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Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Novel - Hardcover

Cameron, Peter

 
9780374309893: Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0374309892 ISBN 13: 9780374309893
Verlag: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), 2007

Inhaltsangabe

It’s time for eighteen-year-old James Sveck to begin his freshman year at Brown. Instead, he’s surfing the real estate listings, searching for a sanctuary—a nice farmhouse in Kansas, perhaps. Although James lives in twenty-first-century Manhattan, he’s more at home in the faraway worlds of Eric Rohmer or Anthony Trollope—or his favorite writer, the obscure and tragic Denton Welch. James’s sense of dislocation is exacerbated by his willfully self-absorbed parents, a disdainful sister, his Teutonically cryptic shrink, and an increasingly vague, D-list celebrity grandmother. Compounding matters is James’s growing infatuation with a handsome male colleague at the art gallery his mother owns, where James supposedly works at his summer job but where he actually plots his escape to the prairie.
 
In the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye and The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Booklist has hailed Cameron as “one of the best writers about middle-class youth since Salinger”), Peter Cameron paints an indelible portrait of a teenage hero holding out for a better grownup world.
 
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is a 2008 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

PETER CAMERON's work has appeared in The New Yorker and he is the author of several novels for adults, including Andorra and The City of Your Final Destination. He lives in New York City.

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Advance praise for Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

"Not since The Catcher in the Rye has a novel captured the deep and almost physical ache of adolescent existential sadness as trenchantly as the perfectly titled Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You. You don't have to be eighteen to relate to James Dunfour Sveck and his sense of alienation from a world he doesn't understand, nor to be profoundly moved by his story. Told with compassion, insight, humor, and hope, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You deserves to be read by readers of all ages for years to come. I would have loved it as a teenager, and I love it now." --James Howe, author of The Misfits

"As I drew near the end of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, I read more and more slowly because I didn't want to leave James. With his devotion to precise English, his dislike of most other people--especially those his own age--and his adoration of his grandmother and old houses, James is the ideal antihero and companion. And, most important of all, he never utters a dull sentence. This is
a riveting, suspenseful, witty, and very funny novel." --Margot Livesey, author of Banishing Verona

"Peter Cameron is one of my favorite writers, and this is one of his best books, a shrewd, funny, and at times painful story about the difficulty of becoming an adult. James is a wonderful narrator--brilliant and witty, remarkably observant, and just a little infuriating. His voice is so irresistible you'll hate to put the book down."
  --Stephen McCauley, author of Alternatives to Sex

"The effect that comes from reading this comedic and beautiful novel is one that I particularly love and only happens with certain books--this feeling that you madly adore the narrator, that you've made this new intimate friend, and that for a little while (the duration of the book, at least) you're a little bit less alone in the world."
 --Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir! and The Extra Man

Rezensionen

*Starred Review* Though he's been accepted by Brown University, 18-year-old James isn't sure he wants to go to college. What he really wants is to buy a nice house in a small town somewhere in the Midwest Indiana, perhaps. In the meantime, however, he has a dull, make-work job at his thrice-married mother's Manhattan art gallery, where he finds himself attracted to her assistant, an older man named John. In a clumsy attempt to capture John's attention, James winds up accused of sexual harassment! A critically acclaimed author of adult fiction, Cameron makes a singularly auspicious entry into the world of YA with this beautifully conceived and written coming-of-age novel that is, at turns, funny, sad, tender, and sophisticated. James makes a memorable protagonist, touching in his inability to connect with the world but always entertaining in his first-person account of his New York environment, his fractured family, his disastrous trip to the nation's capital, and his ongoing bouts with psychoanalysis. In the process he dramatizes the ambivalences and uncertainties of adolescence in ways that both teen and adult readers will savor and remember. Cart, Michael

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From Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
 
We sat for a moment in silence, and then the waiter delivered our meals. My father glanced at my plate of pasta, but said nothing. He cut into his nearly raw beef and smiled at the blood it drooled. "So," he said, after he had taken a bite, "you're not going to tell me."
 
"Not going to tell you what?"
 
"Whether or not you're gay."
 
"No," I said. "Why should I? Did you tell your parents?"
 
"I wasn't gay," said my father. "I was straight."
 
"So, what, if you're gay you have a moral obligation to inform your parents and if you're straight you don't?"
 
"James, I'm just trying to be helpful. I'm just trying to be a good father. You don't have to get hostile. I just thought you might be gay, and if you were, I wanted to let you know that's fine, and help you in whatever way I could."
 
"Why might you think I was gay?"
 
"I don't know. You just seem - well, let's put it this way: you don't seem interested in girls. You're eighteen, and as far as I know you've never been on a date."
 
I said nothing.
 
"Am I wrong? Or is that true?"
 
"Just because I've never been on a date doesn't mean I'm gay. And besides, no one goes on dates anymore."
 
"Well, whatever - normal kids hang out. They go out."

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Verlag
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0374309892
ISBN 13 
9780374309893
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
240
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Verantwortliche Person
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