Mallory Wikoff từ Fairview, KY , USA

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12/22/2024

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Mallory Wikoff Sách lại (10)

2020-01-14 20:30

Đền Tội Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Kelley Armstrong

[These notes were made in 1985:]. By the end of this book, I was in a pleasant state of emotional exhaustion. This is Brosterism in its essence: tho' not homosexual, homoerotic, and firmly grounded - as the title suggests - in the idealism of Honour. Aymar's family motto is "sans tache." It is, too, about hero-worship and loyalty. There is the standard sprinkling of believe-it-or-not-as-you-please supernaturalism, in this case a garter woven of reeds supposed to confer invulnerability on its owner. This element is not nearly so well handled as it would be three years later in Heron. Plot: Laurent, a young French nobleman educated in England by his English mother during the Revolution years, is preparing to go to his homeland for the first time in 1814, Napoleon apparently being defeated. A striking Frenchman who appears on the other side of a trout-stream, and who plunges in in an (unnecessary) attempt to save Laurent from drowning, proves to be the daring young hero L'Oiseleur (Aymar de la Rocheterie), leader of Chouans (again! see Yellow Poppy, Sir Isumbras). Months later, having briefly met Aymar in Paris, and learned of his two lady-cousins - one good, one bad - Laurent is sent on a mission in the 1815 campaign and takes advantage of the opportunity to try to join forces with Aymar. To his horror, he finds himself joint prisoner with him; A is at the point of death, and branded as a traitor for having sent information to the enemy, and subsequently having been shot by his own men. On a purely literal level, both of these last statements are true; and much of the rest of the book keeps Laurent as well as the reader wondering how they could possibly be so, especially after we see Guitton - a relative of Major Guthrie, methinks - trying and failing to press information out of Aymar; in fact, much of Heron is a subtler reworking of this book. (It turns out that the sending of information was part of a military ruse which misfired, complicated by the fact that Aymar was trying at the same time to rescue his beloved cousin Avoye from what he believed to be a threat of death). The activity of Aymar in this painfully interesting central section where all is explained provides a relief from his enforced passivity in the rest of the book. For Laurent is given - and openly delights in - a situation generally supposed to be particularly dear to the female heart; the hero he so greatly admires becomes utterly dependent on him physically and emotionally, to the point where Aymar would have committed suicide had Laurent condemned his actions. Compare this to his reaction when his lady-love, Avoye, does condemn his actions (on insufficient evidence, and having been lied to.) Hurt though he is, there's no talk of suicide here. And this is indicative of the lack of equilibrium between the masculine and feminine loves in the novel; an equilibrium better handled in Mr. Rowl and Heron, where the lady is not brought into direct and detrimental comparison with the friend. The ending is uneasy: Laurent is openly anxious, almost envious, at the reunion of the lovers; no matter how much they accept him, we cannot help feeling that the only conceivable resolution of such a build-up of emotion is some sort of ménage-à-trois, a concept so foreign to the conventional sensibilities of the novel that one immediately rejects it. In Mr. Rowl, the friend was older and presented no sexual threat; in Heron, he is killed. But what is to happen here? - the homoeroticism has been just too gloriously dwelt upon! Avoye loves him less than Laurent does - that has been the message, and the conventional resolution cannot be accepted with equanimity. And yet, I cannot bring myself to wish it hadn't been written - emotionally it was what I had been looking for.

Người đọc Mallory Wikoff từ Fairview, KY , USA

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.