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Zusatztext 68213433 Informationen zum Autor Will Self is the author of six short-story collections, a book of novellas, eight novels, and six collections of journalism. His work has won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He lives in London. Klappentext "First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, London." SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2012 MAN BOOKER PRIZE "A work of throwback modernism . . . an erudite yet barking mad novel about barking madness. . . . You give yourself over to "Umbrella" in flashes, as if it were a radio station you're unable to tune in that you suspect is playing the most beautiful song you will ever hear. . . this novel locks into moments of ungodly beauty and radiant moral sympathy. . . . a bitter critique of how society has viewed (and cared for) those with mental illnesses. It's about myriad other things too: class, the changing nature of British society, trench warfare in World War I, how technology can be counted on to upend everything. At heart it's a novel about seeing. . . . Mr. Self often enough writes with such vividness it's as if he is the first person to see anything at all."--"The New York Times" "A savage and deeply humane novel. . . . . "Umbrella" is an old-fashioned modernist tale with retrofitted ambitions to boot. . . . Self has always been a fabulous writer. . . . The result is page after page of gorgeously musical prose. Self's sentences bounce and weave, and like poetry, they refract. The result is mesmerizing. . . . In its best moments, "Umbrella" compels a reader to the heights of vertigo Woolf excelled at creating.. . . . a triumph of form. With this magnificent novel Will Self reminds that he is Britain's reigning poet of the night."--"Boston Globe" "A virtuosic performance . . . narrated in the allusive, sensory-overloaded style associated with Joyce's "Ulysses." . . . A heady mixture of closely observed (and deeply researched) period details, colorful imagery, surrealistic juxtapositions, and italicized interjections . . . Self's wildly nonlinear narrative offers other delights: richly detailed settings that bring the Edwardian era and mental hospitals sensuously alive, kaleidoscopic patterns of symbolism (umbrellas assume all sorts of forms and functions), and loads of mordant satire."--"The Washingtonu Zusammenfassung ?A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.”?James Joyce! Ulysses 1918 Audrey Death?feminist! socialist and munitions worker at Woolwich Arsenal?falls ill with encephalitis lethargica as the epidemic rages across Europe! killing a third of its victims and condemning a further third to living death. 1971 Under the curious eyes of psychiatrist Dr. Zack Busner! assumed mental patient Audrey Death lies supine in bed above a spring grotto that she has made every one of the forty-nine years she has resided in Friern Mental Hospital. 2010 Now retired! Dr. Busner travels waywardly across North London in search of the truth about that tumultuous summer when he awoke the post-encephalitic patients under his care using a new and powerful drug. Weaving together a dense tapestry of consciousness and lived life across an entire century! in his latest and most ambitious novel! Will Self takes up the challenge of Modernism and reveals how it?and it alone?can unravel new and unsettling truths about our world and how it came to be. ...
