ISBN: 0903747057
Godina izdanja: 1973
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

John Cowper Powys - Weymouth Sands
Rivers Press, 1973
520 str.
meki povez
stanje: dobro

Weymouth Sands is the third in the great quartet of Powys`s Dorset novels, the others being Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance and Maiden Castle. In drawing on his vivid childhood memories of the seaside town of Weymouth Powys created a wealth of characters and showed his deep sympathy for the variety, the eccentricity, the essential loneliness of human beings. Magnus Muir the Latin teacher, Sylvanus Cobbald the nature mystic, Adam Skald the Jobber, Dog Cattistock the brewer: these are especially memorable characters.

But this is not all; the town of Weymouth, the sea, the sands, the stones of Chesil Beach are as much characters as the human beings. As Angus Wilson writes in his introduction, `The setting, though recognizably Weymouth and Portland, is much more than that, it is a claim for a pantheistic (yet never declaredly transcendental) universe in which men, their acts and the memories of those acts survive only through the timeless, so-called inanimate world they live in.`
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Along with `Wolf Solent`, `A Glastonbury Romance` and `Maiden Castle`, this modern classic, originally published in 1934, forms the quartet that `are just about the only novels produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared with the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky` (George Steiner, `The New Yorker`). Drawing on his vivid childhood memories of the seaside town of Weymouth, Powys tells the story of Jobber Skald - a large, somewhat brutish man, obsessed with the urge to kill the local magnate of the town because of the man`s contempt for the workers of the local quarry - and his redeeming love for Perdita Wane, a young girl from the Channel Islands. `Weymouth Sands` boasts a striking collection of human oddities, including a famous clown and his mad brother, a naive Latin teacher, a young philosopher, and an abortionist. Against the mysterious and haunting background of the sea, the sands, and the stones of Dorset coast, Powys weaves together his characters` ever-fascinating patterns of behaviour into an epic tale which depicts the power of Eros, the inscrutability of the universe, and the nature of madness, while highlightling Powys`s deep sympathy for the variety, eccentricity, and essential loneliness of human beings.


Fiction, Classics, 0903747057