Charalampos Agiannidis từ Phungus, Maharashtra, India

_abis_giannidis

11/05/2024

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

Charalampos Agiannidis Sách lại (10)

2019-04-18 17:30

49 Cây Cơm Nguội - Tái bản 12/2013 Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Nguyễn Quang Lập

My response to The Anti-Romantic Child: A Story of Unexpected Joy by Priscilla Gilman was so strong and so personal I doubt if I can write a reasonable review. What I can say is the Gilman writes beautifully, she presents relationships, familial and romantically, with clarity while retaining the complexity of those relationships and of the individuals involved. She is never dismissive nor does she take the route of easy judgments. I was fascinated by her childhood (I too grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side, but in a very different world, nonetheless; however, my mother's ability to create magical moments were brought back to me by Gilman's descriptions of her father's gifts). And the pain of the paradise lost experienced when her parents' marriage cracked open, her need to comfort the vulnerable parent, her own love affair with literature and struggle (emotionally-intellectually she was clearly more than able to hold her own) in the sometimes emotionally sterile world of high-stakes academia, her love affair with the man she married-all were mesmerizing, a combination of fairy tale and reality. And I love how Gilman weaves her favorite poet (Wordsworth's) work into her narrative. I chuckled when she became a parent: as every parent knows, so much of parenting is non-Wordsworthian. Children, even babies, are so stubbornly themselves and they so rarely fit our fantasy. But with Gilman's first child, as with my second, the gap between fantasy and reality is even greater. And most painful (unless this is my projection/identification) is that the ways in which her baby is special and valuable and wonderful are also the ways in which he is "disordered," "special" (a word my own son uses only with heavy sarcasm) in a negative way, a "problem," and, worst of all, perhaps nothing but a set of diagnostic criteria, all of which adding up, not to the child you love and wonder at but to a "label," a problem to be solved. The book brought back the feelings of despair I knew at times that I don't even want to remember. But it also brings in the very special joy that no one who has not lived it can understand. When everything "ordinary" is a struggle, a mother's life can be so painful. All a mother wants is her child's happiness. And to believe her child has a future that will be satisfying to him. When that is in question, it's like living as an open wound. But every triumph is unbelievably sweet. To see a "fragile" child gain resilience is to become stronger oneself; to see him blossom is to know that miracles exist. This book shows how love is a miracle that is never old. Gilman doesn't so much illuminate Wordsworth's poetry as connect his words to vivid life which then lights up the poems.

2019-04-18 19:30

Hải Thượng Phồn Hoa Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Phỉ Ngã Tư Tồn

For me, The Invisible Bridge is a powerful tale of unconditional love, the strength of friendship, and the instinct for survival. It is also a horrific display of the cruelty only humans are capable of. Did Orringer need 600 pages to make her point? That, indeed, is disputable. Readers are potentially put off by the prominent role of romance in this novel, but I believe it's rather sweet. If this tale is to be about a multi-generational Hungarian Jewish family that is about to be torn apart by the Holocaust, I wish to know more about them. I wanted to know who the Lévi's were and what hopes and dreams they harbored on the eve of World War Two. These details made them and their friends human, tangible, instead of just a number on that fateful train carrying Jews to labor camps or gas chambers. I found it heartening to read that even in the most barren and desperate conditions, people would find a way to keep going. What I particularly enjoyed were the descriptions of Andras' life in Paris. Having lived in Paris for a little while, the city has become quite dear to my heart. Of course, Paris around the millennium cannot be compared to the way the city was in 1937. But Orringer paints such a vivid image of the city of light, it's as if she herself has lived there, in those very times. I expected to learn more about the horrors of the Holocaust and the ordeal that Eastern European Jews had to endure. The Invisible Bridge not only met these expectations but also stirred up strong feelings. Because of the detailed descriptions of Orringer's characters, I slowly grew attached to them, and I cried when they suffered, cheered when they achieved success and pleaded for their safety when they were persecuted. There is nothing black and white about this book; spoiled and selfish Joszéf ends up a humbled and a more serious man. In the times in between being conscripted to yet another labor camp, Andras works for a Hungarian-Jewish newspaper that hides the awful truth of the ongoing war. Polaner mourns for a German consulate member who was assassinated by people with anti-German sympathies, but this man was not a Nazi at all. There are many more examples of right blurring into wrong and the other way around. If there were a lesson to be learned from this book, it is to remember that we are all equals, no matter our gender, race or religion.

Người đọc Charalampos Agiannidis từ Phungus, Maharashtra, India

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.