dedalus ltd jun 2025 (3 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'What makes Yonnet's memoir so special is the way the real and fantastic meet. After all, it is set during the Occupation, and the author was a Resistance hero. The secrets of Paris play a role in the struggle against the Germans and their collaborators. Thus, the occultist spiv Keep-on-Dancin' initiates Yonnet to a 'psychic circuit' that enables him to unmask a Gestapo informer in 'the room where only the truth can be told'. Yonnet portrays Paris as a character in her own right: the city is 'edgy', the Seine 'sulks'. The geography determines the behaviour of its inhabitants, and will live on after their deaths. Certain névralgique points in the city incite Parisians to raise barricades, be it during revolutions or the Liberation of 1944. But, like François Villon and Charles Baudelaire, Yonnet conveys the fragility of things. The yarns drunkenly spun in dive bars strive to conjure away a fundamental loneliness: 'men are so isolated, prisoners of their own wretched selves, that they can be unbelievably sociable'.' Gavin Bond in Scotland on Sunday 'Translated into English for the first time since its release in 1954, Yonnet's only published book is a macabre, savage account of life on Paris's Nazi-occupied Left Bank. Like Christopher Isherwood'' 1939 novel 'Goodbye to Berlin', this book sidelines conventional history in favour of anecdotal, autobiographical and brilliantly subjective snapshots of the city's marginalised 'human detritus' in a series of cinematic vignettes that straddle the real, the absurd and the supernatural.This is ultimately a unique panoramic memoir; an admiring but never sentimental love letter to the French capital destined to be loved in its turn by fans of film noir.' Alex Barlow in Time Out \*\*\*\*\*.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'A century after its first publication, this book is still capable of shocking. The opening satire is probably meaningful only to scholars of French political history, but the subsequent journey into the Far East accentuates connections between love and death, sex and depravity, fastidiousness and pleasure. And the petty, parochial corruptions of the narrator are put into context by the immersion into the Sadeian world of the Torture Garden.' The Times 'This hideously decadent fin de siecle novel by the French anarchist Mirbeau has become an underground classic. A cynical first half exposes the rottenness of politics, commerce and the petit bourgeois; in the second half, our totally corrupt narrator travels to China and meets the extraordinary Clara. She shows him the Torture Garden, a place of exotic flowers and baroque sadism. There are satirical and allegorical dimensions, but it remains irreducibly horrible.' Phil Baker in The Sunday Times 'First published in 1899, the same year as Conrad's Heart of Darkness(which, in a sado-masochistic way, it mirrors), this short tale takes place in a Far Eastern garden in which torture is practised as an art form. Amidst exquisite flowers and gorgeous fauna, bodies are sliced, flayed and prised open with sumptuous artisanal skill, the whole scene rendered in prose as visceral and tender as the action it describes. When the staid realist novels of the mid-20th century have been consigned to the oblivion they so richly deserve, this text will be remembered as a classic.' Tom McCarthy in Esquire.