Servants of the Map
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- 8,49 €
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- 8,49 €
Descrizione dell’editore
A national hardback bestseller in the US – another magnificently imagined and executed book of historical fiction with a contemporary twist, from one of the masters of the form. ‘These stories possess a wonderful clarity and ease, the serene authority of a writer working at the very height of her powers.' New York Times
Ranging across two centuries, and from the western Himalayas to an Adirondack village, Servants of the Map travels the territories of yearning and awakening, of loss and unexpected discovery.
A mapper of the highest mountain peaks, engaged on the trigonometrical measurement of British India, realizes his true obsession while in deflationary correspondence with his far-off wife. A young woman afire with scientific curiosity must come to terms with a romantic fantasy. Brothers and sisters, torn apart at an early age, are beset by dreams of reunion. Throughout, Barrett’s most characteristic theme – the happenings in that borderland between science and desire – unfolds in the diverse lives of unforgettable human beings.
Reviews
‘Servants of the Map confirms how deserving Barrett is to be ranked with Alice Munro and the other great North American storytellers of the moment… It is the precision of her words, and the intelligence with which she creates bonds between characters from an age so different from our own, that makes reading her such a joy.’ Economist
‘Andrea Barrett has a talent for reaching to the essence of experience… The passage in which Lavinia speaks of what makes her happy is as poignant and intense as anything I can remember reading for a long time, as radiantly illuminating, in its way, as the famous passage in Wuthering Heights when Catherine describes her idea of perfect weather.’ Barry Unsworth
'Gorgeous, illuminating, entrancing fiction… The scientific themes that made Barrett's novel The Voyage of the Narwhal and her NBA-winning collection Ship Fever two of the most unusual literary successes of their decade again predominate in this superb new gathering of four stories and two novellas.' (Starred) Kirkus Reviews
About the author
ANDREA BARRETT, currently a Fellow at the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers, grew up on Cape Cod and graduated from Union College in Schenectady, New York, where she studied biology. In addition to five novels, she has also written a previous collection of short fiction, Ship Fever. Recently named a MacArthur Fellow, she lives with her husband in Rochester, New York.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Travelers, naturalists, nurses, botanists, surveyors a multitude of seekers and healers populate this luminous new collection of two novellas and four stories by National Book Award winner Barrett (Ship Fever; The Voyage of the Narwhal). Tracking her wandering protagonists from the banks of the Schuylkill in Pennsylvania in 1810 to the Himalayas in the 1860s and on to New York's Finger Lakes in the late 20th century, Barrett elegantly portrays the transitory nature of life and love. Selected for Best American Short Stories (2001) and The O. Henry Awards (2001), the title novella follows young British surveyor Max Vigne on a long, arduous mapping expedition as he writes letters home to a cherished wife that become a chronicle of the distance that is growing between them. Partings and reunions of loved ones recur in these stories. In "Theories of Rain," a young orphan studying the mysteries of precipitation and passion yearns for the brother she was separated from as a child; in the novella "The Cure," a nurse at a village in the Adirondacks finds the brother she lost years ago and yet struggles to communicate with him. In the contemporary "The Forest," Barrett creates a lovely comedy of the inevitable gap of perspectives between an illustrious Polish scientist who has grown nostalgic with age and a young woman who yearns to break free of the past. The mark of Barrett's artistry is her ability to illuminate loneliness and isolation, but also to capture the improbably forged bonds between her disparate characters. Familiar figures appear and reappear in more than one story, and many readers will be able to make connections between these tales and Barrett's earlier works. Yet each is rich and independent and beautiful and should draw Barrett many new admirers. Author tour.
