Checkout 19
‘A book to shake the world anew’ Sebastian Barry
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- 8,99 €
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- 8,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2022 Selection
'Extraordinary . . . radiant' Sunday Times
'An existential tour-de-force' Eimear McBride
'Elatingly risky' Guardian
'We read in order to come to life.'
With fierce imagination, a woman revisits the moments that shape her life; from crushes on teachers to navigating relationships in a fast-paced world; from overhearing her grandmothers' peculiar stories to nurturing her own personal freedom and a boundless love of literature.
Fusing fantasy with lived experience, Checkout 19 is a vivid and mesmerising journey through the small traumas and triumphs that define us - as readers, as writers, as human beings.
* A 'Books of 2021' pick in the Guardian, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Irish Times Culture and New Statesman *
'This is her new book to shake the world anew' Sebastian Barry
'Mesmerising, whip-smart, full of genius . . . It is also very funny' Elaine Feeney
'Her voice is all her own' Anne Enright
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bennett's idiosyncratic and arresting latest (after Pond) explores a woman's tenacious attachment to the written word. The unnamed narrator describes her peculiar experience of reading as a young bookish girl: she thinks "the left page nearly always has better words on it," and, given the readerly urge to turn the page, typesetters are "irresponsible" for allowing "important sentences to appear at the very end of the right page." As an adult, she studies literature, works weekends at a grocery store, and scours books for words that feel "as if they are being written as you read them, that your eyes upon the page are perhaps even making them appear." Along with the narrator's recollections are accounts of her early efforts at writing fiction, "the quickening revolutions of my supremely aberrant imaginings." She recreates the intensity of artistic inspiration and then, from a distance of years, recomposes the lost or abandoned stories themselves, an exercise that proves much more successful than one might expect, as seen in, for instance, a Borgesian tale about a library of blank books concealing one transformative sentence only visible to the collection's owner. Bennett's narrator also recounts interactions with men: a charismatic teacher who senses her fierce talent; vindictive and entitled friends and lovers; and a Nietzsche-toting grocery shopper who, in a scene that demonstrates the destabilizing joy of this book, fills his cart in an "exquisite sequence of sublime prestidigitation." Encompassing literary criticism, suggestive fables, feminist polemic, a portrait of the artist, and a phenomenology of reading, this transfixes on both the right page and the left. Bennett marvels once again.