Just got today at Cultura!
Another book from John Boyne (The Boy in the Stripped Pajamas - which I loved!) about a fourteen-year-old boy, John Jacob Turnstile, who has got into trouble with the police on one too many occasions and is on his way to prison when an offer is put to him - a ship has been refitted over the last few months and is about to set sail with an important mission. The boy who was expected to serve as the captain's personal valet has been injured and a replacement must be found immediately. The deal is struck and Turnstile finds himself on board, meeting the captain, just as the ship sets sail. The ship is HMS Bounty, the captain is William Bligh, and their destination is Tahiti. Mutiny on the Bounty is the first novel to explore all the events relating to the Bounty's voyage, from their long journey across the ocean to their adventures on the island of Tahiti and the subsequent forty-eight-day expedition towards Tiimor. A vivid recreation of the famous mutiny, the story is packed with humor, high drama and historical detail, while presenting a very different portrait of Captain Bligh and Mr. Christian than has ever been shown before. (Goodreads)
The most renowned book by
Albert Camus, I know the first sentences by heart, it's something you always cross when reading anything about french literature, but I've actually never read it... So, let's give it a try sometime!
French description: Condamné à mort, Meursault. Sur une plage algérienne, il a tué un Arabe. À cause du soleil, dira-t-il, parce qu'il faisait chaud. On n'en tirera rien d'autre. Rien ne le fera plus réagir : ni l'annonce de sa condamnation, ni la mort de sa mère, ni les paroles du prêtre avant la fin. Comme si, sur cette plage, il avait soudain eu la révélation de l'universelle équivalence du tout et du rien. La conscience de n'être sur la terre qu'en sursis, d'une mort qui, quoi qu'il arrive, arrivera, sans espoir de salut. Et comment être autre chose qu'indifférent à tout après ça ? Étranger sur la terre, étranger à lui-même, Meursault le bien nommé pose les questions qui deviendront un leitmotiv dans l'oeuvre de Camus. De La Peste à La Chute, mais aussi dans ses pièces et dans ses essais, celui qui allait devenir Prix Nobel de littérature en 1957 ne cessera de s'interroger sur le sens de l'existence. Sa mort violente en 1960 contribua quelque peu à rendre mythique ce maître à penser de toute une génération. (Goodreads)
English version: The Stranger is not merely one of the most widely read novels of the 20th century, but one of the books likely to outlive it. Camus's compelling and troubling tale of a disaffected, apparently amoral young man has earned a durable popularity (and remains a staple of U.S. high school literature courses) in part because it reveals so vividly the anxieties of its time. Alienation, the fear of anonymity, spiritual doubt--all could have been given a purely modern inflection in the hands of a lesser talent than Camus, who won the Nobel Prize in 1957 and was noted for his existentialist aesthetic. The remarkable trick of The Stranger, however, is that it's not mired in period philosophy.
The plot is simple. A young french-Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. The trial's proceedings are absurd, a parsing of incidental trivialities--that Meursault, for instance, seemed unmoved by his own mother's death and then attended a comic movie the evening after her funeral are two ostensibly damning facts--so that the eventual sentence the jury issues is both ridiculous and inevitable. (Goodreads)
To know more about it, click
here (older post)
