Nejdet Fakçı từ Yeniören/Karabük, Turkey

caglarirma0766

11/23/2024

Dữ liệu người dùng, đánh giá và đề xuất cho sách

Nejdet Fakçı Sách lại (10)

2018-07-16 01:31

Chênh Vênh Cuộc Đời Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Mộc Diệp Tử

** spoiler alert ** Throughout this novel, I am more compulsively drawn to Bruno’s life than Michel’s. Oddly enough, I find Michel to be the more tragic and sympathetic character. Although vastly different from one another, both Michel and Bruno’s live follow a side-by-side vectors, and as the climax approaches, the vectors bend toward one another, culminating in a dénouement that could only be reached in tandem. Bruno’s obsession with getting a decent blowjob, becomes an insurmountable obstacle to his ability to connect with another human being. Likewise, as Michele gets deeper into his work, he is emotionally impotent, unable to really connect. Bruno is an over sexed, overweight, teacher while Michel is an under stimulated emotionless molecular biologist who clones the first cow. They both fail connecting with other humans: Bruno is addicted to masturbation to an extent that he is unfulfilled when engaging in intercourse with other human beings; Michel has no other world but his work and fails in connecting with anyone. In the end of the novel, both characters become involved in redeeming relationships that almost bring them to total fulfillment. I think the key here is the word “almost.” In some sense, the entire novel is an indictment against the values of a hippie generations (certainly, hippies are demonized throughout the novel), but more than casting a group of people into a bad light, the novel seems to track the period of time marked individual freedom, free love, free thinking, egalitarianism, etc, etc, to it’s logical and destructive end. In this novel, humans make choices and science and nature win out, dolling out the natural consequences of a people with an audacity to behave as if they are not mortals. And so we see: STDs, aging, emotional and sexual numbness, materialism as masturbation. The result of this freedom is discontentment (raging discontentment, displaced as racism, agism, hatred of sex gender culture …) and inevitably death. After Bruno and Michel are dead, a young biologist studies the work of Michel, which leads to the cloning of the first human. Oddly enough, Bruno’s hand in this develop goes unnoticed under the scrutiny of everyone but the narrator (who only places hints for the reader to put together). From Michel’s journals and studies, the readers find traces of Bruno’s careless rants about women, hippies, humanity in general. His influence on Michel’s study in integral to the development of a new race of people, although no one knows or even cares. This new human is of another race, asexual in its ability to reproduce, godlike, and without the desires of indulging in the pleasures of the old world in an attempt to find ultimate fulfillment; there is no perpetual desire. As a result, crime rates fall, diseases are wiped out, and the last remnants of mankind (those conservatives, usually of a religious ilk, who are morally opposed to the cloning process) slowly die as they reproduce with one another. Perhaps this speaks to the revision process of the writer. Perhaps it is the next logical step after reproduction; that art lives on. Stories are told and retold. Born out of the past and carrying humankind into the future. Art is what lifts us above the nihilism, makes us forget heartache enough to perpetuate the human race in spite of human tragedy. It is what lets evils die out so that in the face of evil, we live. I think this in the same way that I think this is what saves Cormac McCarthy’s novels from being wholly nihilistic. According to John Gardner, art is life affirming. And in a bizarre, ironic, Machiavellian, perhaps in a fascist and in a “nation cleansing” kind of way, this novel is indeed life affirming. The final line, after all, informs the reader without condescension, and with great appreciation, that the entire narrative is dedicated to mankind, even as this new race watches the old man die out in their own stubborn belief in a kind of freedom that doesn’t exist. On more minor, less thematic notes, I thoroughly enjoyed the scientific prose, much of which I didn’t understand. I appreciated Houellebecq’s ability to narrate in summary and half scene without keeping the reader at a great distance. Its structural organization is interesting, bits of history, shifting POVs, shifting tenses – yet throughout, I don’t feel disoriented (there were a few places that I felt jolted, but I believe it is largely as a result of unfortunate glitches in translation). There also seems to be different narrators throughout the novel. At one point, a personal pronoun pops up without it ever reappearing again (p. 19). Parts of the novel couldn’t have been narrated by anyone, not even Michel’s biographer/protégée. Parts of the book read like a biography of this biographer, and of course, the epilogue reads as the collective consciousness of an entire race.

Người đọc Nejdet Fakçı từ Yeniören/Karabük, Turkey

Người dùng coi những cuốn sách này là thú vị nhất trong năm 2017-2018, ban biên tập của cổng thông tin "Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn" khuyến cáo rằng tất cả các độc giả sẽ làm quen với văn học này.