Quicksand - Rilegato

Toltz, Steve

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 147679782X ISBN 13: 9781476797823

Casa editrice: Simon & Schuster, 2015

Riassunto

A daring, brilliant new novel from Man Booker Prize finalist Steve Toltz, for fans of Dave Eggers, Martin Amis, and David Foster Wallace: a fearlessly funny, outrageously inventive dark comedy about two lifelong friends.

Liam is a struggling writer and a failing cop. Aldo, his best friend and muse, is a haplessly criminal entrepreneur with an uncanny knack for disaster. As Aldo’s luck worsens, Liam is inspired to base his next book on his best friend’s exponential misfortunes and hopeless quest to win back his one great love: his ex-wife, Stella. What begins as an attempt to make sense of Aldo’s mishaps spirals into a profound story of faith and friendship.

With the same originality and buoyancy that catapulted his first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, onto prize lists around the world—including shortlists for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award—Steve Toltz has created a rousing, hysterically funny but unapologetically dark satire about fate, faith, friendship, and the artist’s obligation to his muse. Sharp, witty, kinetic, and utterly engrossing, Quicksand is a subversive portrait of twenty-first-century society in all its hypocrisy and absurdity.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

PRAISE FOR QUICKSAND:

“[A] narrative so brilliant, so fizzing with lucidity and comedy and horror and hard-nosed empathy...The real parent of 2008’s A Fraction of the Whole and this new work is Saul Bellow...There is a superfluity of smarts on display. Characters back talk each other like Chinese table tennis champions; aperçus fly like sparks from the angle-grinder of the authorial imagination. Still, there is a feeling edge to all this dazzle, a sense that the torrential flow of wit is a cover for fear of the void. The hollowest babble is better than the endless silence that will follow when death presses mute....

[Like] Philip Roth at his angriest and funniest...Quicksand is a similarly high-octane read; it recalls and updates the tradition of Jewish-American fiction in the same spirit as Gary Shteyngart or Jonathan Safran Foer....
Aldo Benjamin’s fate is as complicated as his character.... What is heroic about him is that he never becomes a hero...He is one of those rare characters who will live on in our collective literary imagination.” (The Saturday Paper (Australia))

“It is very rare for me to laugh on almost every page of a book; it is even rarer for that to be accompanied by exquisite melancholy. Toltz is writing like very few other authors; he seems like an Antipodean Thomas Bernhard in his unsparing, agonizing comedies. I hope it is not seven years before his next novel.” (Scotland on Sunday (UK))

"Exuberant." (The New Yorker)

"Highly original,entertaining and almost impossible to summarize, this is a high-octane,adrenaline-fuelled, frenetic tour de force of sustained brilliance. There is wit, laugh-out-loud humour and linguistic fireworks and dexterity on almost every page..." (Mail on Sunday (UK))

"Brilliantly dark...The entire novel is buzzing with the power of human connection – the jokes, accommodations and shared mythologies of love and friendship. Even in a book overflowing with solipsists and monomaniacs, would-be artists and theories about art, it remains a creative force to be reckoned with." (The Guardian (UK))

“Darkly comic and increasingly cosmic. . .It takes a very good writer to pull off this style, but Toltz is supremely capable. . .A scream of triumph.” (The Literary Review (UK))

"Aldo Benjamin, the novel's hero, is a modern-day Job who endures terrible things: beatings, catastrophic injuries, prison rape, multiple bankruptcies. Trust me, it's very funny... every page has zingers that you'll want to read to other people. Steve Toltz is touched by comic genius. . . .For risque humour and razor-sharp with, look no further...Think John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces." (Robbie Millen, The Sunday Times Summer Reading Choices)

"This is a book shot through with mordant humour and sizzling inventiveness...and in Aldo, Toltz has created a magnificent character ... There is more than a hint in his make-up of Philip Roth’s cantankerous Mickey Sabbath and Woody Allen’s neurotic Alvy Singer, although his pungent humour is all his own." (Financial Times (UK))

“Steve Toltz’s Quicksand proves to be the cherry on the cake – a beguiling novel that confounds and astonishes in equal measure, often on the same page...Part Chuck Palahniuk, part David Foster Wallace,...Quicksand has a thousand dazzling throwaway moments of brilliance.... A tour de force.” (Australian Book Review)

“The funniest novel of the past year...Genuinely moving.” (The Saturday Times (UK))

L'autore:

Steve Toltz’s first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, was released in 2008 to widespread critical acclaim, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award. Prior to his literary career, he lived in Montreal, Vancouver, New York, Barcelona, and Paris, variously working as a cameraman, telemarketer, security guard, private investigator, English teacher, and screenwriter. Born in Sydney, he currently lives in New York.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Simon & Schuster
• Data di pubblicazione: 2015
• ISBN 10: 147679782X
• ISBN 13: 9781476797823
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 359