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The Devil's Grip - A Novel
Lina Wolff; Translated by Saskia Vogel
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R466
R397
Discovery Miles 3 970
Save R69 (15%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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An underemployed chef is pulled into the escalating violence of his
neighbour's makeshift porn channel. An elderly piano student is
forced to flee her home village when word gets out that she's had
sex with her thirty-something teacher. A hose pumping cava through
the maquette of a giant penis becomes a murder weapon in the hands
of a disaffected housewife. In this collection from the winner of
Sweden's August Prize, Lina Wolff gleefully wrenches
unpredictability from the suffocations of day-to-day life, shatters
balances of power without warning, and strips her characters down
to their strangest and most unstable selves. Wicked, discomfiting,
delightful and wry, delivered with the deadly wit for which Wolff
is known, Many People Die Like You presents the uneasy spectacle of
people in solitude, and probes, with savage honesty, the choices we
make when we believe no one is watching ... or when we no longer
care.
This brilliant translation by Frank Perry won the 2017 Oxford
Weidenfeld Translation Prize and the 2019 Bernard Shaw prize At a
run-down brothel in Caudal, Spain, the prostitutes are collecting
stray dogs. Each is named after a famous male writer: Dante,
Chaucer, Bret Easton Ellis. When a john is cruel, the dogs are fed
rotten meat. To the east, in Barcelona, an unflappable teenage girl
is endeavouring to trace the peculiarities of her life back to one
woman: Alba Cambo, writer of violent short stories, who left Caudal
as a girl and never went back. Mordantly funny, dryly sensual,
written with a staggering lightness of touch, the debut novel in
English by Swedish sensation Lina Wolff is a black and Bolano-esque
take on the limitations of love in a dog-eat-dog world.
`Do you have to stare like that?' I asked. `Think about the actors
in porn. They've got no problem showing themselves off.' `Think
about when I broke your nose,'I replied.Ellinor is thirty-six. She
wears soft black sweatpants and a Michelin Man jacket. She fights.
Smart and unsentimental, she tries her hand at online dating, only
to be stranded by a snowstorm in Stockholm, far from her village in
the south of Sweden. Ellinor finds herself at the heart of an
intrigue involving an ex-wife who happens to be a blind medium, an
overweight literary critic with a Houellebecq obsession, and a
manuscript: a very important manuscript. Cut to Max Lamas, its
author, who dreams of a polyglot lover, a woman who will understand
him, in every tongue. His search takes him to Italy, where he
befriends a marchesa on the brink of ruin, and where her
granddaughter, Lucrezia, brings this tale to its final, shocking
conclusion. The Polyglot Lovers, winner of the 2016 August Prize,
Sweden's most prestigious literary prize, is a masterclass in comic
plot and timing, as well as a delight for readers, thanks to
Wolff's trademark deadpan wit.
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