Проза - Страница 632

L’histoire, les histoires plut?t ici narr?es se d?roulent ? Paris au beau milieu du XIX? si?cle, ? la m?me ?poque et dans les m?mes endroits que la seconde partie des «Mis?rables» de Victor Hugo en fait. L? o? par exemple le jeune Marius rencontre Enjolras et ses amis au jardin du Luxembourg en plein c?ur de Paris et fraternisent autour du th?me de la libert?, de l’amiti? et du pouvoir au peuple entre deux beuveries et barricades.

Le Luxembourg parlons-en puisqu’un buste de l’auteur de ce livre survit encore dans un recoin peu fr?quent? de ce grand jardin, un coin discret et ?rod? comme le parfait symbole de ce qui est racont? en ces lignes, pour moi le livre sans doute le plus beau et touchant que j’ai jamais pu lire.

L’histoire ce livre rejoint celle des fameux «Myst?res de Paris» d’Eug?ne Sue, pr?alablement publi? sous formes de feuilleton dans un journal avant d’?tre r?uni et d’avoir le succ?s que l’on conna?t. «Sc?nes de vie de Boh?me» eut le m?me sort ? la diff?rence que le journal dans lequel ces «feuilletons» ?taient publi?s ?tait une aimable mais discr?te feuille satyrique appel?e «Le corsaire». Henry Murger publia de plus ces diff?rents feuilletons de mani?re irr?guli?re. Malgr? ce parcours de boh?me pourrait-on dire ses feuilletons trouv?rent toutefois un fort bel ?cho aupr?s de quelques ?claireurs de la vie litt?raire parisienne (pas la plus d?gueu de l’histoire hein?)

Pour le «grand» public, fa?on de parler bien sur puisque nous sommes mi XIX?, ce fut en fait l’adaptation tr?s libre que fit Henry Murger avec l’aide du dramaturge Th?odore Barri?re au th??tre sous le nom «La vie de boh?me» qui connut un immense succ?s fin 1849 et fit d’Henry Murger un auteur reconnu ? d?faut d’?tre tr?s c?l?bre.

En 1851 parut donc pour la premi?re fois ce livre-ci sous une forme et une construction voulue par l’auteur qui r?unit le tout via un commencement in?dit et une fin ? l’avenant

Ce livre reprend donc comme le chef d’?uvre d’Eug?ne Sue le principe d’une ?criture de feuilleton, ainsi des chapitre ne d?passant gu?re les 4-5 pages avec une chute finale toujours remarqu?e et remarquable;ainsi au hasard, celle-ci prise pour le chapitre XIV: «H?las, pensa Rodolphe, lequel vaut le mieux? Ou de se laisser tromper toujours pour avoir cru ou ne jamais croire de peur d’?tre tromp? toujours?»

Car d’amour il en est beaucoup question ?videmment dans ces lignes et ces pages, mais pas seulement. La vie de boh?me telle que l’on imagine aujourd’hui trouvant l? son illustration litt?raire la plus achev?e avec bien entendu certains des po?mes des acteurs marquants de cette belle ?poque (cette vraie belle ?poque) dans l’histoire de la litt?rature fran?aise, citons sans ?tre complet G?rard de Nerval, Th?ophile Gautier, Les fr?res Goncourt, Th?odore de Banville et Charles Baudelaire bien entendu.

L’histoire relate les aventures de quatre amis tout «artistes» de c?ur et d’?me:

– Le Musicien Schaunard tout occup? ? composer sa grande ?uvre musicale «l’influence du bleu dans l’art»

– Le philosophe Colline arpentant les rues parisiennes son grand manteau aux larges poches remplis de livres ou de papiers

– Le po?te Rodolphe, h?ros central avec son amour avec Mimi, leur s?paration et leurs retrouvailles douloureuses.

– Le peintre Marcel, celui qui refuse de vendre un tableau ? un «amateur» ne connaissant rien de l’art (bien que l’on puisse se tromper ? ce sujet comme le montrera l’un des ?pisodes les plus cocasses du livre)

Tout ce petit monde ayant en commun de mettre leur amiti? et leur art (et l’amour) au-dessus de toute autre chose dans leur vie, partageant avec un ?gal m?pris la moindre petite contingence les enlisant dans le r?el alors qu’ils se vivent dans l’art et l’amour!!

Ce petit monde ayant aussi en commun de vivre sans le sou dans des mansardes o? le maigre argent gagn? se transforme bien plus souvent en peinture ou papier qu’en nourriture ou bois pour se chauffer, la vie de boh?me est depuis rest?e dans le langage commun pour symboliser cette mani?re de vivre.

Cette succession de tableaux, tant?t l?gers, tant?t graves, qu’on devine d’ailleurs teint?s d’emprunt au r?el (Henry Murger a v?cu cette boh?me l? et cette vie intellectuelle tr?pidante l? qui n’allait pas encore de mise avec les beaux salons et l’opulence) nous raconte donc leurs diff?rentes aventures avant de centrer une bonne partie de l’intrigue autour des amours tumultueux de Rodolphe et de Mimi, de leur amour lumineux puis de la lassitude de la demoiselle ? vivre aussi pauvrement et pr?cairement alors qu’un beau marquis lui fait une cour assidue. Elle s’en ira enfin vers lui mais pour au bout de quelques mois revenir s’enivrer l’espace de quelques jours avec son ?ternel amour puis de revenir en ces beaux quartiers, racontant son escapade au marquis de ces quelques lignes qui pour moi encore aujourd’hui sont sans doute les plus belles que j’ai jamais pu lire:

«Que voulez-vous? fit Mimi, j’ai besoin de temps en temps d’aller respirer l’air de cette vie-l?. Mon existence folle est comme une chanson; chacun de mes amours est un couplet mais Rodolphe en est le refrain»

Mais outre cette histoire d’amour magnifique (? l’issue douloureuse sans vouloir effleurer la fin) ces r?cits regorgent de moments euphoriques, de moments difficiles mais toujours surmont?s par un enthousiasme spontan? et na?f de consacrer sa vie ? l’art, ? l’amour et ? l’amiti? en d?pit des terribles ?preuves v?cues ici ou l?.

Imaginez une s?rie ? la «Friends» centr?e sur les gar?ons et se passant dans le Paris de 1840-1850, une s?rie un peu moins comique certes mais autrement plus r?elle et avec une profondeur de sentiments et d’?motions donnant presque chair aux personnages pour nous aussi par moment nous rendre euphoriques ou terriblement tristes selon les ?pisodes v?cus.

En 1880 Puccini adaptera lui-aussi la pi?ce tir?e de ces feuilletons pour en faire son plus c?l?bre op?ra «La boh?me», les amours de Rodolphe et Mimi feront ? partir de l? le tour du monde.

Plus d’un si?cle plus tard et apr?s nombre d’emprunt ou de citations dans la chanson ou ? la litt?rature (comme Aznavour bien sur se retournant vers ces jeunes ann?es et illustrant un nouveau chapitre de cette vie de boh?me immortalis?e par Murger) le cin?aste finlandais Aki Kaurismaki r?alisera une adaptation libre du livre d’Henry Murger, basant l’histoire dans un Paris factice d’apr?s-guerre et donnant ? ces pages, et par la gr?ce d’acteurs magnifiques, d’une photo lumineuse et d’une mise en sc?ne magique, une bouleversante version film?e de l’?uvre de Murger.

La prochaine fois que vous serez dans le jardin du Luxembourg, allez donc faire un tour devant le buste d’Henry Murger, il le m?rite bien.

One day while cycling along the Magill road in Adelaide Paul Rayment is knocked down by a car, resulting in the amputation of his leg. Humiliated, he retreats to his flat and a succession of day-care nurses. After a series of carers who are either "unsuitable" or just temporary, he happens upon Marijana, with whom he has a European childhood in common: his in France, hers in Croatia. Marijana nurses him tactfully and efficiently, ministering to his new set of needs. His feelings for her soon become deeper and more complex. He attempts to fund her son Drago's passage through college, a move which meets the refusal of her husband, causing a family rift. Drago moves in with Paul, but not before an entirely different complication steps in, in the form of celebrated Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello, who threatens to take over the direction of Paul's life in ways he's not entirely comfortable with.

Slow Man has to get the award for "hardest novel of the year to unwrap", in that it's actually more like three novels layered variously on top of each other, and all in a mere 263 pages! It is also, without doubt, the most challenging novel of the year. Coetzee having won the thing two times already and being a Nobel laureate, it never stood a chance getting to the Booker shortlist, but that doesn't stop it being possibly the best novel of the year by miles.

The start is relatively easy to get to grips with: Paul is knocked from his bike, has his limb removed, and becomes one of those who must submit to being cared for. Just like David Lurie from his Booker-prize-winning Disgrace, Paul stubbornly refuses the aid which could make his life superficially normal, (an artificial limb,) and surrenders himself stubbornly to his incapacity. So begins a novel that seems to be concerning itself with an analysis of the spirit of care and the psychological effect any severe injury (or, symbolically, any obvious difference to others) has on a person when their life is "truncated" so. And it is a superb beginning, too. The first 100 pages are astounding, presented in Coetzee's trademark analytical prose that manages to be both spare and yet busting with riches.

It's complicated a little by the fact that Rayment is clearly a kind of semi alter-ego for Coetzee, who himself is reputed to be very keen on cycling the streets of Adelaide. Coetzee and his protagonist share a similar history, too: divorced Rayment grew up in France and now lives in a quiet lonely flat in Adelaide, where he feels out of place. He has never, he thinks, felt the sense of having a real "home" that many do. South-African born Coetzee's early fiction focused much on the White "place" in South Africa; he escaped to London in his youth, he has since lived out extended Professorships in the USA, and is now based in Adelaide. Coetzee, too, feels this sense of unbelonging that is rife in Paul. Slow Man is almost claustrophobic in its sense of lives ending and purposes coming to a close: living in Australia and with South Africa mostly stable, Coetzee is having to look elsewhere for his fiction. And he seems to be turning the focus largely onto himself. His 2003 novel was a series of vignettes concerning Coetzee's alter-ego, the famed but fictional elderly Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello.

When the woman in question knocks on Paul's door, then, it becomes clear Coetzee has far more on his mind than a mere novel about growing old and out of place and cared for. There are potential problems with what Coetzee's doing here: by self-consciously bringing Costello (himself) in, it can seem as if he doesn't really know what to do with this fiction he's making, doesn't know where to go with it, so brings her in to play some nice metafictional tricks, to talk about writing and character and their relationship to the author ("you came to me", Costello says to Paul.) instead of getting on with the real business at hand. She pushes Paul to become "more of a main character", as if she's uncertain about him but can't entirely control him herself. (Though in the end we realise that everyone can be a main character, however dull they may seem. Because they are not.) It might also seem a little heavy-handed, an obvious and self-consciously clever trick. It might seem like these things, but for Coetzee's absolute skill at weaving his narrative together seamlessly. Costello never does seem out of place, not really. There's an air of mystery to her and her presence, some things that are never quite clear in the reader's head, but Coetzee handles her appearance so smoothly it's almost dreamlike. He stitches her into the book almost flawlessly. Not only that, but she becomes an entire character herself, rich with her own frailties and concerns. He's got himself a brilliant set-up, then: like an illusion you can only fully glimpse the parts of separately, he's managed to give himself a narrative where he give us a novel about Paul, himself, and the act of creating fictions, without any one getting in the way of another, and without the doing so seeming obvious or contrived. It's a rather remarkable achievement.

Not that all this intelligent manipulation comes without problems. The fact that we have two versions (Paul and Elizabeth) of Coetzee almost set-up against one another allows him to explore lots of interesting philosophical problems, but he's doing so much here that these questions often just end up going in circles and knocking off one another. The attrition between the two characters says something vaguely itchy about Coetzee's own feelings about his acts of artistic creation, though the way the two finally seem to make peace with one another in the end is pleasingly conclusive in a novel where the other remaining aspects are resolved rather ambiguously.

Slow Man, his first book since winning the Nobel in 2003, is a novel that consists of a full internal novel and at least one full external one. Childless Paul's legacy remains uncertain (where will his meddling with Marijana's family get him? will he find an heir in Drago, if only symbolically?) but Coetzee's is not: with his beautifully stark prose he has left us unnerving and important pictures of South Africa and what it means to be an outsider, and is now – perhaps uncertainly; it may be this tremulous uncertainty of purpose that is the only slight stain on Slow Man – moving on to new terrain. His body of work is one of the most impressive of any current writer in English. Anyone who wants to know just how much of a transcendent experience fiction can be needs to read his work.

Сатирический (однако весьма реалистично описывающий положение вещей) недописанный роман Андрея Подшибякина (он же Андрей Ом) о нелегком пути Юры Гноя (он же Dark Skull) к вершинам славы. Юра живет в сибирском индустриальном городке и мечтает писать статьи в свой любимый журнал "Мания Страны Навигаторов", затем переезжает в Москву и устраивается туда помощником заместителя редактора раздела читов, постепенно знакомясь с изнанкой игровой журналистики - подвалы с раскладушками вместо офисов в небоскребах и помятые усатые мужички вместо небожителей. Роман начал публиковаться по частям в журнале PC Gamer, также главы можно найти в блоге Подшибякина http://evil-ninja.livejournal.com .

There’s something wrong with Estrella Del Mar, the lazy, sun-drenched retirement haven on Spain’s Costa Del Sol. Lately this sleepy hamlet, home to hordes of well-heeled, well-fattened British and French expatriates, has come alive with activity and culture; the previously passive, isolated residents have begun staging boat races, tennis competitions, revivals of Harold Pinter plays, and lavish parties. At night the once vacant streets are now teeming with activity, bars and cafes packed with revelers, the sidewalks crowded with people en route from one event to the next.

Outward appearances suggest the wholesale adoption of a new ethos of high-spirited, well-controlled collective exuberance. But there’s the matter of the fire: The house and household of an aged, wealthy industrialist has gone up in flames, claiming five lives, while virtually the entire town stood and watched. There’s the matter of the petty crime, the burglaries, muggings, and auto thefts which have begun to nibble away at the edges of Estrella Del Mar’s security despite the guardhouses and surveillance cameras. There’s the matter of the new, flourishing trade in drugs and pornography. And there’s the matter of Frank Prentice, who sits in Marbella jail awaiting trial for arson and five counts of murder, and who, despite being clearly innocent, has happily confessed.

It is up to Charles Prentice, Frank’s brother, to peel away the onionlike layers of denial and deceit which hide the rather ugly truth about this seaside idyll, its residents, and the horrific crime which brought him here. But as is usually the case in a J.G. Ballard book, the truth comes with a price tag attached, and likely without any easing of discomfort for his principal characters.

Cocaine Nights marks a partial return on Ballard’s part to the provocative, highly-successful mid-career methodology employed in novels such as Crash and High Rise: after establishing himself as a science fiction guru in the 1960s, Ballard stylistically shifted gears towards an unnerving, futuristic variant on social realism in the 1970s. Both Crash and High Rise were what-if novels, posing questions as to what the likely results would be if our collective fascination with such things as speed, violence, status, power, and sex were carried just a little bit further: How insane, how brutal could our world become if we really cut loose?

Cocaine Nights asks a question better suited to the ’90s, the age of gated communities and infrared home security systems: Does absolute security guarantee isolation and cultural death? Conversely, is a measure of crime an essential ingredient in a vibrant, living, properly functioning social system? Is it true, as a character asserts, that “Crime and creativity go together, always have done,” and that “total security is a disease of deprivation”? Suffice to say that the answers presented in Nights will be anathema to moral absolutists; the world of Ballard’s fiction, like life in the hyperkinetic, relativistic 1990s, abounds with uncomfortable grey areas.

On the surface, Cocaine Nights is a whodunit and a race against time, but as it proceeds – and as preconceived conceptions of good and evil begin to dissolve – it evolves into a thoughtful, faintly frightening look at under-examined aspects of 1990s western society. As is his wont, Ballard confronts his readers with some faintly outlandish hypotheses unlikely to be embraced by many, but which nonetheless serve to provoke both thought and a bit of paranoia; it’s a method that Ballard has developed and refined on his own, and as usual, it propels his novel along marvellously.

Cocaine Nights doesn’t have either the broad sweep or brute impact of the landmark Crash, but it retains enough social relevance and low-key creepiness to more than satisfy Ballardphiles. As is often the case in Ballard’s alternate reality, it’s a given that his most appealing, human characters turn out to be the most twisted, and that even the most normal of events turn out to be governed by a perverse, malformed logic; that this logic turns out to be grounded in sound sociological and psychological principles is its most horrific feature.

David B. Livingstone

Dec?a Jorge Luis Borges que el significado de una novela como El Quijote no pod?a ser el mismo en el siglo XVII que en el XX. Pues bien, ?ste es el reto que ha afrontado el laureado escritor franc?s Michel Tournier al retomar la historia de Robins?n Crusoe y reescribirla desde una sensibilidad contempor?nea.

Toda la fe, la inocencia, el positivismo y el arrogante etnocentrismo del h?roe de Daniel Defoe, se convierten en la obra de Michel Tournier en duda sistem?tica, en conciencia de las invisibles relaciones entre Robins?n y la naturaleza que le limita y le otorga su identidad, y de los complejos, sutiles, conflictivos lazos que le unen a su alter ego, Viernes, un personaje que ha dejado de ser el sumiso esclavo del h?roe, para convertirse en el imposible interlocutor de un poeta.

Viernes o Los limbos del Pac?fico constituye un texto sugerente, en el que las peripecias de su solitario protagonista dan pie a la reflexi?n conjunta de autor y lector sobre el sentido de la condici?n humana y de la civilizaci?n. La novela se cierra con un final consecuente y paradigm?tico: Viernes viajar? en el velero que le conducir? a la sociedad occidental, Robins?n, que descubre justo entonces la atrocidad que se esconde en los valores jer?rquicos de la cultura a la que pertenece, rehusa subir a bordo y asume su condici?n de n?ufrago, en la inesperada compa??a de un grumete que huye, como antes el salvaje Viernes, de la cruel compa??a de sus compa?eros de raza y de cultura.

Эта книга является вторым фундаментальным трудом Алфреда Т. Мэхэна, посвященным изучению влияния морской мощи государства на историю. Сформулированная им концепция, сыграла огромную роль в развитии теории военно-морского искусства и до сих пор продолжает влиять на выработку военных и геополитических доктрин ведущих морских держав мира.

Материалом для исследования автору послужила история революционных и наполеоновских войн.

Первый том охватывает период 1793–1802 годов и содержит подробное описание событий, разворачивавшихся на море.

Второй том охватывает период 1802–1812 годов. Именно в это время Наполеон был ближе всего к окончательной победе над Англией, но катастрофа при Трафальгаре положила конец всем его планам вторжения.

Книга будет интересна как специалистам, так и любителям военной истории.

А. П. Чапыгин (1870—1937) – один из основоположников советского исторического романа.

В романе «Гулящие люди» отражены события, предшествовавшие крестьянскому восстанию под руководством Степана Разина. Заканчивается книга эпизодами разгрома восстания после гибели Разина. В центре романа судьба Сеньки, стрелецкого сына, бунтаря и народного «водителя». Главный объект изображения – народ, поднявшийся на борьбу за волю, могучая сила освободительной народной стихии.

Писатель точно, с большим знанием дела описал Москву последних допетровских десятилетий.

Прочитав в 1934 году рукопись романа «Гулящие люди», А. М. Горький сказал: «Книга будет хорошая и – надолго». Время подтвердило справедливость этих слов. Роман близок нам своим народным содержанием, гуманистической направленностью. Непреходяще художественное обаяние книги.

Erz?hlung aus Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (1795).