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The Child (Paperback, New)
Pascale Kramer; Translated by Tamsin Black
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R386
R316
Discovery Miles 3 160
Save R70 (18%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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"Intense and bravely uncompromising. An adult study of pain,
thwarted affection, and guarded privacies in a world at the edge of
violent public breakdown. An impressive achievement." --DAVID
MALOUF, author of Ransom: A Novel and The Happy Life: The Search
for Contentment in the Modern World Simone and Claude live in a
house with a lush garden, surrounded by a hedge that barely
protects them from the growing violence and unrest in their
low-income neighborhood. Simone mourns the loss of youth and
possibility as Claude, a gym teacher who has been diagnosed with
cancer, edges toward death. This is an unflinching portrait of a
couple ravaged by illness and locked into mutual isolation--that
is, until the arrival of a young boy brings hope and upsets their
delicate danse macabre to devastating effect. Pascale Kramer
dissects romantic love's psychic carnage while unsentimentally
revealing the unique beauty born of an adult's love for a child. As
does Marguerite Duras, she wields spare language like a club and
plumbs emotional depths rarely reached outside of poetry. A
brilliant collision of hope and despair, The Child is a tour de
force. Pascale Kramer, recipient of the 2017 Swiss Grand Prize for
Literature, is the author of fourteen books, including three novels
published in English: The Living, The Child, and Autopsy of a
Father. Born in Geneva, she has worked in Los Angeles, and now
lives in Paris, where she directs a documentary film festival about
children's rights.
Praised for her “exceptional ability to narrate the heartrending
lives of ordinary people” (Jean-Louis Hippolyte), deliver a
“riveting page-turner” (Entertainment Weekly), and master the
“art of creating a diffuse discomfort” (Marie Claire), Pascale
Kramer is one of the world’s finest chroniclers of psychological
disturbance and the family interior. First published in France in
2016, this novel has already been named a finalist for three
prizes. Autopsy of a Father was inspired by the real-life scandal
of French author Richard Millet who, in 2012, made headlines for
publishing an essay in praise of Anders Breivik, the right-wing
extremist who killed 77 people in Norway. Set in France, the novel
addresses issues of racism and anti-immigrant sentiment rampant
throughout Europe by showing how the personal becomes political.
Without resorting to polemics, Kramer shows how a recognized
intellectual can shift toward dark and intolerant positions, and
how that can tear through the fabric of a family and society at
large.
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The Living (Hardcover)
Pascale Kramer; Translated by Tamsin Black
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R1,269
Discovery Miles 12 690
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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How, this novel asks, can you imagine the worst when you are young
and life is sunny? The answer lies in the telling of The Living, in
which a young mother, with her teenage brother, takes her two small
children to a deserted quarry on a hot summer afternoon. Seen
through the eyes of the brother, Benoit, the drama plays out with
all the power and seeming inevitability of classical tragedy, made
all the more intense by the blistering heat of the day. On that
blazing hot summer day Benoit, to entertain his nephews, seats them
in a gondola and sends them down a cableway to the pylon on the
other side of the river. The harrowing story of what follows is
narrated in Pascale Kramer's artfully simple yet transparent prose,
evoking the deep reservoirs of feeling that family members cannot
voice, perhaps even to themselves. The Living is filled with the
vitality of summer. At the same time, it reveals suffering at its
most pure and most volatile as the affected people wonder, in the
wake of tragedy, whether they should subsist with the living or
with the dead. Pascale Kramer's Les vivants received excellent
reviews in the French and Francophone press and won the Prix Lipp,
Switzerland's most prestigious literary prize. Kramer is the Swiss
author of several other books in French, including Manu and Onze
ans plus tard. Tamsin Black has translated many books, including
Marie NDiaye's Rosie Carpe, available in a Bison Books edition.
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