The Chosen copertina

The Chosen

who pays the price of a writer's fame?

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The Chosen

Di: Elizabeth Lowry
Letto da: Philip Bird
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One Wednesday morning in November 1912 Thomas Hardy, an old man in ragged trousers, entombed by paper and increasingly estranged from his wife Emma, finds her dying in her bedroom. Between his speaking to her and taking her in his arms she has gone.

The day before he and Emma had exchanged bitter words, leading Hardy to wonder whether all husbands and wives ended up as enemies to each other. He, his family and Florence Dugdale, the much younger woman with whom he had been in a relationship, all assumed that he would be happy and relieved to be set free. But he is left shattered by the loss.

Hardy finds a set of secret diaries Emma kept about their life together and discovers what Emma had truly felt - that he had been cold, remote and incapable of ordinary human affection and had kept her childless, a virtual prisoner for forty years. Why had they ever married?

He is consumed by something worse than grief, an absence without form or meaning, a chaos in which certainties have been obliterated. He must re-evaluate himself and reimagine his unhappy wife as she was when they first met.

Hardy's pained reflections on the choices he has made - and must now make - form a unique combination of love story and ghost story, by turns tender, surprising, comic and true. Based on meticulous research, The Chosen - the extraordinary new novel by Elizabeth Lowry - hauntingly searches the unknowable spaces between man and wife; memory and grief; life and art.

(P)2022 Quercus Editions Limited©2022 Elizabeth Lowry Narrativa di genere Narrativa femminile Narrativa letteraria Narrativa storica Vita familiare
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Recensioni della critica

Does art enhance life, or negate it? The painful question runs through Lowry's portrait of Thomas Hardy, and produces a sombre, delicate novel, finely judged and full of insight (Hilary Mantel)
In The Chosen, Lowry conjures the torments of a writer's life wonderfully. It is full of understanding, shrewd and often lyrical - a thing of beauty and sadness. (Alison Light, author of Mrs Woolf & the Servants)
Elizabeth Lowry writes like a dream; finely attuned to the hopes, desires and secret hauntings of her characters, she brings them to life like no other writer I know. Every new book from Lowry is a rare treat, best devoured slowly. (Marina Benjamin)
'[A] novel which is both a fascinating analysis of Hardy and a powerful and exquisite work of art in its own right . . . her writing is utterly without mercy while also being underpinned by deep compassion . . . Lowry's view of marriage and, more particularly, the creative life is almost unbearably bleak, but her novel is glorious - the best that I have read in several years. (Alice Jolly)
Hardy's doomed first marriage is the subject of this beautifully rendered and poignant novel . . . The prose is exquisite . . . Above all, like many of the best novelists, Lowry understands the intricacies of the human heart.
In this exquisite imagining of the days after Emma's unexpected death, The ­Chosen excavates Hardy's emotions . . . Felled by the bitterness in her diaries . . .Hardy experiences 'a savage sense of liberty' and overwhelming feelings of loss, beautifully described in Lowry's bellclear, silvery prose.
This novel is exquisitely written and powerfully perceptive, yet never loses sight of its biographical nature.
Deserves to be read by anyone interested in Thomas Hardy or in good literature.
It's a remarkable, mesmeric piece of writing . . . an authentic cri de coeur from a deeply reserved man. There are utterly remarkable passages in The Chosen where something shifts, time seems to alter and language starts to glow. It's rare and quite extraordinary. It feels as though two levels of language like two currents of different salinity are flowing across each other - the sensation is one of looking through the 3rd person narration into Hardy's innermost lived experience, and through or behind those the further layer of the poems themselves, still fluid, in formation in the mind. (Andrew Greig, author of Rose Nicolson)
A stylistic tour de force . . . Miss this work of art -- and cautionary tale against long-term gaslighting -- at your peril.
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