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| | The Chosen d'Elizabeth Lowry, un roman sur Thomas Hardy | |
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Emjy Bookworm
| Sujet: The Chosen d'Elizabeth Lowry, un roman sur Thomas Hardy Ven 19 Mai - 16:28 | |
| Un roman sur Thomas Hardy est sorti l'année dernière. Il revient sur la relation du romancier avec sa femme. Il a reçu plusieurs très bonnes critiques, notamment du Guardian. Je viens de le commencer et je dois dire que le style me plaît beaucoup pour l'instant. Je trouve qu'il y a quelque chose de très atmosphérique dans l'écriture d'Elizabeth Lowry. - Citation :
- One Wednesday morning in November 1912 the ageing Thomas Hardy, entombed by paper and books 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 end up as enemies to each other. His family and Florence Dugdale, the much younger woman with whom he has been in a relationship, assume that he will be happy and relieved to be set free. But he is left shattered by the loss.
Hardy's bewilderment only increases when, sorting through Emma's effects, he comes across a set of diaries that she had secretly kept about their life together, ominously titled 'What I Think of My Husband'. He 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 did they ever marry?
He is consumed by something worse than grief: a chaos in which all his certainties have been obliterated. He has to 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. The Chosen - the extraordinary new novel by Elizabeth Lowry - hauntingly searches the unknowable spaces between man and wife; memory and regret; life and art. L'article très positif du Guardian : - Citation :
- The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry review – Thomas Hardy in mourning
A remarkable portrait of the remorse that followed a difficult marriage, and gave birth to great poetry
When Thomas Hardy’s wife Emma died in 1912 she left behind the recollections she had been writing of her life in Cornwall before her marriage, evoking her joy as a young woman riding over the cliffs of Beeny and St Juliot. She also left the many diaries she had kept through two decades of increasing alienation from a husband who seemed to have abandoned her for the separate reality of his novels. The bereaved Thomas confronted these documents in shock, encountering in their pages both the young woman he had loved and a horrifying picture of their failed marriage. From the unexpected depths of his grief and remorse came his great sequence of elegies, Poems of 1912-13.
- Spoiler:
With remarkable steadiness and fine judgment, Elizabeth Lowry goes right into the midst of this legendary literary maelstrom and opens a space for fiction. She inhabits the household at Max Gate, the house Hardy built in Dorset, in the days after Emma’s sudden death and before the poems gave lasting shape and voice to the lost woman on the Cornish hills. Was Hardy the jailer of a neglected wife? Was Emma thwarted in her own writing? Why did it all go so wrong – and did the trouble start with Tess of the d’Urbervilles? Slowly and feelingly, the novel pores over questions about the costs of art, refusing to shout out answers, letting many perspectives tell upon each other.
The diaries Hardy read were, according to his second wife, “diabolical”. He burned them: Emma’s own version of her life story went up in flames. Lowry takes on the challenge of imaginative re-creation. Here is Emma reinstated as narrator of herself: persistent in her love, acute about her husband’s work, chronically rejected, finding no adequate company or purpose, and eventually feeling caged in an attic room, resented and avoided by the man preoccupied with invented people in the study below. By 1896 she thinks of herself as dead already. “This is how we exist now: two people in their coffins, two ghosts, stacked one on top of the other.”
The charges against Hardy are many and clear, but Lowry is certainly not out to cancel Thomas Hardy The charges against Hardy are many and clear, but the novel itself is not one of accusation; Lowry is certainly not out to cancel Thomas Hardy. The Chosen is underwritten at every turn by the enduring power of the poems, and it leads us back to them. It follows carefully the stages of Hardy’s inchoate sorrow and reawakening desire, his attachment to his labouring-class family and distance from them, his efforts to honour a restless mind as well as the woman standing solidly in front of him – who in autumn 1912 is his lover Florence Dugdale, expecting to be made his wife.
This is Lowry’s third novel. The Bellini Madonna (2008), a densely plotted mystery with an alluringly off-putting narrator, was followed in 2018 by Dark Water, finely crafted and hugely ambitious in its study of 19th-century psychology and its shadowing of Melville. These are all novels interested in the attractions and dangers of great minds and in the limits of understanding; they work with narrators we might call, after Hardy, “self-unseeing”; they offer partial, counterpointed versions of the story.
Lowry can shape glittering sentences when she wants to, as in The Bellini Madonna, but in The Chosen she chooses restraint. The writing steers us towards calm thinking even while Emma is soundlessly screaming in her prison or Hardy is holding her corpse. The very mobile tone won’t let this be all tragedy or melodrama or farce or shimmeringly remembered romance. Everyone at Max Gate has their own keen sense of the absurdities involved in mourning. The wreaths laid for Emma are “plump as life buoys” (but are saving no one, soon look deflated, and are merely rained on rather than flung out across a flood). Plangent reveries are liable to run up against acerbic interruptions – from Hardy himself, or from his sharp, capable, loyal sister Kate, one of the most memorably drawn figures in this composite portrait of Hardy and the people he loves. “Don’t go soft on me,” she says, shaking off sentiment before it takes hold.
The wit can be touchingly gentle and suggestive. Thomas and Kate sit quietly together, she remembering how proud they all were at the Higher Bockhampton cottage when he was a schoolboy bringing his certificates back across the fields. Fondly she prompts him to decline “table” in Latin. Mensae, mensae, mensa, he begins:
“That’s the vocative you know, mensa. It means ‘O table’.”
“Why would anyone want to address a table?”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
They say no more, but fleetingly we see how the late poem The Little Old Table (“creak, little wood thing, creak”) might come from this moment of familial closeness. And we see how differently the vocative will be used in the lines of Hardy’s poetry that we sense below the surface of the novel: “Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me”.
Where Poems of 1912-13 intensify around single visions, utterly concentrated, The Chosen works by looking around at everything going on in the house. Max Gate is vividly realised in all its tree-shadowed gloominess, gobbling coal and effort, too large yet grimly confining. There are admirers at the door, the pie is cold, someone needs to pay the grocery bills, the maid’s family would go hungry without her wages. Hardy is learning to notice all this: the passions and difficulties of these others who live around him, the practical work that makes possible his days of absorption. Unmoored as he is, adrift and a stranger to himself, he is thinking hard about what he has failed to notice. “Too late, he sees it all.” It’s changing him, perhaps, though there’s no simple moral to be drawn, and he must set off again on his solitary journeys while someone else sees to the fire.
Le roman est sorti en poche en anglais le mois dernier. _________________ |
| | | Shelbylee Bookworm
| Sujet: Re: The Chosen d'Elizabeth Lowry, un roman sur Thomas Hardy Ven 19 Mai - 17:18 | |
| Noté à plusieurs reprise, j'attends ton avis final ! _________________ |
| | | sandie Bookworm
| Sujet: Re: The Chosen d'Elizabeth Lowry, un roman sur Thomas Hardy Sam 20 Mai - 7:33 | |
| J'adore Thomas Hardy donc ce roman m'intéresse beaucoup ! J'ai hâte d'avoir ton avis ! _________________ |
| | | Barbara Ironic Dandy
| Sujet: Re: The Chosen d'Elizabeth Lowry, un roman sur Thomas Hardy Sam 20 Mai - 10:05 | |
| Ca pourrait faire suite à “Parallel lives” de Phyllis Rose que je suis en train de finir de lire |
| | | Emjy Bookworm
| Sujet: Re: The Chosen d'Elizabeth Lowry, un roman sur Thomas Hardy Sam 20 Mai - 19:45 | |
| - Barbara a écrit:
- Ca pourrait faire suite à “Parallel lives” de Phyllis Rose que je suis en train de finir de lire
Ah mais tout à fait ! D'ailleurs, Phyllis Rose aurait très bien pu consacrer un chapitre de son essai au couple Hardy tant il y a à dire à leur sujet ! Bon, en même temps, il y a tellement de couples victoriens fascinants qu'elle a du faire des choix ... Il me reste un tiers à lire de The Chosen, je trouve ce roman magnifique _________________ |
| | | Emjy Bookworm
| Sujet: Re: The Chosen d'Elizabeth Lowry, un roman sur Thomas Hardy Lun 3 Juil - 20:37 | |
| J'ai lu ce roman dernier et je l'ai beaucoup aimé Novembre 1912. Thomas Hardy alors âgé de 72 ans mène une existence de reclus dans son bureau, cerné par des livres et des manuscrits de toutes parts. Il s'est lentement mais irrémédiablement éloigné de sa femme Emma, qu'il avait pourtant épousée par amour et malgré la désapprobation de sa famille, 27 ans plus tôt. Un matin, il découvre qu'Emma est morte, dans la chambre qu'elle occupait seule. Au lendemain de cette perte terrible et écrasante, l'écrivain en vient à remettre en cause toute son existence. Et lorsqu'il découvre plusieurs journaux qu'Emma a secrètement tenus durant toutes leurs années ensemble, il se met à éprouver des sentiments douloureux, du chagrin et du remords mais aussi et surtout de l'amour, à nouveau. Dans ses mémoires, Emma décrit leur première rencontre, dans un petit village des Cornouailles puis leurs années de mariage et se montre brutalement honnête, sur les défauts, les faiblesses et l'arrogance de son mari. “I expect nothing from him now & that is just as well – neither gratitude nor attention, love, nor justice. He belongs to the public & all my years of devotion count for nothing.” Pour l'écrivain adulé et célébré Thomas Hardy, est venu le temps de l'introspection et de la remise en question. A ses côtés, sa soeur et Florence, sa secrétaire s'affairent pour réorganiser sa vie et sa maison. Elizabeth Lowry nous offre le récit aussi délicat que bouleversant d'une histoire d'amour tendre, surprenante, drôle aussi par moments, poignante mais surtout d'un extraordinaire réalisme. Son roman, d'une grande acuité et modernité, joue sur la frontière narrative très mince entre l'histoire d'amour et l'histoire de fantôme. Dans "The Chosen", il est avant tout question de deuil et de souvenirs et pourtant la femme aimée et perdue ne semble jamais avoir été aussi présente. D'un point de vue purement biographique, le roman s'avère aussi extrêmement intéressant puisqu'il repose sur « Some Recollections », les journaux d'Emma Hardy qui ont réellement existé. De plus, les pages où est évoquée l'écriture (laborieuse et exigeante) de Tess d'Urbervilles sont tout à fait fascinantes. Des profondeurs de son chagrin et de son amour, Thomas Hardy trouvera l'inspiration pour écrire certains de ses plus beaux poèmes. Elizabeth Lowry a choisi de ne porter aucun jugement sur ses protagonistes, son écriture privilégie toujours la sobriété et gagne à mon avis beaucoup en émotion pour cette raison. The Chosen est un roman d'une grande maîtrise que je conseille plus que volontiers aux admirateurs de Thomas Hardy et plus largement, aux amateurs de littérature victorienne. A lire en parallèle d'un autre roman dédié à Thomas Hardy, Hiver de Christopher Nicholson, qui lui, se passe en 1924, soit 12 ans plus tard. (topic ici : :arrow;_________________ |
| | | sandie Bookworm
| Sujet: Re: The Chosen d'Elizabeth Lowry, un roman sur Thomas Hardy Jeu 6 Juil - 19:27 | |
| J'adore Thomas Hardy et tu donnes vraiment envie de découvrir ce roman, donc je le note ! J'espère qu'un éditeur français aura envie de le proposer aux lecteurs... _________________ |
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