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The Cliff: A Novel - Hardcover

Slavitt, David R.

 
9780807117811: The Cliff: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0807117811 ISBN 13: 9780807117811
Verlag: LOUISIANA ST UNIV PR, 1994

Inhaltsangabe

A satiric tale of human weakness and spiritual growth concerns John Smith, a failed writer and third-rate professor who steals another professor's place at an artists' colony in Italy and finds himself dealing with pretentious bores and a disappearing poet.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David R. Slavitt has published 130 books of poetry, fiction, and translation. Born in White Plains, New York, and educated at Andover, Yale, and Columbia, Slavitt has worked at Newsweek and taught at Temple University, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Bennington College.

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John Smith is an eminent historian, secure in his well-paid position as an endowed professor at a major university. Any day he expects a favorable reply to his application for a residency at the Villa Sfrondata, a foundation-supported colony for artists and intellectuals on the banks of Italy's Lake Como, where he hopes to finish work on a study of Mussolini. John Smith - the other John Smith - is a bitter and failed novelist, an adjunct assistant professor of English at the same university. Suffering from writer's block, ignored by his daughter, hounded by his former wife's attorney for back alimony, and about to lose his job, his prospects could not be dimmer - that is, until the day the Villa Sfrondata's invitation to the eminent historian is delivered to him by mistake. Before you know it, the down-and-out-how-can-things-get-worse-what-have-I-got-to-lose John Smith is in Italy, ensconced, imposter though he is, in a room at the centuries-old villa. But what had promised to be a blissful if ill-gotten idyll quickly sours. The villa is drafty and decaying, the staff are surly and incompetent, and the other residents - among them a Nigerian economist, a Washington lawyer, a book designer, and art historian, and a feminist poet from California - are a motley and eccentric group whom Smith finds all but insufferable. He seizes every opportunity to deflate their overblown pretensions with a razor-sharp wit, which he possesses in astonishing abundance. At the same time, he must take care that some misstep does not reveal him as a fraud. His life is further complicated when one of the guests - the despised feminist poet - mysteriously disappears. After passing through what he calls "acloudy afternoon of the soul", including the very real fear that he will be implicated in the disappearance of the poet, Smith contrives in the end to amend his life and even to revive his all but abandoned literary career. This devastatingly satiric and funny book, David R. Slavitt's fiftieth, is a complicated burlesque that turns out to be a moving story of human frailty and spiritual rebirth. It is a feat of literary legerdemain that will dazzle even admirers of Slavitt's Turkish Delights, Lives of the Saints, Salazar Blinks and The Hussar.

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Verlag
LOUISIANA ST UNIV PR
Erscheinungsdatum
1994
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0807117811
ISBN 13 
9780807117811
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
154
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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