Tämä sivusto käyttää evästeitä palvelujen toimittamiseen, toiminnan parantamiseen, analytiikkaan ja (jos et ole kirjautunut sisään) mainostamiseen. Käyttämällä LibraryThingiä ilmaiset, että olet lukenut ja ymmärtänyt käyttöehdot ja yksityisyydensuojakäytännöt. Sivujen ja palveluiden käytön tulee olla näiden ehtojen ja käytäntöjen mukaista.
Mary felt rather like someone for whom a marriage was being arranged by people who doubted the suitability of the match but could think of no seemly way of retiring. Her family and friends behaved like outsiders privy to a secret and dubious courtship, treating her with an arch, considered and wholly unnatural care, whispering together and falling silent when they remembered her sitting by the window and possibly listening. Mary Marsh has lost her only child, but rather than allow her peace in which to grieve, her mother cajoles her into participating in a proper family Christmas. As the various guests arrive, Mary's sister Barbara, Barbara's children and husband, Barbara's lover, Barbara's husband's lover ("the Thrush"), Vera and Dennis the neighbors, a grown cat and a kitten, the house descends into farcical chaos.… (lisätietoja)
KayCliff: Both "The Birds of the Air" and A S Byatt's short story, `The July Ghost', are fictional accounts of bereavement and grief following the death of a young son, that really happened in the woman authors' lives.
C’est avec le souvenir en tête de la sublime trilogie du jardin d’hiver (Les habits neufs de Margaret, Les ivresses de madame Monro et Les égarements de Lili) que je me suis lancé dans ces oiseaux du ciel.
Certes, la satire sociale des familles anglaises est délicieuse et l’humour grinçant bien présent. Pour autant, j’ai trouvé que ce petit livre manquait un peu de tonus et peinait à conclure, malgré l’annonce du désastre annoncé ( )
For the first twenty pages I didn't much like this book. I found the writing a shade too pretentious even for me, and the metaphor of the birds (I mean, come on - the dead son was called Robin...) a bit too trite. But I gave it some time, and before I knew it I was on the way to reading the whole short book in a single sitting. Ellis's writing began to grow on me - her similes became more telling and more precise, and her characters more fleshed-out. I was actually a little sad that it all ended when it did - I would have been grateful for another twenty or thirty pages, but that would have meant ending the book with some kind of reconciliation - and that would have been antithetical to Ellis's point. ( )
A re-read. Fittingly, on Christmas eve. Some comments from a second read:
1. Some books take you differently as a (as you imagine) stable, rooted, but childless bulwark of society, than as a father. Soldier of the Great War is one such. This is another. 2. I tend to idolize the bourgeois virtues. Ellis' provides an astringent corrective. There is no law but Gods law. No virtues but his.
Another story from Ellis about an unhappy, and in some sense literally god-forsaken Christmas, and it's a stunner. Ellis works in darker tones here than in "The Inn of the End of the World," and through her usual humor and insight runs a story of loss as terrible and unstinting as the Book of Job.
Highly recommended. 1.19.08
"In the world of books it was never worth saying what you meant. Extreme caution was necessary in negotiating your way through the sensibilities of people who wrote, and while this child already clearly had an ego like the liver of a Strasbourg goose it offered her no protection against rejection. Quite the contrary." ( )
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta.Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
TO JOSHUA
All his beauty, wit and grace Lie forever in one place. He who sang and sprang and moved Now, in death, is only loved.
Ensimmäiset sanat
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta.Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
"It's going to snow for Christmas", called Mrs Marsh from the kitchen, raising her voice -- unnecessarily since the house was so small.
Sitaatit
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta.Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
The age-old human problem—everyone’s unshakeable belief that everyone else either is, or wishes or deserves to be, like himself. Just as the healthy think the ill are malingering, so the ill think the healthy haven’t yet recognised their own symptoms; as the homosexual think the heterosexual are lurking in the closet, so the heterosexual think the homosexual can be ‘cured’; the old think the young desire their wisdom, the young that the old covet their youth, blacks that whites envy them their virility, whites that blacks wish to be white, the rich that the poor wish to be like them, the poor that the rich are like them, only richer and less happy.
Kate, at her most determinedly winsome, gambolled.
She had considered offering the sweet sympathy of an innocent child, but had luckily thought better of that too.
Viimeiset sanat
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta.Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
Mary felt rather like someone for whom a marriage was being arranged by people who doubted the suitability of the match but could think of no seemly way of retiring. Her family and friends behaved like outsiders privy to a secret and dubious courtship, treating her with an arch, considered and wholly unnatural care, whispering together and falling silent when they remembered her sitting by the window and possibly listening. Mary Marsh has lost her only child, but rather than allow her peace in which to grieve, her mother cajoles her into participating in a proper family Christmas. As the various guests arrive, Mary's sister Barbara, Barbara's children and husband, Barbara's lover, Barbara's husband's lover ("the Thrush"), Vera and Dennis the neighbors, a grown cat and a kitten, the house descends into farcical chaos.
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Google Books — Ladataan...
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Certes, la satire sociale des familles anglaises est délicieuse et l’humour grinçant bien présent. Pour autant, j’ai trouvé que ce petit livre manquait un peu de tonus et peinait à conclure, malgré l’annonce du désastre annoncé (