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding knows Green Town, Illinois, is as vast and deep as the whole wide world that lies beyond the city limits. It is a pair of brand-new tennis shoes, the first harvest of dandelions for Grandfather's renowned intoxicant, the distant clang of the trolley's bell on a hazy afternoon. It is yesteryear and tomorrow blended into an unforgettable always. But as young Douglas is about to discover, summer can be more than the repetition of established rituals whose mystical power holds time at bay. It can be a best friend moving away, a human time machine that can transport you back to the Civil War, or a sideshow automaton able to glimpse the bittersweet future. .Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Google Books — A carregar... GénerosSistema Decimal de Melvil (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos EUA (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
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