Alasdair Gray - a short biography
Childhood and Youth: 1934 - 1954
Painting and Plays: 1954 - 1980
Success: 1981 - Present

Alasdair James Gray was born in Riddrie, east Glasgow, on 28 December 1934. His father, Alexander Gray, worked in a cardboard box cutting factory (after being wounded by shrapnel in the belly during WW1), his mother, Amy Fleming, worked in a clothes shop. His parents met while on a rambling outing organised by the Holiday Fellowship and had married in 1931. Alasdair's sister, Mora Jean, was born in 1937. He attended Riddrie primary school until the start of WW2.

In 1940, Alasdair, Mora and their mother were evacuated from the city of Glasgow. Their first new residence was on a farm in Perthshire, where Alasdair's eczema and asthma became a problem - this stay is recounted in book 1 of Lanark - then they moved to the town of Stonehouse in Lanarkshire - an experience used for Jock's childhood in 1982, Janine.
في عام 1940 تم ترحيل الام والاب والابنة من جلاسكو الى مزرعة في بيتشير حيث اثر العيش هناك سلبا على صحة السدير واشتدت الاكزما والازمة عليه
They were reunited with their father in 1942 when he got the job managing a hostel for munitions workers near Wetherby, West Yorkshire. (As an aside, part of the munitions factory itself now houses the British Library's Document Supply Centre, the UK's centre for interlibrary loans.)
عاد لينضم الى والده مرة ثانية عام 1942 بعد ان حصل والده على عمل
Alasdair attended the local church school where he sang in the choir and displayed early literary talent by adapting an episode from Homer's Odyssey to perform as a school play.
After the war ended, Alasdair's father could not find a professional job, despite five years experience managing hostels, and got work as a wage clerk for a building firm. In 1946, Alasdair started at Whitehill Senior Secondary School. On Saturday mornings, for several years, he attended Art Appreciation classes at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. At Whitehill, his English and Art teachers were encouraging, but Alasdair was torn by an obligation to his parents to also study for the qualifications that would allow him to enter university should he wish.
In 1952, Alasdair's mother died in the same year he entered Glasgow Art School.
ماتت امه عام 1952 وكان عمره عندها 18 عاما
In 1954, Alasdair began writing sections of what would eventually be published in 1981 as Lanark. The chapter entitled 'The War Begins' won a prize from the Observer newspaper when entered as a short story into a competition. He also wrote, and published, three of the stories that were eventually collected in Unlikely Stories, Mostly before 1957 - 'The Star', 'The Spread of Ian Nicol' and 'The Cause of Some Recent Changes'. Gray's art school years, and much of his childhood, can be worked out from the Thaw sections of Lanark, which are largely autobiographical.
In 1973, his father, who now lived in Alderly Edge, Cheshire, died.
عام 1973 مات والده

السادير جري
- السادير جري كاتب وفنان اسكتلندي ولد عام 1934 اشهر رواياته لانارك والتي استغرف في كتابتها قرابة 30 عام
- كتب في السياسة والاشتراكية والاستقلال لاسكتلندا وفي تاريخ الادب الانجليزي
- ولد في جلاسكو وكان والده قد جرح في الحرب العالمية الاولى وكان يعمل في مصنع وكانت امه تعمل في دكان
- خلال الحرب العالمةي الثانية تك ترحيلة اولا الى بيرثشير ومن ثم الى لانارك شير وهو ما انعكس لاحقا في ادبه
- عاشت العائلة على المخصصات التي منحت لوالده بسبب اصابته في الحرب وبعض المساعادات من رامج تعليمية كانت تمنح مجانا
- تزوج مرتين مرة عام 1961- 1970 والثانية من 1991 ولديه ولد واحد ولد عام 1964 وما يزال يعيش في جلاسكو
- - كتب عن والديه وكيف عاشا في اسرة من الطبقة العاملة وفي منطقة يسكنها سكان من الطبقة العاملة ليظهر ان الاشتراكية تخدم الفقراء
- في رد على سؤال ان كانت محتويات روايته تعكس احداث حياته اجاب بأنها في الجزء الاول وحتى العام 20 هي تسجل التعاسة التي واجهها في حياته المبكرة
- في عام 1940 تم ترحيل الام والاب والابنة من جلاسكو الى مزرعة في بيتشير حيث اثر العيش هناك سلبا على صحة السدير واشتدت الاكزما والازمة عليه
- عاد لينضم الى والده مرة ثانية عام 1942 بعد ان حصل والده على عمل
- ماتت امه عام 1952 وكان عمره عندها 18 عاما
- عام 1973 مات والده

يتيم الام في سن 18

The New York Trilogy is a series of novels by Paul Auster. Originally published sequentially as City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986), it has since been collected into a single volume.
Plot introduction
Ostensibly presented as detective fiction, the stories of The New York Trilogy have been described as "meta-detective-fiction", "anti-detective fiction", "mysteries about mysteries", a "strangely humorous working of the detective novel", "very soft-boiled", a "metamystery" and a "mixture between the detective story and the nouveau roman"[citation needed]. This may classify Auster as a postmodern writer whose works are influenced by the "classical literary movement" of American postmodernism through the 1960s and 70s[citation needed]. There is, however, "a certain coherence in the narrative discourse, a neo-realistic approach and a show of responsibility for social and moral aspects going beyond mere metafictional and subversive elements"[citation needed], which distinguish him from a "traditional" postmodern writer. The New York Trilogy is a particular form of postmodern detective fiction which still uses well-known elements of the detective novel (the classical and hardboiled varieties, for example) but also creates a new form that links "the traditional features of the genre with the experimental, metafictional and ironic features of postmodernism."
A 2006 reissue by Penguin Books is fronted by new pulp magazine-style covers by comic book illustrator Art Spiegelman]
City of Glass
The first story, City of Glass, features a detective-fiction writer become private investigator who descends into madness as he becomes embroiled in a case. It explores layers of identity and reality, from Paul Auster the writer of the novel to the unnamed "author" who reports the events as reality to "Paul Auster the writer", a character in the story, to "Paul Auster the detective", who may or may not exist in the novel, to Peter Stillman the younger to Peter Stillman the elder and, finally, to Daniel Quinn, protagonist.
Ghosts
The second story, Ghosts, is about a private eye called Blue, trained by Brown, who is investigating a man named Black on Orange Street for a client named White. Blue writes written reports to White who in turn pays him for his work. Blue becomes frustrated and loses himself as he becomes immersed in the life of Black.
The Locked Room
The Locked Room is the story of a writer who lacks the creativity to produce fiction. Fanshawe,[1] his childhood friend, has produced creative work, and when he disappears the writer publishes his work and replaces him in his family. The title is a reference to a "locked room mystery", a popular form of early detective fiction.

روايات بول أوستر محتفى بها فى أوروبا، ولكن الأمر ليس كذلك فى وطنه أمريكا. لحسن الحظ هو يعتبر هذا إطراء.

تقول إحدى شخصيات رواية بول أوستر الأخيرة (سانست بارك): "ليس من المفترض أن يتحدث الكتاب إلى الصحفيين." هذا أمر محبط، أقرأ هذا وأنا فى طريقى لأحاور أوستر. تكمل الشخصية: "الحوار هو شكل أدبى وضيع لا يهدف إلا لتبسيط ما لا يجب تبسيطه." هذا سيكون مثيرا للسخرية.

أثناء توجهى نحو منزله، البنى الضخم الواقع فى شارع محفوف بالأشجار ببروكلين- نيويورك، شعرت بالاضطراب، لأننى رأيت أوستر ينظر إلىّ من النافذة بوجه حجرى، كأحد الشخصيات الكئيبة فى رواياته وأفلامه (شارك فى إخراج فيلمى دخان وكآبة على الوجه).

ولكن الانطباع الأول كان خاطئا، فأوستر رحب بى بشدة عندما وصلت وأنا أحمل حقائبى؛ فلم يكن لدىّ وقت لأمر على الفندق قبل ذلك.

قال وهو يتقدم ليساعدنى: "تبدين كأنك جئت لتبقى.. مرحبا بك لو أحببت أن تبقى هنا."

أوستر، 63 عاما، يجلس على كرسى مخملى لونه كاكى، تبرز منه أشغال خشبية لامعة، روائع من الفن الحديث على الجدران، كتب ومجلات ملقاة بلطف هنا وهناك، آنيات زهور مرتبة.

يعيش هنا مع زوجته الثانية الروائية سيرى هاستفيت، أما ابنته صوفى، 23 عاما، الممثلة والمغنية، فتعيش بالقرب منه فى مانهاتن. وبينما كان يشعل أولى سجائره الصغيرة سألته لماذا ينزعج من الحوارات.

قال باهتمام: "اسمعى.. أنا مخلص للناشرين، ولا أريد أن أكون منفرا، أريد أن أكون ذو روح حلوة، لذلك فأنا أجرى حوارا من آن لآخر، ولكنى أعتقد أن الفن لا يمكن إيجازه أبدا وبأى شكل، يمكن تحليله ومناقشته، ولكنى لا أعرف إن كان على الفنان أن يفعل ذلك."

يختلف الأمر باختلاف من تستمع إليه، فربما يكون أوستر هو أعظم كاتب فى جيله، أو هو تجريبى وغامض جدا لدرجة أنه لا يُقرأ. يتنهد ويقول: "نحن جميعا نتلقى الضربات.. على مر السنوات تلقيت انتقادات فظيعة وتلقيت مديحا مبالغا فيه، ونادرا ما تلقيت شيئا فيما بينهما."

أرجأت قراءة كتبه (الصعبة) لسنوات، وفوجئت حينما وجدتها ليست كذلك. (سانست بارك) روايته السادسة عشر المنشورة للتو تدور أحداثها فى بروكلين، المكان الذى يعرفه جيدا.

إنها تدور حول قصة تحول تقليدية نسبيا، عن شاب يتسلط عليه ضميره ويهرب من عائلته، وينفق على نفسه عن طريق تنظيف المنازل التى أخليت لتوها. ولكن نحن نقرأ رواية لأوستر، فلا يوجد شىء يسير بالضبط كما نتوقع، ولكنها قصة جذابة.

سألته إن كان يزعجه قول الناس إن كتبه غير مفهومة. "لا.. هذا لا يزعجنى، ولكن الشىء الطريف هو أننى أعتقد أنها سهلة الفهم، فكتبى عن العالم الواقعى، أنا لا أكتب عن أخيلة وهمية، اسمعى..." قال هذه الكلمة التى يستخدمها مرارا ليعطى إحساسا بالأهمية: "ما أكافح من أجله هو الوضوح فى كل جملة."

كان يرتدى قميصا أزرق غاليا، وبنطلون بدلة أسود، وحذاء جلديا لامعا. بدا أوستر كسياسى أنيق وشديد التهذيب. كان يكرر مشجعا: "هذا سؤال رائع."

لماذا أصبح كاتبا؟ قال أوستر: "هذا هو السؤال غالبا؟ اسمعى، أعتقد أن الكتابة تأتى من إحساس شديد بالوحدة، إحساس بالعزلة." ولكن أليست الكتابة تزيد من هذا الإحساس؟ "لا.. أنا لم أشعر أبدا بذلك.. وإنما كنت أشعر أننى مبتهج وأنا أكتب. بدأت بكتابة أشعار بشعة للغاية وأنا فى التاسعة أو العاشرة تقريبا، وارتقيت إلى القصة القصيرة وأنا فى الحادية أو الثانية عشر."

نشأ فى ساوث أورانج- نيوجيرسى، كابن ليهوديين مهاجرين من بولندا؛ صمويل وكوينى، كانا غير متفاهمين وانفصلا فى النهاية. كان أبوه بائع أثاث، ثم سمسار عقارات، وتتضح فى كتاب أوستر الأول (اختراع العزلة) طبيعة علاقتهما الصعبة.

لم تكن هناك كتب كثيرة فى المنزل، حتى سافر عمه المترجم وترك مكتبته لأسرة أوستر. "عندما كنت فى الثالثة عشر من العمر ذهلت من (الحارس فى حقل الشوفان)، لم يكن هناك شىء يشبه هذا الصوت." ولكن الصاعقة الحقيقية جاءت عندما قرأ (الجريمة والعقاب)، "هذا الكتاب غيرنى، أذكر أننى كنت أفكر: لو كانت هذه هى الرواية فهذا هو ما أود أن أفعله. كنت أقرأه وأنا مضطرب جدا."

ذهب إلى جامعة كولومبيا، ثم بدأ يعمل على ناقلة بترول: "أردت أن أقوم بمغامرة؛ كنت قد حصلت على البكالوريوس والماجستير، وأردت أن أفعل شيئا مختلفا."

فى سن الثالثة والعشرين توجه إلى فرنسا ليحصل على عيشه ككاتب. يقول أوستر: "ما كنت أفعله هو أن أحصل على الطعام.. عندما عدت من باريس، كنت فى السابعة والعشرين، وكل ما كان معى هو تسعة دولارات. كنت قد نشرت كتابا واحدا فى الشعر، وربما كتابا أو اثنين فى الترجمة. بقيت مع أبى حتى أجد مكانا لأعيش فيه. كان مرتبكا، لم يكن يدرى ماذا يصنع بى، ولكننى أتعاطف معه، فقد كنت مجنونا."

"كان كلامه منطقيا، قال لى: أنا لا أفهمك.. ستموت إذا لم تفعل شيئا، هذا غير مقبول. لأول وهلة أثر فىّ رأيه، وفكرت فى أن أكون أستاذا جامعيا، ولكنى فى النهاية ظللت أكتب."

مات الأب قبل أن يصبح أوستر مشهورا، "الآن أستطيع كسب عيشى من كل هذا، وفى الحقيقة أنا أحيا بشكل أفضل مما توقعت على الإطلاق.. كان سيصبح سعيدا جدا." أما عن أمه: "هى تضع كتبى بفخر على أرفف مكتبتها، ولكنى لا أعتقد أنها قرأتها، كانت دائما مهتمة أكثر بالأفلام التى صنعتها، الأفلام هى التى استطاعت التواصل معها.. وليس الكتب."

رواياته التى لفتت الانتباه هى (ثلاثية نيويورك)، تلك الروايات البوليسية الثلاث المنفصلة المتصلة التى يستكشف فيها مسائل الهوية واللغة. الروايات اللاحقة أكدت على صوته المتميز، حتى أصبح شهيرا خاصة فى أوروبا؛ حيث حصل على الجائزة الثقافية الفرنسية للأدب الأجنبى، وجائزة أمير أستورياس بأسبانيا.

"فى فرنسا يشعرون أننى مثلهم، كونى أتحدث الفرنسية يساعدنى على ذلك، فأنا لست عدوا أمريكيا."

فى الولايات المتحدة يقدر أوستر بشكل أقل: "كل قصصى عن أمريكا، كلها متشربة بالتاريخ الأمريكى والأدب الأمريكى، ولكن.. الناس لا يهتمون كثيرا بالكتب، لا توجد ثقافة كتاب هنا."

ومع ذلك فقد تأثر بالاحتفاء بجوناثان فرانزن الذى جعلته روايته الأخيرة يتصدر غلاف التايم. يقول أوستر بحماس: "هذا رائع، لم أر شيئا مثل هذا من عقود.. أنا سعيد أن أحدا جاد إلى حد ما يحصل على هذا الاهتمام."

سألته إن كان يغار من ذلك، هل كان يحب أن يكون على غلاف التايم؟ يضحك: "أعتقد أن فرصة حدوث ذلك معدومة، أنا لا أفكر فى ذلك، فما أفعله بعيد جدا عن الذائقة الأمريكية، ولم أقل أبدا لنفسى: أريد أن أكتب كتابا عن الأزمة الاقتصادية فى أمريكا، أو عن مؤسسة الزواج."

"أنا لا أعرف حتى ما يمكن أن أفعله، أنا فقط أكتب ما أكتبه، لدىّ دافع هائل للتواصل، أريد أن أتغلغل تحت جلد القارئ وداخل عقله وقلبه، أن أتحداه وأحركه، وأفتح عينيه على أشياء ربما لم يفكر فيها من قبل."

هو يزعم أنه لا يقرأ المقالات التى تكتب عن أعماله: "هى إما ستحبطنى أو ستطرينى بشكل غير مقبول. فى مرة كنت أقرأ جريدة ساعة الإفطار وتصادف أن رأيت مقالا عنى وأخذنى الفضول."

كان يقول: "بول أوستر لا يؤمن بقيم الرواية التقليدية. هذا بدا كأنه هجوما سياسيا، لو بدلت جملة قيم أسرية بجملة قيم روائية. هذا يعبر بشكل كبير عما يعتقده النقاد الأمريكيون عن عملى.

مثل العديد من الكتاب ينزعج أوستر من أمريكا: "ربما تأتى اللحظة التى سأنزعج فيها بالقدر الذى سيضطرنى للرحيل." قال ذلك مازحا إلى حد ما. "أشعر بتعاطف شديد مع أوباما، أنا لا أعتقد أننى رأيت مثل هذا الصراع فى الحكومة، الجمهوريون يسعون عمليا على إفشال أوباما، سيشعرون بسعادة كبيرة إذا مات، وأعتقد أنه أظهر حلما كبيرا بتحكمه فى نفسه."

وأوستر يعرف كيف يكون حليما، ففى مرة قُدّم إليه ناقد كان يهاجم كتبه، هذا فى الوقت الذى كان لا يزال يقرأ فيه النقاد: "عندما سمع الناقد اسمى شحب وجهه، توقع أن ألكمه، والحقيقة أننى كنت أريد ذلك لأن ما كتبه أغضبنى جدا."

"بعد ذلك قلت لنفسى أن أفضل طريقة للتعامل مع الأمر هو التظاهر بأننى لا أعرفه، لذلك قلت له: أنا سعيد جدا بلقائك." يضحك ويقول: "لحظته يتنفس الصعداء من رئتيه، ولكنه لا يزال ينتقدنى، لذلك أشعر الآن أنه كان علىّ أن ألكمه."

أبطال روايات أوستر غالبا ما يكونوا قد تعرضوا لخسارة كبيرة قبل بداية القصة: "أنا مهتم بأن أبدأ قصصى بأزمة ما لأرى كيف ستتعامل الشخصية معها." هل تعرض لخسائر مشابهة فى حياته؟ "العديد من الناس ماتوا أمامى فجأة، فهذا الشعور ليس غريبا علىّ."

أكثر من أى شىء آخر تمتلئ روايات أوستر بالحوادث والصدف؛ عندما كان فى الرابعة عشر رأى أوستر صبيا يموت مصعوقا حينما كانوا فى رحلة بمعسكر صيفى. يقول: "ربما تكون تلك التجربة هى أكثر شىء أثر على رؤيتى للعالم."

يستعيد القصة كأنه يستعيد رعب تلك اللحظة: "كنا تائهين فى الغابات، وهبت فوقنا عاصفة رعدية شديدة، وكانت تلقى بصواعقها على الأرض، كان الأمر أشبه بقذف القنابل."

"أحد الصبية قال إنه من الأفضل أن نتوجه بعيدا عن الأشجار، تحركنا فى صف واحد تحت سياج من الأسلاك الشائكة، الصبى الذى كان أمامى كان تحت السياج مباشرة عندما ضربته الصاعقة، مات فى التو، ولكننا لم ندر ذلك."

"جذبناه واستلقينا على الأرض معه طوال العاصفة، أتذكر أننى كنت أمسك لسانه حتى لا يبتلعه، وشاهدت لون جسمه يشحب. عندما ترى ذلك وأنت فى الرابعة عشر، تبدأ فى إدراك أن العالم أقل استقرارا بكثير مما كنت تعتقد."

"الحياة ليست مرتبة بعناية، فأنت تذهب إلى العمل فى يوم ما، فتصطدم طائرة بالمبنى وتجد نفسك احترقت."

هل وعيه الدائم بهذه التبدلات يجعل الحياة صعبة العيش؟ "اسمعى، الأمر لا يعنى أننى أسعى باحثا عن هذه الأشياء، أنا مثل الجميع، لدىّ أحلام وأهداف، وأشعر بالإحباط عندما لا تتم. إنما الفكرة أن هناك العديد من الأشياء ليست فى قدراتنا. لقد قابلت سيرى بالصدفة، الحظ جعلنا نعيش سويا لثلاثين عاما حتى الآن."

تقابلا فى أمسية شعرية بنيويورك، أوستر كان قد تزوج من قبل بليديا ديفيز، كاتبة قصة قصيرة، ولديه منها ابن؛ دانييل. مؤخرا وصفت سيرى اللقاء كالتالى: "ذهبت إلى الردهة ورأيت هذا الرجل الوسيم، قدمت إليه ووقعت فى حبه فى ظرف عشر ثوان."

يقول أوستر: "لو لم يظهر أحدنا لما تقابلنا أبدا، كانت فرصة وحيدة.". وبالصدفة أيضا فُتح الباب لأرى امرأة شقراء طويلة. ابتسمنا جميعا. قال: "ها هى سيرى." وكان يبدو هو نفسه متفاجئا.

يكتب أوستر رواياته فى شقة قريبة، "أذهب إلى هذا المكان المتقشف، لا شىء هناك سوى العمل، أكتب فى دفتر، أحيانا أمزق كل ما كتبت، لو استطعت كتابة صفحة واحدة أرى أننى أنجزت فى اليوم، أتوجه بعد ذلك لأكتبها على آلتى الكاتبة."

لا يملك بريدا إلكترونيا ولا كمبيوتر، "ليس لدىّ موقف فلسفى من ذلك، أنا فقط أشعر بنفسى أكثر حرية وانطلاقا بدون أن تكبلنى هذه الأشياء."

مؤخرا بدأ فى العمل على رواية جديدة، ولكنه يقول إنه فى الأعوام الأخيرة أصبح من الصعب عليه إيجاد الأفكار.

"كنت معتادا على أن أحتفظ بقصص غير مكتملة، ولكن من أعوام مضت وجدت الأدراج خاوية، أعتقد أننى وصلت للوقت الذى أخبر فيه نفسى أننى لو لم أكتب كتابا آخر فتلك ليست مأساة، هل يعنى كثيرا أن أنشر 16 أو 17 رواية؟ لو لم يكن هذا ملحا، فلا معنى للكتابة."

Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American author known for works blending absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002) and The Brooklyn Follies (2005).
Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish middle class parents of Polish descent, Samuel and Queenie Auster.
ولد لابوين يهوديان من بولندا
He grew up in South Orange, New Jersey and graduated from Columbia High School in adjoining Maplewood.
نشأ في نيوجرسي
After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to Paris, France where he earned a living translating French literature.
بعد تخرجه من جامعة كولومبيا عام 1970 سافر الى فرنسا وعمل في ترجمة الادب الفرنسي
Since returning to the U.S. in 1974, he has published poems, essays, novels of his own as well as translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.
عاد الى الولايات المتحدة عام 1974
He and his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, were married in 1981, and they live in Brooklyn.
تزوج للمرة الثانية عام 1981 وعاش مع زوجته في بروكلن
Together they have one daughter, Sophie Auster. Previously, Auster was married to the acclaimed writer Lydia Davis. They had one son together, Daniel Auster.
He is also the Vice-President of PEN American Center.

Writing
Following his acclaimed debut work, a memoir entitled The Invention of Solitude,
---------------
Thee Invention of Solitude is the debut work of Paul Auster, a memoir published in 1982.
The book is divided into two parts, Portrait of an Invisible Man, which concerns the sudden death of Auster's father,
في مذكراته التي نشرت عام 1982 يكتب اوستر عن وموت والده المفاجيء
and The Book of Memory, in which Auster delivers his personal opinions concerning subjects such as coincidence, fate, and solitude, subjects that have become trademarks of Auster's works.

Portrait of an Invisible Man


This first part is a meditation on the nature of absence in relation to Auster's recently deceased father, Samuel Auster. "Even before his death he had been absent, and long ago the people closest to him had learned to accept this absence".


الكتاب الاول في مذكراته يعالج موت والده المفاجيء والذي كان غائبا منذ زمن بعيد وقد تعلم الناس الاقرب اليه ان يتعاملوا مع فكرة غيابه


Auster reconstructs his father's life from artifacts he has left behind, using his judgement of the dead man's failings as a father to justify his own life and relationship with his own son.


The Book of Memory


The second part of the book comes across as more of a critical essay concerning many of the themes found in Auster's works: the order of events, absurdism, chance as well as the overarching theme of the relationship between father and son.


"For this act of saving people is in effect what a father does: he saves his little boy from harm. And for the little boy to see Pinocchio... become a figure of redemption, the very being who saves his father from the grips of death, is a sublime momentof revelation. The son saves the father." Although The Book of Memory may be seen as less autobiographical than Portrait of an Invisible Man due to the characterisation of Auster as "A.", it is his personal account of concepts and feelings and contains references to his life.


The opening pages of The Book of Memory make mention of mnemotechnics (the ancient art of memory), and some of the earliest writers on the topic - Raymond Lull, Robert Fludd and Giordano Bruno.

=------------
Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely connected detective stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy. These books are not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues. Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential issues and questions of identity, space, language and literature, creating his own distinctively postmodern (and critique of postmodernist) form in the process. Comparing the two works, Auster said, "I believe the world is filled with strange events. Reality is a great deal more mysterious than we ever give it credit for. In that sense, the Trilogy grows directly out of The Invention of Solitude."[7]
The search for identity and personal meaning has permeated Auster's later publications, many of which concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance) or increasingly, the relationships between men and their peers and environment (The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace). Auster's heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else's inscrutable and larger-than-life schemes. In 1995, Auster wrote and co-directed the films Smoke (which won him the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay) and Blue in the Face. Auster's more recent works, Oracle Night (2003), The Brooklyn Follies (2005) and the novella Travels in the Scriptorium have also met critical acclaim.

Themes

According to a dissertation by Heiko Jakubzik at the University of Heidelberg, two central influences in Paul Auster's writing are Jacques Lacan'spsychoanalysis and the American transcendentalism of the early to middle 19th century, namely amongst others Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In short Lacan's theory declares that we enter the world through words. We observe the world through our senses but the world we sense is structured (mediated) in our mind through language. Thus our subconscious is also structured as a language. This leaves us with a sense of anomaly. We can only perceive the world through language, but we have the feeling of something missing. This is the sense of being outside language. The world can only be constructed through language but it always leaves something uncovered, something that cannot be told or be thought of, it can only be sensed. This can be seen as one of the central themes of Paul Auster's writing.
Lacan is considered to be one of the key figures of French poststructuralism. Some academics are keen to discern traces of other poststructuralist philosophers throughout Auster's oeuvre - mainly Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and Michel de Certeau - although Auster himself has claimed to find such philosophies 'unreadable'[3].
The transcendentalists believe that the symbolic order of civilization separated us from the natural order of the world. By moving into nature - like Thoreau in Walden - it would be possible to return to this natural order.
The common factor of both ideas is the question of the meaning of symbols for human beings.[8] Auster's protagonists are often writers who establish meaning in their lives through writing, and they try to find their place within the natural order to be able to live within "civilization" again.
Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, and Herman Melville have also had a strong influence on Auster's writing. Not only do their characters reappear in Auster's work (like William Wilson in City of Glass or Hawthorne's Fanshawe in The Locked Room, both from The New York Trilogy), Auster also uses variations on the themes of these writers.
Paul Auster's reappearing subjects are:[9]

· coincidence


· frequent portrayal of an ascetic life


· a sense of imminent disaster


· obsessive writer as central character/narrator


· loss of the ability to understand


· loss of language


· depiction of daily and ordinary life


· failure


· absence of a father


· احد الافكار الرئيس التي تتكرر في كتاباته هي غياب الاب


· writing/story telling, metafiction


· intertextuality


· American History


· American Space


Coincidence

Instances of coincidence can be found throughout Auster's work[ Auster himself claims that people are so influenced by the continuity among them that they do not see the elements of coincidence, inconsistency and contradiction in their own lives:

“

Failure in Paul Auster's works is not just the opposite of the happy ending. In Moon Palace and The Book of Illusions it comes from the individual's uncertainty about the status of his own identity. The protagonists start a search for their own identity and reduce their life to the absolute minimum. From this zero point they gain new strength and start their new life and they are also able to regain contact with their surroundings. A similar development can also be seen in City of Glass and The Music of Chance.
Failure in this context is not the "nothing" - it is the beginning of something all new.

Identity/Subjectivity

Auster's protagonists often go through a process that reduces their support structure to an absolute minimum: They sever all contact with family and friends, go hungry and lose or give away all their belongings. Out of this state of "nothingness" they either acquire new strength to reconnect with the world or they fail and disappear for good.

“

"Over the past twenty-five years," opined Michael Dirda in The New York Review of Books in 2008, "Paul Auster has established one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature." Dirda has also extolled his loaded virtues in The Washington Post:
Ever since City of Glass, the first volume of his New York Trilogy, Auster has perfected a limpid, confessional style, then used it to set disoriented heroes in a seemingly familiar world gradually suffused with mounting uneasiness, vague menace and possible hallucination. His plots — drawing on elements from suspense stories, existential récit and autobiography — keep readers turning the pages, but sometimes end by leaving them uncertain about what they've just been through.
Respected literary critic James Wood, however, offers Auster little praise in his piece "Shallow Graves" in the November 30, 2009, issue of The New Yorker:
What Auster often gets instead is the worst of both worlds: fake realism and shallow skepticism. The two weaknesses are related. Auster is a compelling storyteller, but his stories are assertions rather than persuasions. They declare themselves; they hound the next revelation. Because nothing is persuasively assembled, the inevitable postmodern disassembly leaves one largely untouched. (The disassembly is also grindingly explicit, spelled out in billboard-size type.) Presence fails to turn into significant absence, because presence was not present enough.[15]

Published works

Fiction

· Squeeze Play (1982) (Written under pseudonym Paul Benjamin)


· The New York Trilogy (1987)


o City of Glass (1985)


o Ghosts (1986)


o The Locked Room (1986)


· In the Country of Last Things (1987)


· Moon Palace (1989)


· The Music of Chance (1990)


· Auggie Wren's Christmas Story (1990)


· Leviathan (1992)


· Mr. Vertigo (1994)


· Timbuktu (1999)


· The Book of Illusions (2002)


· Oracle Night (2003)


· The Brooklyn Follies (2005)


· Travels in the Scriptorium (2006)


· Man in the Dark (2008) [19]


· Invisible (2009)


· Sunset Park (2010

ureadblog:
Writer Paul Auster’s speech at the Prince of Asturias Awards, Letters 2006. (Reposted from here.)
Your Majesty, Your Highnesses, Distinguished Authorities, Ladies and gentlemen,
I don’t know why I do what I do. If I did know, I probably wouldn’t feel the need to do it. All I can say, and I say it with utmost certainty, is that I have felt this need since my earliest adolescence. I’m talking about writing, in particular writing as a vehicle to tell stories, imaginary stories that have never taken place in what we call the real world. Surely it is an odd way to spend your life -sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist -except in your own head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.
This need to make, to create, to invent is no doubt a fundamental human impulse. But to what end? What purpose does art, in particular the art of fiction, serve in what we call the real world? None that I can think of -at least not in any practical sense. A book has never put food in the stomach of a hungry child. A book has never stopped a bullet from entering a murder victim’s body. A book has never prevented a bomb from falling on innocent civilians in the midst of war. Some like to think that a keen appreciation of art can actually make us better people -more just, more moral, more sensitive, more understanding. Perhaps that is true -in certain rare, isolated cases. But let us nor forget that Hitler started out in life as an artist. Tyrants and dictators read novels. Killers in prison read novels. And who is to say they don’t derive the same enjoyment from books as everyone else?
In other words, art is useless -at least when compared, say, to the work of a plumber, or a doctor, or a railroad engineer. But is uselessness a bad thing? Does a lack of practical purpose mean that books and paintings and string quartets are simply a waste of our time? Many people think so. But I would argue that it is the very uselessness of art that gives it its value -and that the making of art is what distinguishes us from all other creatures who inhabit this planet, that it is, essentially, what defines us as human beings. To do something for the pure pleasure and beauty of doing it. Think of the effort involved, the long hours of practice and discipline required to become an accomplished pianist or dancer. All the suffering and hard work, all the sacrifices in order to achieve something that is utterly and magnificently… useless.
Fiction, however, exists in a somewhat different realm from the other arts. Its medium is language, and language is something we share with others, that is common to us all. From the moment we learn to talk, we begin to develop a hunger for stories. Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the Bedtime Story - when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales. Those of us who are parents will have no trouble conjuring up the rapt attention in the eyes of our children when we read to them. Why this intense desire to listen? Fairy tales are often cruel and violent, featuring be-headings, cannibalism, grotesque transformations, and evil enchantments. One would think this material would be too frightening for a young child - but what these stories allow the child to experience is precisely an encounter with his own fears and inner torments - in a perfectly safe and protected environment. Such is the magic of stories: the might drag us down to the depths of hell, but in the end they are harmless.
We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story, and the next, and the next. For years, in every country of the Western world, article after article has been published bemoaning the fact that fewer and fewer people are reading books, that we have entered what some have called the “post-literate age”. That may well be true, but at the same time this has not diminished the universal craving for stories. Novels are not the only source, after all. Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories. They need them almost as desperately as they need food, and however the stories might be presented -whether on a printed page or on a television screen -it would be impossible to imagine life without them.
Still, when it comes to the state of the novel, to the future of the novel, I feel rather optimistic. Numbers don’t count where books are concerned -for there is only one reader, each and every time only one reader. That explains the particular power of the novel, and why in my opinion, it will never die as a form. Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader, and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy. I have spent my life in conversations with people I have never seen, with people I will never know, and I hope to continue until the day I stop breathing.
It’s the only job I’ve ever wanted.

- لماذا أصبح كاتبا؟ قال أوستر: "هذا هو السؤال غالبا؟ اسمعى، أعتقد أن الكتابة تأتى من إحساس شديد بالوحدة، إحساس بالعزلة."

- نشأ فى ساوث أورانج- نيوجيرسى، كابن ليهوديين مهاجرين من بولندا؛ صمويل وكوينى، كانا غير متفاهمين وانفصلا فى النهاية.

- كان أبوه بائع أثاث، ثم سمسار عقارات، وتتضح فى كتاب أوستر الأول (اختراع العزلة) طبيعة علاقتهما الصعبة.

- لم تكن هناك كتب كثيرة فى المنزل، حتى سافر عمه المترجم وترك مكتبته لأسرة أوستر. "عندما كنت فى الثالثة عشر من العمر ذهلت من (الحارس فى حقل الشوفان)، لم يكن هناك شىء يشبه هذا الصوت." ولكن الصاعقة الحقيقية جاءت عندما قرأ (الجريمة والعقاب)، "هذا الكتاب غيرنى، أذكر أننى كنت أفكر: لو كانت هذه هى الرواية فهذا هو ما أود أن أفعله. كنت أقرأه وأنا مضطرب جدا."

- ذهب إلى جامعة كولومبيا، ثم بدأ يعمل على ناقلة بترول: "أردت أن أقوم بمغامرة؛ كنت قد حصلت على البكالوريوس والماجستير، وأردت أن أفعل شيئا مختلفا."

- فى سن الثالثة والعشرين توجه إلى فرنسا ليحصل على عيشه ككاتب. يقول أوستر: "ما كنت أفعله هو أن أحصل على الطعام.. عندما عدت من باريس، كنت فى السابعة والعشرين، وكل ما كان معى هو تسعة دولارات. كنت قد نشرت كتابا واحدا فى الشعر، وربما كتابا أو اثنين فى الترجمة. بقيت مع أبى حتى أجد مكانا لأعيش فيه. كان مرتبكا، لم يكن يدرى ماذا يصنع بى، ولكننى أتعاطف معه، فقد كنت مجنونا."

- "كان كلامه منطقيا، قال لى: أنا لا أفهمك.. ستموت إذا لم تفعل شيئا، هذا غير مقبول. لأول وهلة أثر فىّ رأيه، وفكرت فى أن أكون أستاذا جامعيا، ولكنى فى النهاية ظللت أكتب."

- مات الأب قبل أن يصبح أوستر مشهورا، "الآن أستطيع كسب عيشى من كل هذا، وفى الحقيقة أنا أحيا بشكل أفضل مما توقعت على الإطلاق.. كان سيصبح سعيدا جدا."

- أما عن أمه: "هى تضع كتبى بفخر على أرفف مكتبتها، ولكنى لا أعتقد أنها قرأتها، كانت دائما مهتمة أكثر بالأفلام التى صنعتها، الأفلام هى التى استطاعت التواصل معها.. وليس الكتب."

- أبطال روايات أوستر غالبا ما يكونوا قد تعرضوا لخسارة كبيرة قبل بداية القصة: "أنا مهتم بأن أبدأ قصصى بأزمة ما لأرى كيف ستتعامل الشخصية معها." هل تعرض لخسائر مشابهة فى حياته؟ "العديد من الناس ماتوا أمامى فجأة، فهذا الشعور ليس غريبا علىّ."

- أكثر من أى شىء آخر تمتلئ روايات أوستر بالحوادث والصدف؛ عندما كان فى الرابعة عشر رأى أوستر صبيا يموت مصعوقا حينما كانوا فى رحلة بمعسكر صيفى. يقول: "ربما تكون تلك التجربة هى أكثر شىء أثر على رؤيتى للعالم."

- ولد لابوين يهوديان من بولندا

- نشأ في نيوجرسي

- بعد تخرجه من جامعة كولومبيا عام 1970 سافر الى فرنسا وعمل في ترجمة الادب الفرنسي

- عاد الى الولايات المتحدة عام 1974

- تزوج للمرة الثانية عام 1981 وعاش مع زوجته في بروكلن

- في مذكراته التي نشرت عام 1982 يكتب اوستر عن وموت والده المفاجيء

- الكتاب الاول في مذكراته يعالج موت والده المفاجيء والذي كان غائبا منذ زمن بعيد وقد تعلم الناس الاقرب اليه ان يتعاملوا مع فكرة غيابه

- احد الافكار الرئيس التي تتكرر في كتاباته هي غياب الاب
- لم يكن زواج والديه زواجا سعيدا
- انفصل والديه بالطلاق وهو في سن التوجيهي وانتقلت الام لتيعش مع ابنتها وابنها في شقة منقصلة
- بدل من حضور حفل التخرج من المدرسة سافر الى ايطاليا واسبانيا وفرنسا واقام هناك الى ان افتتحت الجامعات في الفصل التالي ليلتحق بالجامعة
- سافر الى فرنسا لانهاءسنته الاخيرة فيها لكنه افصل عن الجامعة وعاد ليلتحق بجامعتهفي امريكا
- عمل للانفاق على دراسته في عدة اعمال
- انهى دراسته الجامعية عام 1969
- عام 1971 سافر الى فرنسا من جديد

زواج الاب والام كان تعيسا ينتهي بالطلاق و واستر ما يزال في الثانوية، موت طفل وهو في سن الرابعة عشره كان يسير امامه تماما من صاعقة، سفر الى اوروبا متكرر، موت الاب الذي كان غائبا اصلا ، شعور دائم بالعزلة والوحدة.

مأزوم ومحاصر بتجربة موت صديقه في سن الـ 14 ويتيم اجتماعي.

.

والان مع سر الروةعة في رواية:

88 ـ ذا بي إف جي، للمؤلف رولد دال.

The BFG (short for "Big Friendly Giant") is a children's book written by Roald Dahl and illustrated by Quentin Blake, first published in 1982. The book was an expansion of a story told in Danny, the Champion of the World, an earlier Dahl book. An animated film based on the book was released in 1989 with David Jason providing the voice of the BFG and Amanda Root as the voice of Sophie. The book went on to win a Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis prize in 1985. It has also been adapted as a theatre performance.
British writer, famous for his ingenious short stories and macabre children's books. Dahl's taste for cruelty, rudeness to adults, and the comic grotesque fascinated young readers, but upset many adult critics. Several of Dahl's stories have been made into films, including Matilda, dir. by Danny DeVito (1996).
'Aunt Glosspan,' the boy said, ' what do ordinary people eat that we don't?'
'Animals,' she answered, tossing her head in disgust.
'You mean live animals?'
'No,' she said. 'Dead ones.'
(from 'Pig' in Kiss, Kiss, 1959)
The BFG (1982).
Plot
The story is about a little girl named Sophie, after the author's granddaughter Sophie Dahl One night, when Sophie cannot fall asleep during the "witching hour", she sees a giant blowing something into the bedroom windows down the street. The giant notices her, reaches through the window, and carries her to his home in Giant Country.
Once there, he reveals that he is the world's only benevolent giant, the Big Friendly Giant or BFG, who operating in the strictest secrecy, collects good dreams that he later distributes to children. By means of immense ears he can hear dreams and their contents (which manifest themselves in a misty Dream Country as floating, blob-like objects) and blow them via a trumpet-like blowpipe into the bedrooms of children. When he catches a nightmare, he explodes it, or uses it to start fights among the other giants, who periodically enter the human world to steal and eat "human beans", especially children. The BFG, because he refuses to do likewise, subsists on a foul-tasting vegetable known as a snozzcumber, and on a drink called frobscottle, which is unusual in that the bubbles in the drink travel downwards and therefore cause the drinker to break wind instead of burp; this causes noisy flatulence known as Whizzpoppers.
Sophie and the BFG become friends early on; later, she persuades him to approach the Queen of England on behalf of capturing the other giants. To this end, the BFG creates a nightmare introducing the man-eating giants to the Queen and leaves Sophie in the Queen's bedroom to confirm it true. Because the dream included the knowledge Sophie's presence, the Queen believes her and speaks with the BFG. After considerable effort by the palace staff to create a table, chair, and cutlery of appropriate size for him to use, the BFG is given a lavish breakfast, and the Queen begins a plan of eliminating the other giants. She calls the King of Sweden and the Sultan of Baghdad to confirm the BFG's story - the giants having visited those locations on the previous two nights – then summons the Head of the Army and the Marshal of the Air Force. The said officers, though initially belligerent and skeptical, are brought to co-operate.
Eventually, a huge fleet of helicopters follows the BFG to the giants' homeland. While the child-eating giants are asleep, the Army ties them up, hangs them under the helicopters, and (after a brief struggle with the largest and fiercest of the giants, known as the Fleshlumpeater), flies them to London, where a special pit has been constructed from which they will not be able to escape. With thousands watching closely, the BFG unties the giants, then feeds them snozzcumbers which they will eat for the rest of their lives as a punishment for eating human beings.
Afterwards, a huge castle is built to serve as the BFG's new house, with a little cottage next door for Sophie. While they are living happily in England, the BFG writes a book of their adventures, which is stated to be the same book in which the afore-mentioned story is narrated (a literary device also apparent in James and the Giant Peach and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar).
Characters
· Sophie: The orphaned protagonist of the story, who becomes heroic by causing the man-eating giants to be captured.
· The BFG: A 24-foot-tall individual possessed of superhuman hearing and immense ability of speed, whose primary occupation is the collection and distribution of good dreams to children. He also appears in another novel, Danny, the Champion of the World, in which he is introduced as a folkloric character.
· The Queen of England: The Queen is based on Elizabeth II.
· Mary: The Queen's Maid
· Mr. Tibbs: The Palace butler
· Mrs. Clonkers: The unseen director of the orphanage to which Sophie originally belongs; described as cruel and often abusive to her charges.
· Head of the Army: Very dependent on guns
· Head of the Air Force; Very dependent on bombs
· King of Sweden: Sometimes Queen of Sweden in play versions
· Sultan of Baghdad: Often omitted from plays and films as he is portrayed in a slightly racist and dated way.
· Monsieur Papillon: The Queen's chief cook.
[edit] Giants
The nine evil giants in the story
· The Fleshlumpeater
· The Bonecruncher
· The Manhugger
· The Childchewer
· The Meatdripper
· The Gizzardgulper
· The Maidmasher
· The Bloodbottler
· The Butcher Boy
Most of the evil giants are only mentioned by name; some are given a larger role, such as Fleshlumpeater, who is the largest and most dangerous of them all (and therefore something of a leader), and Bloodbottler, who invades the BFG's cave early in the story. The BFG later narrates the hunting methods of Childchewer, Gizzardgulper, and Meatdripper. It is also remarked that each giant has his favourite hunting ground, though they vary at times. Because every ethnicity of humans is said to taste different from the others, the giants have certain preferences, although all detest Greece as a hunting ground. This is because the flavors supposedly reflect the names and/or principal exports of the native land: therefore, Greeks taste greasy; Turks, taste like turkey;Danes taste like dogs (Labradors - those from Labrador taste like Great Danes), and Swedes taste sweet and sour; people from Wales taste of fish (because the name sounds like that of "whales"); etc. Also, the BFG says that evil giants are twice as tall as him, so he's a comparatively runty giant. (In his own words, "24 feet is puddlenuts in giant country.")

Roald Dahl was born in Llandaff, Wales, of Norwegian parents. His father, Harald Dahl, was the joint owner of a successful ship-broking business, "Aadnesen& Dahl" with another Norwegian.
ولد رولد دال في ةيلز لاب نرويجيين زكان والده يعمل تاجرا
Before emigrating to Wales, Harald had been a farmer near Oslo.
قبل ان يهاجر الى ويلز كان الاب يعمل مزارعا بالقرب من اسلو
He married a young French girl named Marie in Paris; she died after giving birth to their second child.
تزوج الاب من فتاة فرنسة في باريس وماتت بعد ولادة ابنهم الثاني
In 1911 he married Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg.
في عام 1911 تزوج الاب من صوفي هسلبرغ
Harald died when Dahl was four years old, and three weeks later his elder sister, Astri, died from appendicitis.
مات هرالد الاب ودال في سن الرابعة
The family had to sell their jewellery to pay for Dahl's upkeep at a private school in Derbyshire. When Dahl was 13 he went to a public school named Repton.
باعت العائلة الذهب من اجل تدريس دال
His years at public schools in Wales and England Dahl later described without nostalgia: "I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed literally to wound other boys, and sometimes quite severely. I couldn't get over it. I never got over it..." (from Boy: Tales of Childhood, 1984)
Dahl especially hated the matron who ruled the school dormitories. These experiences later inspired him to write stories in which children fight against cruel adults and authorities. "I have never met anybody who so persistently writes words meaning the exact opposite of what is intended," one of Dahl's English teachers commented.
تأثر كثير ا في بيئة المدرسة التي كان يسمح فيها للطلاب الكبار ضرب الصغار وقد تأثر على ةجه الخصوص بما واجه في السكن الداخلي الذي كان بيئة عنيفة
Parents and schoolteachers are the enemy," Dahl once said. "The adult is the enemy of the child because of the awful process of civilizing this thing that when it is born is an animal with no manners, no moral sense at all." In WITCHES (1973) behind the mask of a beautiful woman is an ugly witch, and in MATILDA (1988) Miss Turnbull throws children out of windows. Both parents are eaten in JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH (1961), but the real enemies of the hero of the story, a little boy, are two aunts.
At eighteen, instead of entering university, Dahl joined an expedition to Newfoundland.
سافر في رحلى استشكافية وهو في سن الثامنة عشر الى الاراضي الجديدة newfound land
Returning to England he took a job with Shell, working in London (1933-37) and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (1937-39).
عمل في لندن ما بين 1933 و1937 وفي دار السلام تنزانيا ما بين 1937 – 1939
During World War II he served in the Royal Air Forces in Libya, Greece, and Syria.
انضم الى سلاح الجو البريطاني خلال الحرب العاملية الثانية وخدم في ليبيا واليونان وسوريا
He was shot down in Libya, wounded in Syria, and then posted to Washington as an assistant air attaché to British Security (1942-43).
اسقطت طائرته في ليبيا وجرح في سوريا واخيرا ارسل الى واشنطن كحارس امن ما بين 1942 و 1943
In 1943 he was a wing commander and worked until 1945 for British Security Co-ordination in North America.
عمل في الامن ما بين 1943 و 1945 في امريكا الشمالية
In the crash Dahl had fractured his skull, and said later: "You do get bits of magic from enormous bumps on the head." While he was recovering from his wounds, Dahl had strange dreams, which inspired his first short stories.
سقوطه في الطائرة ادى الى حدوث جروح في الجمجمة وقال لاحقا انك تحصل على السحر من الاورام التي يمكن ان تصيب رأسك وبينما كان في مرحلة النقاهه من جراحه كان يرى احلام غريبة جعلته يكتب قصته الاولى
Encouraged by C.S. Forester, Dahl wrote about his most exiting RAF adventures. The story, A Piece of Cake, was published by the Saturday Evening Post. It earned him $1,000. The same story was later included in OVER TO YOU: THE STORIES OF FLYERS AND FLYING (1946). Dahl's first children's book, THE GREMLINS (1943), about mischievous little creatures, who eventually join the Allied forces in the Battle of Britain, caught also Walt Disney's attention. Later it inspired a popular movie. Dahl's collection of short stories, SOMEONE LIKE YOU (1954), gained world success, as did its sequel, KISS KISS (1959). The two books were serialized for television in America. A number of the stories had appeared in the New Yorker. Dahl's stories were seen in Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-61) and in the Tales of the Unexpected (1979) series.
In 1953 Dahl married the successful and wealthy actress Patricia Neal; they had one son and four daughters – the eldest daughter Olivia died of measles when she was eight. Dahl's wife suffered a series of brain hemorrhages at the age of 38; while pregnant with their fifth child she had a stroke. She described her recovery and her husband's solicitous help in the autobiography As I Am (1988). The marriage ended after other family tragedies; she also discovered that Dahl had been having an affair with her friend, Felicity Ann Crossland, who was 22 years his junior. Dahl married her in 1983. Patricia Neal received in 1964 an Oscar for her performance in Hud. She died in 2010.
The only stageplay Dahl ever wrote, THE HONEYS, failed in New York in 1955. After showing little inclination towards children's literature, Dahl published JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH (1961). It was first published in the United States, but it took six years before Dahl found a published in Britain. James and the Giant Peach was followed by the highly popular tale CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (1964), which has inspired two film adaptations. The story dealt with one small boy's search for the ultimate prize in fierce competition with other, highly unpleasant children, many of whom come to sticky ends as a result of their greediness. It presented the central theme in Dahl's fiction for young readers: virtue is rewarded, vice is punished. In the end the fabulous chocolate factory is given to Charlie, the kind, impoverished boy. THE WITCHES (1983) won the Whitbread Children's Book Award in 1983. The judges described the book as "deliciously disgusting". Later Felicity Dahl collected her husband's culinary "delights", such as "Bird Pie", "Hot Frogs", and "Lickable Wallpaper" in Roald Dahl's Revolting Recipes (1994).
MY UNCLE OSWALD (1979) was Dahl's first full-length novel, a bizarre story of a scheme for procuring and selling the sperm of the world's most powerful and brilliant men. Dahl received three Edgar Allan Poe Awards (1954, 1959, 1980). In 1982 he won his first literary prize with THE BFG, a story about Big Friendly Giant, who kidnaps and takes a little girl to Giantland, where giants eat children. In 1983 he received World Fantasy Convention Lifetime Achievement award. Dahl died of an infection on November 23, 1990, in Oxford. Dahl's autobiographical books, BOY: TALES OF CHILDHOOD and GOING SOLO, appeared in 1984 and 1986 respectively. The success of his books resulted in the foundation of the Roald Dahl Children's Gallery in Aylesbury, not far from where he lived.
"Good ghost stories, like good children's books, are damnably difficult to write. I am a short story writer myself, and although I have been doing it for forty-five years and have always longed to write just one decent ghost story, I have never succeeded in bringing it off. Heaven knows, I have tried. Once I thought I had done it. It was with a story that is now called 'The Landlady'. But when it was finished and I examined it carefully, I knew it wasn't good enough. I hadn't brought it off. I simply hadn't got the secret. So finally I altered the ending and made it into a non-ghost story." (from Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories, 1983)
Dahl's stories have unexpected endings and strange, menacing atmospheres. The principle of "fair play" works in unconventional but unavoidable ways. Uncle Oswald, a seducer from 'The Visitor', gets seduced. In 'Parson's Pleasure' an antique dealer tastes his own medicine and the Twits from THE TWITS (1980) use glue to catch birds and meet their own gluey ends. In 'Lamb to the Slaughter' the evidence of a murder, a frozen leg of lamb, is eaten by officers who in vain search for the murder weapon. The story was inspired by a meeting with the writer Ian Fleming at a dinner party. Puns, word coinages, and neologism are more often used in the children's stories, whereas in adult fiction the emphasis is on imaginative plots. In addition to his children's books, Dahl also aroused much controversy with his politically incorrect opinions - he was accused of anti-Semitism and antifeminism and when a prowler managed to get into Queen Elizabeth's bedroom, Dahl was wrongly suspected of giving to the unwanted guest the whole idea in one of his books,

Roald Dahl Norwegian: 13 September 1916 – 23 November 1990) was a British novelist, short story writer, fighter pilot and screenwriter.
كاتب انجليزي ولد عام 1916 وكان طيارا ويكتب سيناريو للافلام
Born in Llandaff, Cardiff, to Norwegian parents, he served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, in which he became a flying ace and intelligence agent, rising to the rank of Wing Commander. Dahl rose to prominence in the 1940s with works for both children and adults, and became one of the world's best-selling authors. He has been referred to as "one of the greatest storytellers for children of the 20th century". In 2008 The Times placed Dahl 16th on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". His short stories are known for their unexpected endings, and his children's books for their unsentimental, often very dark humour.
Some of his notable works include James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, George's Marvellous Medicine, Fantastic Mr Fox, Matilda, The Witches, and The Big Friendly Giant.
Early life
Roald Dahl was born at Villa Marie, Fairwater Road in Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales in 1916, to Norwegian parents, Harald Dahl and Sofie Magdalene Dahl (née Hesselberg). Dahl's father had moved from Sarpsborg in Norway and settled in Cardiff in the 1880s. His mother came over to marry his father in 1911. Dahl was named after the polar explorer Roald Amundsen, a national hero in Norway at the time. He spoke Norwegian at home with his parents and sisters, Astri, Alfhild, and Else. Dahl and his sisters were christened at the Norwegian Church, Cardiff, where their parents worshipped. In 1920, when Dahl was three years old, his seven-year-old sister, Astri, died from appendicitis. Weeks later, his father died of pneumonia at the age of 57 while on a fishing trip in the Antarctic.
وعمره 3 سنوات ماتت اخته بالمصران الزايد وكان عمرها سبع سنوات
ومات ابوه بعد اسابيع خلال رلة صيد بسبب الالتهاب الرئوي
With the option of returning to Norway to live with relatives, Dahl's mother decided to remain in Wales because her husband Harald had wished to have their children educated in British schools, which he considered the world's best.
Dahl first attended The Cathedral School, Llandaff. At the age of eight, he and four of his friends (one named Thwaites) were caned by the headmaster after putting a dead mouse in a jar of gobstoppers at the local sweet shop, which was owned by a "mean and loathsome" old woman called Mrs Pratchett. This was known amongst the five boys as the "Great Mouse Plot of 1924".[10]
Thereafter, he transferred to a boarding school in England: Saint Peter's in Weston-super-Mare. Roald's parents had wanted him to be educated at an English public school and, because of a then regular ferry link across the Bristol Channel, this proved to be the nearest. His time at Saint Peter's was an unpleasant experience for him. He was very homesick and wrote to his mother every week, but never revealed to her his unhappiness, being under the pressure of school censorship. Only after her death in 1967 did he find out that she had saved every single one of his letters, in small bundles held together with green tape.[11] Dahl wrote about his time at St. Peter's in his autobiography Boy: Tales of Childhood.[12]
From 1929, he attended Repton School in Derbyshire, where, according to Boy: Tales of Childhood, a friend named Michael was viciously caned by headmaster Geoffrey Fisher, the man who later became the Archbishop of Canterbury and crowned the Queen in 1953. (However, according to Dahl's biographer Jeremy Treglown,[13] the caning took place in May 1933, a year after Fisher had left Repton. The headmaster concerned was in fact J.T. Christie, Fisher's successor.) This caused Dahl to "have doubts about religion and even about God".[14] He was never seen as a particularly talented writer in his school years, with one of his English teachers writing in his school report "I have never met anybody who so persistently writes words meaning the exact opposite of what is intended,"[15] Dahl was exceptionally tall, reaching 6 ft 6 in (1.98 m) in adult life.[16] He excelled at sports, being made captain of the school fives and squash teams, and also playing for the football team.[17] As well as having a passion for literature, he also developed an interest in photography.[18] During his years at Repton, Cadbury, the chocolate company, would occasionally send boxes of new chocolates to the school to be tested by the pupils. Dahl apparently used to dream of inventing a new chocolate bar that would win the praise of Mr. Cadbury himself, and this proved the inspiration for him to write his third book for children, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1963) and include references to chocolate in other books for children.[19]
Throughout his childhood and adolescent years, Dahl spent his summer holidays with his mother's family in Norway. His childhood and first job selling kerosene in Midsomer Norton and surrounding villages in Somerset, south West England are subjects in Boy: Tales of Childhood.[20] The main child character in his 1983 book The Witches is a British boy of Norwegian descent, whose grandmother is still living in Norway.[21]
After finishing his schooling, he spent three weeks hiking through Newfoundland with the Public Schools' Exploring Society (now known as BSES Expeditions).[22]
In July 1934, Dahl joined the Shell Petroleum Company. Following two years of training in the United Kingdom, he was transferred to Dar-es-Salaam, Tanganyika (now Tanzania). Along with the only two other Shell employees in the entire territory, he lived in luxury in the Shell House outside Dar-es-Salaam, with a cook and personal servants. While out on assignments supplying oil to customers across Tanganyika, he encountered black mambas and lions, amongst other wildlife.[14]
In August 1939, as World War II loomed, plans were made to round up the hundreds of Germans in Dar-es-Salaam. Dahl was made an officer in the King's African Rifles, commanding a platoon of Askaris, indigenous troops serving in the colonial army.[23]
In November 1939, Dahl joined the Royal Air Force as an Aircraftman. After a 600-mile (970 km) car journey from Dar-es-Salaam to Nairobi, he was accepted for flight training with 16 other men, of whom only two others survived the war. With seven hours and 40 minutes experience in a De Havilland Tiger Moth, he flew solo;[24] Dahl enjoyed watching the wildlife of Kenya during his flights. He continued to advanced flying training in Iraq, at RAF Habbaniya, 50 miles (80 km) west of Baghdad. He was promoted to Leading Aircraftman on 24 August 1940.[25] Following six months' training on Hawker Harts, Dahl was made an Acting Pilot Officer.
He was assigned to No. 80 Squadron RAF, flying obsolete Gloster Gladiators, the last biplane fighter aircraft used by the RAF. Dahl was surprised to find that he would not receive any specialised training in aerial combat, or in flying Gladiators. On 19 September 1940, Dahl was ordered to fly his Gladiator from Abu Sueir in Egypt, on to Amiriya to refuel, and again to Fouka in Libya for a second refuelling. From there he would fly to 80 Squadron's forward airstrip 30 miles (48 km) south of Mersa Matruh. On the final leg, he could not find the airstrip and, running low on fuel and with night approaching, he was forced to attempt a landing in the desert. The undercarriage hit a boulder and the aircraft crashed, fracturing his skull, smashing his nose, and temporarily blinding him.[26] He managed to drag himself away from the blazing wreckage and passed out. Later, he wrote about the crash for his first published work.[26]
Dahl was rescued and taken to a first-aid post in Mersa Matruh, where he regained consciousness, but not his sight, and was then taken by train to the Royal Navy hospital in Alexandria. There he fell in and out of love with a nurse, Mary Welland. An RAF inquiry into the crash revealed that the location to which he had been told to fly was completely wrong, and he had mistakenly been sent instead to the no man's land between the Allied and Italian forces.[27]
In February 1941, Dahl was discharged from hospital and passed fully fit for flying duties. By this time, 80 Squadron had been transferred to the Greek campaign and based at Eleusina, near Athens. The squadron was now equipped with Hawker Hurricanes. Dahl flew a replacement Hurricane across the Mediterranean Sea in April 1941, after seven hours flying Hurricanes. By this stage in the Greek campaign, the RAF had only 18 combat aircraft in Greece: 14 Hurricanes and four Bristol Blenheim light bombers. Dahl saw his first aerial combat on 15 April 1941, while flying alone over the city of Chalcis. He attacked six Junkers Ju-88s that were bombing ships and shot one down. On 16 April in another air battle, he shot down another Ju-88.[28]
On 20 April 1941, Dahl took part in the "Battle of Athens", alongside the highest-scoring British Commonwealth ace of World War II, Pat Pattle and Dahl's friend David Coke. Of 12 Hurricanes involved, five were shot down and four of their pilots killed, including Pattle. Greek observers on the ground counted 22 German aircraft downed, but because of the confusion of the aerial engagement, none of the pilots knew which plane they had shot down. Dahl described it as "an endless blur of enemy fighters whizzing towards me from every side".[29]
In May, as the Germans were pressing on Athens, Dahl was evacuated to Egypt. His squadron was reassembled in Haifa. From there, Dahl flew sorties every day for a period of four weeks, shooting down a Vichy French Air Force Potez 63 on 8 June and another Ju-88 on 15 June, but he then began to get severe headaches that caused him to black out. He was invalided home to Britain. Though at this time Dahl was only an Acting Pilot Officer, in September 1941 he was simultaneously confirmed as a Pilot Officer and promoted to Flying Officer.[30]
Dahl began writing in 1942, after he was transferred to Washington, D.C. as Assistant Air Attaché. His first published work, in 1 August 1942 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, was "Shot Down Over Libya" which described the crash of his Gloster Gladiator. C. S. Forester had asked Dahl to write down some RAF anecdotes so that he could shape them into a story. After Forester read what Dahl had given him, he decided to publish the story exactly as Dahl had written it. The original title of the article was "A Piece of Cake" but the title was changed to sound more dramatic, despite the fact that he was not actually shot down.[27]
Dahl was promoted to Flight Lieutenant in August 1942.[31] During the war, Forester worked for the British Information Service and was writing propaganda for the Allied cause, mainly for American consumption.[32] This work introduced Dahl to espionage and the activities of the Canadian spymaster William Stephenson, known by the codename "Intrepid".[33]
During the war, Dahl supplied intelligence from Washington to Stephenson and his organisation known as British Security Coordination, which was part of MI6. He was revealed in the 1980s to have been serving to help promote Britain's interests and message in the United States and to combat the "America First" movement, working with such other well known agents as Ian Fleming and David Ogilvy.[34] Dahl was once sent back to Britain by British Embassy officials, supposedly for misconduct – "I got booted out by the big boys," he said. Stephenson promptly sent him back to Washington—with a promotion to Wing Commander.[35] Towards the end of the war, Dahl wrote some of the history of the secret organisation and he and Stephenson remained friends for decades after the war.[36]
Upon the war's conclusion, Dahl held the rank of a temporary Wing Commander (substantive Flight Lieutenant). Owing to his accident in 1940 having left him with excruciating headaches while flying, in August 1946 he was invalided out of the RAF. He left the service with the substantive rank of Squadron Leader.[37] His record of five aerial victories, qualifying him as a flying ace, has been confirmed by post-war research and cross-referenced in Axis records, although it is most likely that he scored more than that during 20 April 1941 when 22 German aircraft were shot down.[38]

Postwar life
Dahl married American actress Patricia Neal on 2 July 1953 at Trinity Church in New York City. Their marriage lasted for 30 years and they had five children: Olivia, Tessa, Theo, Ophelia, and Lucy.[39]
On 5 December 1960, four-month-old Theo Dahl was severely injured when his baby carriage was struck by a taxicab in New York City. For a time, he suffered from hydrocephalus, and as a result, his father became involved in the development of what became known as the "Wade-Dahl-Till" (or WDT) valve, a device to alleviate the condition.[40][41]
In November 1962, Olivia Dahl died of measles encephalitis at age seven. Dahl subsequently became a proponent of immunisation[42] and dedicated his 1982 book The BFG to his daughter.[43]
In 1965, wife Patricia Neal suffered three burst cerebral aneurysms while pregnant with their fifth child, Lucy; Dahl took control of her rehabilitation and she eventually relearned to talk and walk, and even returned to her acting career,[44] an episode in their lives which was dramatised in the film 'The Patricia Neal Story', in which the couple were played by Glenda Jackson and Dirk Bogarde.
Dahl married Felicity "Liccy" Crosland at Brixton Town Hall, South London, following a divorce from Neal in 1983. Dahl and Crosland had previously been in a relationship.[45] According to biographer Donald Sturrock, Liccy gave up her job and moved into 'Gipsy House', Great Missenden, which had been Dahl's home since 1954.[46]
In 1983, Dahl was quoted as saying: "There's a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity ... I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason."[47] Dahl stated that he was anti-Israel rather than anti-Semitic, and he maintained friendships with a number of Jews, including philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who said, "I thought he might say anything. Could have been pro-Arab or pro-Jew. There was no consistent line."[47]
Dahl is the father of author Tessa Dahl, and grandfather of author, cookbook writer, and former model Sophie Dahl (after whom Sophie in The BFG is named[48]).
Death and legacy
Roald Dahl died on 23 November 1990, at the age of 74 of a blood disease, myelodysplastic syndrome, in Oxford and was buried in the cemetery at St. Peter and St. Paul's Church in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, England.
مات وهو في الرابعة والسبعين عام 1990
According to his granddaughter, the family gave him a "sort of Viking funeral". He was buried with his snooker cues, some very good burgundy, chocolates, HB pencils and a power saw. In his honour, the Roald Dahl Children's Gallery was opened in November 1996, at the Buckinghamshire County Museum in nearby Aylesbury.[50]
In 2002, one of Cardiff Bay's modern landmarks, the historic Oval Basin plaza, was re-christened "Roald Dahl Plass". "Plass" means "place" or "square" in Norwegian, referring to the acclaimed late writer's Norwegian roots. There have also been calls from the public for a permanent statue of him to be erected in the city.[51]
Dahl's charitable commitments in the fields of neurology, haematology and literacy have been continued by his widow since his death, through Roald Dahl's Marvellous Children's Charity, formerly known as the Roald Dahl Foundation.[52][53] In June 2005, the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre opened in Great Missenden to celebrate the work of Roald Dahl and advance his work in literacy education.[54][55]
In 2008, the UK charity Booktrust and Children's Laureate Michael Rosen inaugurated The Roald Dahl Funny Prize, an annual award to authors of humorous children's fiction.[56][57] On 14 September 2009 (the day after what would have been Dahl's 93rd birthday) the first blue plaque in his honour was unveiled in Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales.[58] Rather than commemorating his place of birth, however, the plaque was erected on the wall of the former sweet shop (and site of "The Great Mouse Plot of 1924") that features in the first part of his autobiography Boy. It was unveiled by his widow Felicity and son Theo.[58]
In honour of Roald Dahl, Gibraltar Post issued a set of four stamps in 2010 featuring Quentin Blake's original illustrations for four of the children's books written by Dahl during his long career; The BFG, The Twits, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda.[59] Dahl's influence has extended beyond literary figures, and he connected with film director Tim Burton with his "mixture of light and darkness, and not speaking down to kids, and the kind of politically incorrect humour that kids get".[60] Regarded as "one of the greatest storytellers for children of the 20th century",[5] Dahl was listed as one of the greatest British writers since 1945.[6] He ranks amongst the world's best-selling fiction authors with sales estimated at over 100 million,[3][4] and his books have been published in almost 50 languages.[61] In 2003, the UK survey entitled The Big Read carried out by the BBC in order to find the "nation's best loved novel" of all time, four of Dahl's books were named in the Top 100, with only works by Charles Dickens and Terry Pratchett featuring more.[62]
The anniversary of Dahl's birthday on 13 September is celebrated as "Roald Dahl Day" in Africa, the United Kingdom, and Latin America.[61][63][64]
Writing
Roald Dahl's story "The Devious Bachelor" was illustrated by Frederick Siebel when it was published in Collier's (September 1953).
Dahl's first published work, inspired by a meeting with C. S. Forester, was "A Piece Of Cake" on 1 August 1942. The story, about his wartime adventures, was bought by The Saturday Evening Post for US$1000 (a substantial sum in 1942) and published under the title "Shot Down Over Libya".[65]
His first children's book was The Gremlins, about mischievous little creatures that were part of RAF folklore.[66] All the RAF pilots blamed the gremlins for all the problems with the plane. The book, which First Lady of the US Eleanor Roosevelt read to her grandchildren,[66] was commissioned by Walt Disney for a film that was never made, and published in 1943. Dahl went on to create some of the best-loved children's stories of the 20th century, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, The Witches, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, The BFG, George's Marvellous Medicine and Fantastic Mr Fox.
Dahl also had a successful parallel career as the writer of macabre adult short stories, usually with a dark sense of humour and a surprise ending.[67] The Mystery Writers of America presented Dahl with three Edgar Awards for his work, and many were originally written for American magazines such as Collier's, Ladies Home Journal, Harper's, Playboy and The New Yorker. Works such as Kiss Kiss subsequently collected Dahl's stories into anthologies, gaining worldwide acclaim. Dahl wrote more than 60 short stories; they have appeared in numerous collections, some only being published in book form after his death (See List of Roald Dahl short stories). His three Edgar Awards were given for: in 1954, the collection Someone Like You; in 1959, the story "The Landlady"; and in 1980, the episode of Tales of the Unexpected based on "Skin".[67]
One of his more famous adult stories, "The Smoker" (also known as "Man From the South"), was filmed twice as both 1960 and 1985 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and also adapted into Quentin Tarantino's segment of the 1995 film Four Rooms.[68] This oft-anthologised classic concerns a man in Jamaica who wagers with visitors in an attempt to claim the fingers from their hands. The 1960 Hitchcock version stars Steve McQueen and Peter Lorre.[68]
His short story collection Tales of the Unexpected was adapted to a successful TV series of the same name, beginning with "Man From the South".[69] When the stock of Dahl's own original stories was exhausted, the series continued by adapting stories by authors that were written in Dahl's style, including the writers John Collier and Stanley Ellin.
He acquired a traditional Romanichal Gypsy wagon in the 1960s, and the family used it as a playhouse for his children. He later used the vardo as a writing room, where he wrote the book Danny, the Champion of the World.[70]
A number of his short stories are supposed to be extracts from the diary of his (fictional) Uncle Oswald, a rich gentleman whose sexual exploits form the subject of these stories.[71] In his novel My Uncle Oswald, the uncle engages a temptress to seduce 20th century geniuses and royalty with a love potion secretly added to chocolate truffles made by Dahl's favourite chocolate shop, Prestat of Piccadilly.[71]
Memories with Food at Gipsy House, written with his wife Felicity and published posthumously in 1991, was a mixture of recipes, family reminiscences and Dahl's musings on favourite subjects such as chocolate, onions, and claret.[52][72]
[edit] Children's fiction
Dahl's children's works are usually told from the point of view of a child. They typically involve adult villains who hate and mistreat children, and feature at least one "good" adult to counteract the villain(s). These stock characters are possibly a reference to the abuse that Dahl stated that he experienced in the boarding schools he attended.[5] They usually contain a lot of black humour and grotesque scenarios, including gruesome violence. The Witches, George's Marvellous Medicine and Matilda are examples of this formula. The BFG follows it in a more analogous way with the good giant (the BFG or "Big Friendly Giant") representing the "good adult" archetype and the other giants being the "bad adults". This formula is also somewhat evident in Dahl's film script for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Class-conscious themes – ranging from the thinly veiled to the blatant – also surface in works such as Fantastic Mr Fox and Danny, the Champion of the World.
Dahl also features in his books characters who are very fat, usually children. Augustus Gloop, Bruce Bogtrotter, and Bruno Jenkins are a few of these characters, although an enormous woman named Aunt Sponge is featured in James and the Giant Peach and the nasty farmer Boggis in Fantastic Mr Fox is an enormously fat character. All of these characters (with the possible exception of Bruce Bogtrotter) are either villains or simply unpleasant gluttons. They are usually punished for this: Augustus Gloop drinks from Willy Wonka's chocolate river, disregarding the adults who tell him not to, and falls in, getting sucked up a pipe and nearly being turned into fudge. Bruce Bogtrotter steals cake from the evil headmistress, Miss Trunchbull, and is forced to eat a gigantic chocolate cake in front of the school. Bruno Jenkins is turned into a mouse by witches who lure him to their convention with the promise of chocolate, and, it is speculated, possibly disowned or even killed by his parents because of this. Aunt Sponge is flattened by a giant peach. Dahl's mother used to tell him and his sisters tales about trolls and other mythical Norwegian creatures and some of his children's books contain references or elements inspired by these stories, such as the giants in The BFG, the fox family in Fantastic Mr Fox and the trolls in The Minpins.
In his poetry, Dahl gives a humorous re-interpretation of well-known nursery rhymes and fairy tales, providing surprise endings in place of the traditional happily-ever-after. Dahl's collection of poems Revolting Rhymes is recorded in audio book form, and narrated by actor Alan Cumming.[73]

رولد دال
- ولد رولد دال في ةيلز لاب نرويجيين زكان والده يعمل تاجرا
- قبل ان يهاجر الى ويلز كان الاب يعمل مزارعا بالقرب من اسلو
- تزوج الاب من فتاة فرنسة في باريس وماتت بعد ولادة ابنهم الثاني
- في عام 1911 تزوج الاب من صوفي هسلبرغ
- مات هرالد الاب ودال في سن الرابعة
- باعت العائلة الذهب من اجل تدريس دال
- تأثر كثير ا في بيئة المدرسة التي كان يسمح فيها للطلاب الكبار ضرب الصغار وقد تأثر على ةجه الخصوص بما واجه في السكن الداخلي الذي كان بيئة عنيفة
- عمل في لندن ما بين 1933 و1937 وفي دار السلام تنزانيا ما بين 1937 – 1939
- انضم الى سلاح الجو البريطاني خلال الحرب العاملية الثانية وخدم في ليبيا واليونان وسوريا
- اسقطت طائرته في ليبيا وجرح في سوريا واخيرا ارسل الى واشنطن كحارس امن ما بين 1942 و 1943
- عمل في الامن ما بين 1943 و 1945 في امريكا الشمالية
- سقوطه في الطائرة ادى الى حدوث جروح في الجمجمة وقال لاحقا انك تحصل على السحر من الاورام التي يمكن ان تصيب رأسك وبينما كان في مرحلة النقاهه من جراحه كان يرى احلام غريبة جعلته يكتب قصته الاولى
- كاتب انجليزي ولد عام 1916 وكان طيارا ويكتب سيناريو للافلام
- وعمره 3 سنوات ماتت اخته بالمصران الزايد وكان عمرها سبع سنوات
- ومات ابوه بعد اسابيع خلال رلة صيد بسبب الالتهاب الرئوي
- مات وهو في الرابعة والسبعين عام 1990

والان مع سر الروعة في رواية :

89 ـ الجدول الدوري،للمؤلف بريمو ليفي.

The Periodic Table (Italian: Il Sistema Periodico) is a collection of short stories by Primo Levi, published in 1975, named after the periodic table in chemistry. In 2006, the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it the best science book ever [1].

The stories are autobiographical episodes of the author's experiences as a Jewish-Italian doctoral-level chemist under the Fascist regime and afterwards. They include various themes following a chronological sequence: his ancestry, his study of chemistry and practicing the profession in wartime Italy, a pair of imaginative tales he wrote at that time , and his subsequent experiences as an anti-Fascist partisan, his arrest and imprisonment, interrogation, and internment in the Fossoli di Carpi and Auschwitz camps, and postwar life. Every story, 21 in total, has the name of a chemical element and is connected to it in some way.


Chapters

Money: A Suicide Note is a 1984 novel by Martin Amis. Time magazine included the novel in its "100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present".[
Plot summary
Money tells the story of, and is narrated by, John Self, a successful director of commercials who is invited to New York by Fielding Goodney, a film producer, to shoot his first film. Self is an archetypal hedonist and slob; he is usually drunk, an avid consumer of pornography and prostitutes, eats too much and, above all, spends too much, encouraged by Goodney.
The actors in the film, which Self originally titles Good Money but which he eventually wants to re-name Bad Money, all have some kind of emotional issue which clashes with fellow cast members and with the parts they've signed on for - the principal casting having already been done by Goodney. For example: the strict Christian, Spunk Davis (whose name is intentionally unfortunate), is asked to play a drugs pusher; the ageing hardman Lorne Guyland has to be beaten up; the motherly Caduta Massi, who is insecure about her body, is asked to appear in a sex scene with Lorne, whom she detests, and so on.
Self is stalked by "Frank the Phone" while in New York, a menacing misfit who threatens him over a series of telephone conversations, apparently because Self personifies the success Frank was unable to attain. Self is not frightened of Frank, even when he is beaten by him while on an alcoholic bender. (Self, characteristically, is unable to remember how he was attacked.) Towards the end of the book Self arranges to meet Frank for a showdown, which is the beginning of the novel's shocking denouement; Money is similar to Amis' five-years-later London Fields, in having a major plot twist.
Self returns to London before filming begins, revealing more of his humble origins, his landlord father Barry (who makes his contempt for his son clear by invoicing him for every penny spent on his upbringing) and pub doorman Fat Vince. Self discovers that his London girlfriend, Selina, is having an affair with Ossie Twain, while Self is likewise attracted to Twain's wife in New York, Martina. This increases Self's psychosis and makes his final downfall even more brutal.
After Selina has plotted to destroy any chance of a relationship between him and Martina, Self discovers that all his credit cards have been blocked and, after confronting Frank, the stars of film angrily claim that there is no film. It is revealed that Goodney had been manipulating him - all the contracts signed by Self were loans and debts, and Goodney fabricated the entire film. He is also revealed to be Frank and responsible for the visions of Self's mother. He supposedly chose Self for his behaviour on the first plane to America, where Goodney was sitting close to him. The New York bellhop, Felix, helps him escape the angry mob in the hotel lobby and fly back to England, only to discover that Barry is not Self's real father.
There are some hilarious set pieces, such as when Self wakes to find he has skipped an entire day in his inebriated state, the tennis match and the attempts to change Spunk's screen name. The writing is also full of witty one-liners and silly names for consumer goods, such as Self's car, the Fiasco, and the Blastfurters which he snacks on.
Amis writes himself into the novel as a kind of overseer and confidant in Self's final breakdown. He is an arrogant character, but Self is not afraid to express his rather low opinion of Amis, such as the fact that he earns so much yet "lives like a student." Amis, among others, tries to warn Self that he is heading for destruction but to no avail. Felix becomes Self's only real friend in America and finally makes Self realise the trouble he is in: "Man, you are out for a whole lot of money."
The novel's subtitle, "A Suicide Note", is clarified at the end of the novel. It is revealed that Barry Self is not John Self's father; his father is in fact Fat Vince. As such, John Self no longer exists. Hence, in the subtitle, Amis indicates that this cessation of John Self's existence is analogous to suicide, which of course, results in the death of the self. A Suicide Note could also relate to the novel as a whole, or money, which Self himself calls suicide notes within the novel.
After learning that his father is Fat Vince, John realises that his true identity is that of Fat John, half-brother of Fat Paul. The novel ends with Fat John having lost all his money (if it ever existed), yet he is still able to laugh at himself and is cautiously optimistic about his future.
Background
The novel is derived in part from Amis's experience working on the film Saturn 3, of which he was scriptwriter. The character of Lorne Guyland was based on the star of the film, Kirk Douglas. (His name is a play on the way the place-name "Long Island", where the character lives, is pronounced in certain New York-area accents.). Amis said of his work that "Money makes a break from the English tradition of sending a foreigner abroad in that (a) John Self is half American, and (b) as a consequence cannot he scandalized by America. You know the usual Pooterish Englishman who goes abroad in English novels and is taken aback by everything. Well, not a bit of that in John Self. He completely accepts America on its own terms and is perfectly at home with it."[
In 2010, Time Magazine called Amis' book "the best celebrity novel I know: the stars who demand and wheedle their way across his plot seem less like caricature and more like photorealism every year."
2010 BBC television adaptation
On November 11, 2009, The Guardian reported that the BBC has adapted Money for television as part of their early 2010 schedule for BBC 2.[6] The programme was shown in May 2010. Spaced/Shaun of the Dead/Hot Fuzz actor Nick Frost played John Self,[7] and Vincent Kartheiser portrayed Fielding Goodney. Emma Pierson played Selina Street,[8] and Jerry Hall played Caduta Massi. The adaptation, by Tom Butterworth and Chris Hurford, was in two parts.

Martin Louis Amis (born 25 August 1949) is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year. The Times named him in 2008 as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
روائي بريطاني ولد عام 1949 يعمل حاليا دكتور للكتابة الابداعية في جامعة مانشستر
Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition and the excesses of late-capitalist Western society with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus been portrayed as the undisputed master of what The New York Times called "the new unpleasantness." Influenced by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Sir Kingsley Amis, he has inspired a generation of writers with his distinctive style, including Will Self and Zadie Smith The Guardian writes that his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis called a "terrible compulsive vividness in his style ... that constant demonstrating of his command of English," and that the "Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop."
Early life
Amis was born in Swansea, South Wales His father, Sir Kingsley Amis, was the son of a mustard manufacturer's clerk from Clapham; his mother, Hilary Bardwell (Hilly), was the daughter of a Ministry of Agriculture civil servant. He has an older brother, Philip, and his younger sister, Sally, died in 2000. His parents divorced when he was twelve.
انفصل واليده بالطلاق وهو في سن الثانية عشره
He attended a number of schools in the 1950s and 1960s—including the Bishop Gore School ( Swansea Grammar School), and Cambridgeshire High School for Boys—where he was described by one headmaster as "unusually unpromising." The acclaim that followed his father's first novel Lucky Jim sent the family to Princeton, New Jersey, where his father lectured. This was Martin's introduction to the United States.
In 1965, at age 15, he played John Thornton in the film version of Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica.
He read nothing but comic books until his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, introduced him to Jane Austen, whom he often names as his earliest influence. After teenage years spent in flowery shirts and a short spell at Westminster School while living in Hampstead, he graduated from Exeter College, Oxford with a "Congratulatory" First in English – "the sort where you are called in for a viva and the examiners tell you how much they enjoyed reading your papers." After Oxford, he found an entry-level job at The Times Literary Supplement, and at age 27 became literary editor of The New Statesman, where he met Christopher Hitchens, then a feature writer for The Observer, who remains a close friend.
Early writing
According to Martin, Kingsley Amis famously showed no interest in his son's work. "I can point out the exact place where he stopped and sent Money twirling through the air; that's where the character named Martin Amis comes in." "Breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself," Kingsley complained.
His first novel The Rachel Papers (1973) won the Somerset Maugham Award. The most traditional of his novels, made into an unsuccessful cult film, it tells the story of a bright, egotistical teenager (which Amis acknowledges as autobiographical) and his relationship with the eponymous girlfriend in the year before going to university.
He also wrote the screenplay for the film Saturn 3, an experience which he was to draw on for his fifth novel Money.
Dead Babies (1975), more flippant in tone, chronicles a few days in the lives of some friends who convene in a country house to take drugs. A number of Amis's characteristics show up here for the first time: mordant black humour, obsession with the zeitgeist, authorial intervention, a character subjected to sadistically humorous misfortunes and humiliations, and a defiant casualness ("my attitude has been, I don't know much about science, but I know what I like"). A film adaptation was made in 2000.
Success (1977) told the story of two foster-brothers, Gregory Riding and Terry Service, and their rising and falling fortunes. This was the first example of Amis's fondness for symbolically 'pairing' characters in his novels, which has been a recurrent feature in his fiction since (Martin Amis and Martina Twain in Money, Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry in The Information, and Jennifer Rockwell and Mike Hoolihan in Night Train).
Other People: A Mystery Story (1981), about a young woman coming out of a coma, was a transitional novel in that it was the first of Amis's to show authorial intervention in the narrative voice, and highly artificed language in the heroine's descriptions of everyday objects, which was said to be influenced by his contemporary Craig Raine's 'Martian' school of poetry.
Main career
1980s and 1990s
Amis's best-known novels are Money, London Fields, and The Information, commonly referred to as his "London Trilogy."[6] Although the books share little in terms of plot and narrative, they all examine the lives of middle-aged men, exploring the sordid, debauched, and post-apocalyptic undercurrents of life in late 20th-century Britain. Amis's London protagonists are anti-heroes: they engage in questionable behaviour, are passionate iconoclasts, and strive to escape the apparent banality and futility of their lives.
London Fields (1989), Amis's longest work, describes the encounters between three main characters in London in 1999, as a climate disaster approaches. The characters have typically Amisian names and broad caricatured qualities: Keith Talent, the lower-class crook with a passion for darts; Nicola Six, a femme fatale who is determined to be murdered; and upper-middle-class Guy Clinch, 'the fool, the foil, the poor foal' who is destined to come between the other two. The book was controversially omitted from the Booker Prize shortlist in 1989, because two panel members, Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil, disliked Amis's treatment of his women characters. "It was an incredible row," Martyn Goff, the Booker's director, told The Independent. "Maggie and Helen felt that Amis treated women appallingly in the book. That is not to say they thought books which treated women badly couldn't be good, they simply felt that the author should make it clear he didn't favour or bless that sort of treatment. Really, there was only two of them and they should have been outnumbered as the other three were in agreement, but such was the sheer force of their argument and passion that they won. David [Lodge] has told me he regrets it to this day, he feels he failed somehow by not saying, `It's two against three, Martin's on the list'."
Amis's 1991 offering, the short novel Time's Arrow, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Notable for its unique, backwards narrative - including dialogue in reverse - the novel is the autobiography of a Nazi concentration camp doctor. The unique reversal of time in the novel seemingly transforms Auschwitz - and the entire theatre of war - into a place of joy, healing, and resurrection.
The Information (1995) was notable not so much for its critical success, but for the scandals surrounding its publication. The enormous advance (an alleged £500,000) demanded and subsequently obtained by Amis for the novel attracted what the author described as "an Eisteddfod of hostility" from writers and critics after he abandoned his long-serving agent, the late Pat Kavanagh, in order to be represented by the Harvard-educated Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie.[12] The split was by no means amicable; it created a rift between Amis and his long-time friend, Julian Barnes, who was married to Kavanagh. According to Amis's autobiography Experience (2000), he and Barnes had not resolved their differences.[13] The Information itself deals with the relationship between a pair of British writers of fiction. One, a spectacularly successful purveyor of "airport novels," is envied by his friend, an equally unsuccessful writer of philosophical and generally abstruse prose. The novel is written in the author's classic style: characters appearing as stereotyped caricatures, grotesque elaborations on the wickedness of middle age, and a general air of post-apocalyptic malaise.
Amis's 1997 offering, the short novel Night Train, is unique in that it is the first of Amis' books to use a female protagonist. Narrated by the mannish American Detective Mike Hoolihan, the story revolves around the suicide of her boss's teenage daughter. Like most of Amis's work, Night Train is dark, bleak, and foreboding, arguably a reflection of the author's views on America. Amis's distinctively American vernacular in the narrative was criticized by, among others, John Updike, although the novel found defenders elsewhere, notably in Janis Bellow, wife of Amis's sometime mentor and friend, the late Saul Bellow.[14]
2000s
The 2000s were Amis's least productive decade in terms of full-length fiction since starting in the nineteen-seventies (two novels in ten years), while his non-fiction work saw a dramatic uptick in volume (three published works including a memoir, a hybrid of semi-memoir and amateur political history, and another journalism collection).
In the year 2000 Amis published a memoir titled Experience. Largely concerned with the strange relationship between the author and his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, the autobiography nevertheless deals with many facets of Amis's life. Of particular note is Amis's reunion with his daughter, Delilah Seale, resulting from an affair in the 1970s, whom he did not see until she was 19. Amis also discusses, at some length, the murder of his cousin Lucy Partington by Fred West when she was 21. The book was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography.
In 2002 Amis published Koba the Dread, a devastating history of the crimes of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, and their denial by many writers and academics in the West. The book precipitated a literary controversy for its approach to the material, and for its attack on Amis's long-time friend, Christopher Hitchens. Once (but no longer) a passionate and committed leftist, Hitchens' alleged sympathy for Stalin and communism was criticized by Amis. Although Hitchens wrote a vituperative response to the book in The Atlantic, his friendship with Amis appears to have emerged unchanged: in response to a reporter's question, Amis responded "We never needed to make up. We had an adult exchange of views, mostly in print, and that was that (or, more exactly, that goes on being that). My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May."[15]
In 2003, Yellow Dog, Amis's first novel in six years, was published. The novel drew mixed reviews, and was most notably denounced by the novelist Tibor Fischer: "Yellow Dog isn't bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad. I was reading my copy on the Tube and I was terrified someone would look over my shoulder… It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating."[16] Elsewhere, the book received mixed reviews, with some critics proclaiming the novel a return to form, but most considered the book to be a great disappointment.[citation needed] Amis was unrepentant about the novel and its reaction, calling Yellow Dog "among my best three". He gave his own explanation for the novel's critical failure, "No one wants to read a difficult literary novel or deal with a prose style which reminds them how thick they are. There's a push towards egalitarianism, making writing more chummy and interactive, instead of a higher voice, and that's what I go to literature for."[17] Yellow Dog "controversially made the 13-book longlist for the 2003 Booker Prize, despite some scathing reviews", but failed to win the award.
Following the harsh reviews afforded to Yellow Dog, Amis relocated from London to Uruguay with his family for two years, during which time he worked on his next novel away from the glare and pressures of the London literary scene.
In September 2006, upon his return from Uruguay, Amis's published his eleventh novel. House of Meetings, a short work, continued the author's crusade against the crimes of Stalinism and also saw some consideration of the state of contemporary post-Soviet Russia. The novel centres on the relationship between two brothers incarcerated in a prototypical Siberian gulag who, prior to their deportation, had loved the same woman. House of Meetings saw some better critical notices than Yellow Dog had received three years before, but there were still some reviewers who felt that Amis's fiction work had considerably declined in quality while others felt that he was not suited to writing an ostensibly serious historical novel. Despite the praise for House of Meetings, once again Amis was overlooked for the Booker Prize longlist. According to a piece in The Independent, the novel "was originally to have been collected alongside two short stories - one, a disturbing account of the life of a body-double in the court of Saddam Hussein; the other, the imagined final moments of Muhammad Atta, the leader of 11 September attacks - but late in the process, Amis decided to jettison both from the book."[19] In the same 2006 interview, Amis revealed that he had "recently abandoned a novella, The Unknown Known (the title was based on one of Donald Rumsfeld's characteristically strangulated linguistic formulations) in which Muslim terrorists unleash a horde of compulsive rapists on a town called Greeley, Colorado"[19] and instead continued to work on a follow-up full novel that he had started working on in 2003:[20]
"The novel I'm working on is blindingly autobiographical, but with an Islamic theme. It's called A Pregnant Widow, because at the end of a revolution you don't have a newborn child, you have a pregnant widow. And the pregnant widow in this novel is feminism. Which is still in its second trimester. The child is nowhere in sight yet. And I think it has several more convulsions to undergo before we'll see the child."[19]
The new novel took some considerable time to write and was not published before the end of the decade. Instead, Amis's last published work of the 2000s was the 2008 journalism collection The Second Plane, a collection with compiled Amis's many writings on the events of 9/11 and the subsequent major events and cultural issues resulting from the War on Terror. The reception to The Second Plane was decidedly mixed, with some reviewers finding its tone intelligent and well reasoned, while others believed it to be overly stylised and lacking in authoritative knowledge of key areas under consideration. The most common consensus was that the two short stories included were the weakest point of the collection. The collection sold relatively well and was widely discussed and debated.
2010s
In 2010, after a long period of writing, rewriting, editing and revision, Amis published his long-awaited new long novel, The Pregnant Widow, which marks the beginning of a new four-book deal. Originally set for release in 2008, the novel's publication was pushed back to 2009 and then 2010 as further editing and alterations were being made, expanding the novel to some 480 pages. A statement from publishers Johnathan Cape describes the content of the novel:
"The 1960s, as is well known, saw the launch of the sexual revolution, which radically affected the lives of every Westerner fortunate enough to be born after the Second World War. But a revolution is a revolution - contingent and sanguinary. In the words of the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen: The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that what the departing world leaves behind it is not an heir but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass. In many senses, including the literal, it was a velvet revolution; but it wasn't bloodless. Nor was it complete. Even today, in 2009, the pregnancy is still in its second trimester. Martin Amis, in "The Pregnant Widow", takes as his control experiment a long, hot summer holiday in a castle in Italy, where half a dozen young lives are afloat on the sea change of 1970. The result is a tragicomedy of manners, combining the wit of "Money" with the historical sense of "Time's Arrow" and "House of Meetings"."[21]
The first public reading of the then just completed version of The Pregnant Widow occurred on 11 May 2009 at the Norwich Playhouse as part of the Norwich and Norfolk festival.[22] Amis was in conversation with the Observer’s Robert McCrum, a long-time friend of his. At this reading, according to the coverage of the event for the Norwich Writers' Centre by Katy Carr, "the writing shows a return to comic form, as the narrator muses on the indignities of facing the mirror as an aging man, in a prelude to a story set in Italy in 1970, looking at the effect of the sexual revolution on personal relationships. The sexual revolution was the moment, as Amis sees it, that love became divorced from sex. He said he started to write the novel autobiographically (something that has been interesting the press recently), but then concluded that real life was too different from fiction, and difficult to drum into novel shape, so he had to rethink the form."[22] Additionally, Amis "seemed quite happy reading the opening pages in the novel’s first public outing."[22]
Further details concerning the novel's plot were revealed by The Times on 10 May 2009, its reporter Maurice Chittenden writing that at the event "Amis said the book was originally meant to be based much more closely on his own life. He had introduced more fictional passages after realising the format was not working," and that he "[had] been working on the partly autobiographical The Pregnant Widow for more than five years."[.

Amis and Katie Price
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On 27 October 2009, The Daily Telegraph reported that during a recent appearance by Amis at the Hay Festival in Wales, Amis had discussed his fascination with the glamour model turned celebrity author Katie Price (formerly known as Jordan). Amis went on to reveal that he "has honoured [Price] with a character bearing some of her traits" in his forthcoming new novella provisionally titled State of England (also the title of a 1996 short story by Amis). Amis said that her character was named 'Threnody', and stated categorically that Threnody "isn't based on" Jordan but readers should "bear in mind" the model when they read the book.[Furthermore, Amis said of Price: "She has no waist, no arse...an interesting face...but all we are really worshipping is two bags of silicone," though he admitted to having read both volumes of her autobiography.[]
Amis's remarks concerning Price and the rise of the "celebrity author" provoked wide discussion and much fierce debate with the press and literary circles, with Guardian BookBlog writer Jean Hannah Edelstein accusing Amis of misogyny and implying that it showed insecurity on his part. David Lister in The Independent thought that Amis was "refreshingly unafraid to challenge prevailing orthodoxies"[but thought he had also been "a real fool". "In turning his critique of celebrity publishing into a personal attack on a woman's physical attributes in language that would have seemed chauvinist 40 years ago, let alone now, he has shown his true colours, won Jordan sympathy and lost the argument on celebrity novels," Lister wrote. These are accusations which have been levelled at Amis before, most notably in 1989 when London Fields was rumoured to have been excluded from the Booker Prize longlist for similar reasons after protests by judges Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil, and exclusions from the shortlist for the Whitbread Prize the same year.[Independent Editor-At-Large Janet Street Porter also attacked Amis's remarks: "The truth is, he doesn't sell as many books as he used to...Whether Amis can cope with it or not, Katie Price sells millions of books to people who would not normally buy books." Street Porter went on to add that Price's novels were "pure escapism"[ (asking "...what's wrong with that?") and that in being "reduced to slagging off a woman who will never have read one of his own books, or even have heard of him, in order to drum up interest and grab a few headlines for his next opus", Amis was "signing up to the very culture he's said to despise." Porter signed off her piece saying that Amis shouldn't be "...such a rude snob."Amis was defended by fellow novelist Tony Parsons. Writing in The Mirror, Parsons opined that "...it is wrong to suggest that Amis is just jealous of Jordan’s sales figures. I think the real problem is the sheer excitement that Katie/Jordan generates among her readers. She encourages people to pour into bookshops in a way that the likes of Martin and I can only dream about." Despite the critical acclaim of literary fiction and high profile awards such as the Booker Prize, Parsons said that ultimately "Jordan, those two bestselling bags of silicone, has done more to promote reading in this country than anyone apart from the great J.K. Rowling."]
Amis revealed a few more details about Threnody and his views on Jordan in an interview with Will Gore for the Epsom Guardian prior to the release of The Pregnant Widow:
“She is a minor character,” he explains. “It is not Jordan but a rather different type of woman who gets about as much attention. My character is a poet, not a novelist, on the side as well as being a glamour model. “I think it is slightly depressing that Jordan’s autobiography is a best seller and people queue for five hours to meet her. What does that say about England? “Snobbery has to start somewhere and if you can’t be snobbish about Katie Price you are dead, you’ve gone.”]
Further details about State of England and Amis's plans were revealed in an interview with The Times in late January 2010 prior to the release of The Pregnant Widow. According to the article, "[Amis has] nearly finished his next novel, State of England, about chavs, which contains one character, Threnody, inspired by Katie Price and another, “my worst yet”, he says, based on Mikey Carroll, a crack-smoking lottery winner. “Lionel Asbo wins £90m on the lottery and does something so vicious…I can't tell you what”.Amis clarified further by stating: “I’ve got the first draft of the next novel done...and another novel ready to go after that.”]
Other works
Amis has also released two collections of short stories (Einstein's Monsters and Heavy Water), four volumes of collected journalism and criticism (The Moronic Inferno, Visiting Mrs Nabokov, The War Against Cliché and The Second Plane), and a guide to 1980s space-themed arcade video-game machines (Invasion of the Space Invaders). He also regularly appeared on television and radio discussion and debate programmes, and contributes book reviews and articles to newspapers. His wife Isabel Fonseca released her debut novel Attachment in 2009 and two of Amis's children, his son Louis and his daughter Fernanda, have also been published in their own right in Standpoint magazine and The Guardian, respectively.[
Current life
Amis returned to Britain in September 2006 after living in Uruguay for two and a half years with his second wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, and their two young daughters. Amis became a grandfather in 2008 when his daughter Delilah gave birth to a son. He said, "Some strange things have happened, it seems to me, in my absence. I didn't feel like I was getting more rightwing when I was in Uruguay, but when I got back I felt that I had moved quite a distance to the right while staying in the same place." He reports that he is disquieted by what he sees as increasingly undisguised hostility towards Israel and the United States.
In late 2010 Amis bought a property in the Cobble Hill area of Brooklyn, New York, although it is unclear whether he will be permanently moving to New York or just maintaining another 'sock' there.]

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Amis was a strong critic of nuclear proliferation. His collection of five stories on this theme, Einstein's Monsters, began with a long essay entitled "Thinkability" in which he set out his views on the issue, writing: "Nuclear weapons repel all thought, perhaps because they can end all thought."
He wrote in "Nuclear City" in Esquire of 1987 (re-published in Visiting Mrs Nabokov) that: "when nuclear weapons become real to you, when they stop buzzing around your ears and actually move into your head, hardly an hour passes without some throb or flash, some heavy pulse of imagined supercatastrophe."
Amis expressed his opinions on terrorism in an extended essay published in The Observer on the eve of the fifth anniversary of 9/11 in which he criticized the economic development of all Arab countries because their "aggregate GDP... was less than the GDP of Spain", and they "lag[ged] behind the West, and the Far East, in every index of industrial and manufacturing output, job creation, technology, literacy, life-expectancy, human development, and intellectual vitality."[The Catholic-Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, in the 2007 introduction to his work Ideology, singled out and attacked Amis for a particular quote (which Eagleton mistakenly attributed to one of Amis's essays),[citation needed] taken the day after the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot came to light, in an informal interview in The Times Magazine. Amis was quoted as saying: "What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children...It’s a huge dereliction on their part".[38] Eagleton wrote that this view is "[n]ot the ramblings of a British National Party thug, [...] but the reflections of Martin Amis, leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary world".
In a highly critical article in the Guardian "The absurd world of Martin Amis" the satirist Chris Morris likened Amis to the Muslim cleric Abu Hamza (who was jailed for inciting racial hatred in 2006), suggesting that both men employ "mock erudition, vitriol and decontextualised quotes from the Qu'ran" to incite hatred. In a later piece, Eagleton added: "But there is something rather stomach-churning at the sight of those such as Amis and his political allies, champions of a civilisation that for centuries has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world, shrieking for illegal measures when they find themselves for the first time on the sticky end of the same treatment."
Elsewhere, Amis was especially careful to distinguish between Islam and radical Islamism, stating that:
“
"We can begin by saying, not only that we respect Muhammad, but that no serious person could fail to respect Muhammad - a unique and luminous historical being...Judged by the continuities he was able to set in motion, Muhammad has strong claims to being the most extraordinary man who ever lived...To repeat, we respect Islam - the donor of countless benefits to mankind...But Islamism? No, we can hardly be asked to respect a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination...Naturally we respect Islam. But we do not respect Islamism, just as we respect Muhammad and do not respect Muhammad Atta."A prominent British Muslim, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, wrote an op-ed piece on the subject condemning Amis and he responded with an open letter to The Independent which the newspaper printed in full. In it, he stated his views had been misrepresented by both Alibhai-Brown and Eagleton. In an article in The Guardian, Amis subsequently wrote:
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And now I feel that this was the only serious deprivation of my childhood - the awful human colourlessness of South Wales, the dully flickering whites and grays, like a Pathe newsreel, like an ethnic Great Depression. In common with all novelists, I live for and am addicted to physical variety; and my one quarrel with the rainbow is that its spectrum isn't wide enough. I would like London to be full of upstanding Martians and Neptunians, of reputable citizens who came, originally, from Krypton and Tralfamadore.

On terrorism, Martin Amis wrote that he suspected "there exists on our planet a kind of human being who will become a Muslim in order to pursue suicide-mass murder," and added: "I will never forget the look on the gatekeeper's face, at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, when I suggested, perhaps rather airily, that he skip some calendric prohibition and let me in anyway. His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife, and my children was something for which he now had warrant."
In comments on the BBC in October 2006 Amis expressed his view that North Korea was the most dangerous of the two remaining members of the Axis Of Evil, but that Iran was our "natural enemy", suggesting that we should not feel bad about having "helped Iraq scrape a draw with Iran" in the Iran–Iraq War, because a "revolutionary and rampant Iran would have been a much more destabilising presence."
His views on radical Islamism earned him the contentious sobriquet Blitcon from the New Statesman (his former employer). This term, it has since been argued, was wrongly applied.[
His political opinions have been attacked in some quarters, particularly in The Guardian.]He has received support from many other writers. In The Spectator, Philip Hensher noted:
“
"The controversy raised by Amis’s views on religion as specifically embodied by Islamists is an empty one. He will tell you that his loathing is limited to Islamists, not even to Islam and certainly not to the ethnic groups concerned. The point, I think, is demonstrated, and the openness with which he has been willing to think out loud could usefully be emulated by political figures, addicted as they are to weasel words and double talk. I have to say that from non-practising Muslims I’ve heard language and opinions on Islamists which are far less temperate than anything Amis uses. In comparison to the private expressions of voices of modernity within Muslim societies, Amis is almost exaggeratedly respectful."In June 2008, Amis endorsed the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, stating that "The reason I hope for Obama is that he alone has the chance to reposition America's image in the world".Agnosticism
In 2006, Amis said that "agnostic is the only respectable position, simply because our ignorance of the universe is so vast" that atheism is "premature". Clearly, "there's not going to be any kind of anthropomorphic entity at all", but the universe is "so incredibly complicated", "so over our heads", that we cannot exclude the existence of "an intelligence" behind it.
In 2010, he said: "I'm an agnostic, which is the only rational position. It's not because I feel a God or think that anything resembling the banal God of religion will turn up. But I think that atheism sounds like a proof of something, and it's incredibly evident that we are nowhere near intelligent enough to understand the universe.... Writers are above all individualists, and above all writing is freedom, so they will go off in all sorts of directions. I think it does apply to the debate about religion, in that it's a crabbed novelist who pulls the shutters down and says, there's no other thing. Don't use the word God: but something more intelligent than us... If we can't understand it, then it's formidable. And we understand very little."Recent employment
In February 2007, Martin Amis was appointed as a Professor of Creative Writing at The Manchester Centre for New Writing in the University of Manchester, and started in September 2007. He ran postgraduate seminars, and participated in four public events each year, including a two-week summer school.
Of his position, he said: "I may be acerbic in how I write but...I would find it very difficult to say cruel things to [students] in such a vulnerable position. I imagine I'll be surprisingly sweet and gentle with them."He predicted that the experience might inspire him to write a new book, while adding sardonically: "A campus novel written by an elderly novelist, that's what the world wants."It was revealed that the salary paid to Amis by the university was £80,000 a year. The Manchester Evening News broke the story claiming that according to his contract this meant he was paid £3000 an hour for 28 hours a year teaching. The claim was echoed in headlines in several national papers. As with any other member of academic staff, his teaching contact hours constituted a minority of his commitments, a point confirmed in the original article by a reply from the University. In January 2011, it was announced that he would be stepping down from his university position at the end of the current academic year.[From October 2007 to July 2011, at Manchester University's Whitworth Hall or at the Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall, Martin Amis regularly engaged in public discussions with other experts on literature and various topics (21st century literature, terrorism, religion, Philip Larkin, science, Britishness, suicide, sex, ageing, his novel The Pregnant Widow, violence, film, the short story, and America).

91. An Artist of the Floating World Kazuo Ishiguro - A collaborator from prewar Japan reluctantly discloses his betrayal of friends and family.
تدور احداث الرواية حول عميل ياباني كان يعمل قل الحرب العاملية الثانية والرواية عبارة عن كشف ما كان يفعله من خيانه لاصدقاؤه وعائلته
An Artist of the Floating World (1986) is a novel by British-Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro. It is set in post-World War II Japan and is narrated by Masuji Ono, an aging painter, who looks back on his life and how he has lived it. He notices how his once great reputation has faltered since the war and how attitudes towards him and his paintings have changed. The chief conflict deals with Ono's need to accept responsibility for his past actions. The novel attempts to ask and answer the question: what is man's role in a rapidly changing environment?
رواية من تأليف البرياطني الياباني كازو إيشيجورو
Narrative structure
In the buildup to World War II, Ono, a promising artist, broke away from the teaching of his master, whose artistic aim is to reach an aesthetic ideal, and became involved in far-right politics, making propagandistic art. As a member of the Cultural Committee of the Interior Department and official adviser to the Committee of Unpatriotic Activities, Ono became a police informer, taking an active part in an ideological witch hunt. After the 1945 defeat and the collapse of jingoistic, early twentieth-century Japan, Ono became a discredited figure, one of the "traitors" who "led the country astray", while the victims of state repression, including people Ono himself had denounced, are reinstated and allowed to lead a normal life. Over the course of the first three sections, spanning October 1948-November 1949, Ono seems to show a growing acknowledgement of his past "errors", although this acknowledgement is never explicitly stated. However, in the short fourth and last section (June 1950), Ono appears to have returned to his earlier inability to change his viewpoint.
The book is written in the first person and hinges on the exclusive use of a single, unreliable narrative voice, expressing a viewpoint which the reader identifies as limited and fallible, without any other voice or point of view acting as a test. Ono often makes it clear that he is not sure of the accuracy of his narrative, but this may either make the reader cautious or, on the contrary, suggest that Ono is very honest and therefore trustworthy. The self-image Ono expresses in his narrative is vastly different from the image of him the reader builds from reading the same narrative. Ono often quotes others as expressing admiration and indebtedness to him. Ono's narrative is characterized by denial, so that his interests and his hierarchy of values are at odds with the reader's. The reader therefore finds what they are interested in is not in the focus of Ono's narrative but at its fringes, presented in an oblique rather than frontal way. For example, Ono's descriptions of his pictures focus on pictorial technique, mentioning the subjects as if they were unimportant, although they reveal the propagandistic nature of his work. It is not necessarily clear if this focus on style rather than substance should be ascribed to Ono as narrator (showing his retrospective, unconscious embarrassment) or if it was already present in him at the time he was making the pictures (showing that totalitarianism exploits people's "ability" to restrain their consciousness to limited aspects of their actions). Similarly, when Ono narrates an episode when he was confronted with the results of his activity as a police informer, it is debatable whether his attempt to mitigate the police's brutality is a retrospective fabrication devised to avoid his responsibility, or whether he did disapprove of the treatment of the person he had denounced, dissociating himself from his actions and refusing to recognize this treatment as a direct and foreseeable consequence of his own action.
Themes
Amongst the themes explored in this novel are arranged marriage, the changing roles of women, and the lessening status of "elders" in Japanese society since World War II. The novel is narrated through the eyes of one man who, besides being an artist, is also a father, grandfather, and widower. It tells, with a strong voice, much about the "pleasure" era of Japanese society, elaborating on the life of a successful and devoted young artist in a decadent era. We learn how attitudes toward Japanese art and society became less tolerant of such extravagance, and what it was like to live with the guilt of such pleasure. The pace is slow and luscious and the language delightful, all reflecting the central theme.
Awards
The novel was shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for the same year.
Title
The novel's title is based on the literal translation of Ukiyo-e, a word referring to the Japanese art of prints. Therefore, it can be read as "a printmaker" or "an artist living in a changing world," given both Ono's limited understanding and the dramatic changes his world, Japan in the first half of the twentieth century, has undergone in his lifetime.

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An Artist of the Floating World Plot Summary
Preview of An Artist of the Floating World Summary:
An Artist of the Floating World tells the story of Masuji Ono, a Japanese artist who became a leading cultural figure in support of imperialism and Japan's involvement in World War II. In the years leading up to the war, his pro-war propaganda made Ono a highly respected artist, and he commanded a prestigious reputation in the community. Since as a young boy his father had told him he'd never amount to anything if he pursued his art, success was particularly sweet to Ono. Moreover, his first art teacher, Seiji Moriyama, also told Ono he would never amount to anything if he eschewed Moriyama's aesthetic style to paint his political works of art. On separate occasions, both his father and Moriyama went so far as to burn Ono's paintings. An Artist of the Floating World tells the story of how Ono's political life leads him to the point where he...

Kazuo Ishiguro OBE (Kazuo Ishiguro) or 石黒一雄 (Ishiguro Kazuo); born 8 November 1954) is a Japanese–Britishnovelist. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and his family moved to England in 1960.
ولد في عام 1954 في نكازاكي- اليابان، وهو روائي بريطاني من اصل ياباني وانتقلت اسرته الى بريطانيا عام 1960
Ishiguro obtained his Bachelor's degree from University of Kent in 1978 and his Master's from the University of East Anglia's creative writing course in 1980. He became a British citizen in 1982.
درس في بريطانيا وحصل على الجنسية البريطانية عام 1982
Ishiguro is one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the English-speaking world, having received four Man Booker Prize nominations, and winning the 1989 prize for his novel The Remains of the Day. In 2008, The Times ranked Ishiguro 32nd on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Recently, his novel Never Let Me Go has been adapted to film.

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki on 8 November 1954, the son of Shizuo Ishiguro, a physical oceanographer, and his wife Shizuko. In 1960 his family, including his two sisters, moved to Guildford, Surrey so that his father could work on oil development in the North Sea.
انتقلت العائلة الى بريطانيا ليتمكن والده ن العمل في حقل الفط في بحر الشمال
He attended Stoughton Primary School and then Woking County Grammar School in Surrey. After finishing school he took a 'gap year' and travelled through America and Canada, whilst writing a journal and sending demo tapes to record companies.
درس في مدارس بريطانية وبعد انهاء المدرسة الثانوية سافر الى الولايات المتحدة وكندا لمدة عام
In 1974 he began at the University of Kent, Canterbury, and he graduated in 1978 with a Bachelor of Arts (honours) in English and Philosophy. After spending a year writing fiction, he resumed his studies at the University of East Anglia where he gained a Master of Arts in Creative Writing in 1980. He became a British citizen in 1982.
بدأ دراسته الجامعية عام 1974 وانجزها عام 1978 وحصل على شهادة في اللغة الانجليزية والفلسفة
He co-wrote four of the songs on jazz singer Stacey Kent's 2009 Breakfast On the Morning Tram album. He also wrote the liner notes to Kent's 2003 album, In Love Again.

A number of his novels are set in the past. His most recent, Never Let Me Go, has science fiction qualities and a futuristic tone; however, it is set in the 1980s and 1990s, and thus takes place in a very similar yet alternate world. His fourth novel, The Unconsoled, takes place in an unnamed Central European city. The Remains of the Day is set in the large country house of an English lord in the period surrounding World War II.
An Artist of the Floating World is set in an unnamed Japanese city during the period of reconstruction following Japan's surrender in 1945. The narrator is forced to come to terms with his part in World War II. He finds himself blamed by the new generation who accuse him of being part of Japan's misguided foreign policy and is forced to confront the ideals of the modern times as represented by his grandson.
The novels are written in the first-person narrative style and the narrators often exhibit human failings. Ishiguro's technique is to allow these characters to reveal their flaws implicitly during the narrative. The author thus creates a sense of pathos by allowing the reader to see the narrator's flaws while being drawn to sympathize with the narrator as well. This pathos is often derived from the narrator's actions, or, more often, inaction. In The Remains of the Day, the butler Stevens fails to act on his romantic feelings toward housekeeper Miss Kenton because he cannot reconcile his sense of service with his personal life.
Ishiguro's novels often end without any sense of resolution. The issues his characters confront are buried in the past and remain unresolved. Thus Ishiguro ends many of his novels on a note of melancholic resignation.
غالبا ما ينهي رواياته بنهاية حزينة
His characters accept their past and who they have become, typically discovering that this realization brings comfort and an ending to mental anguish.
ابطاله يتقبلون ماضيهم وهو ما ينهي المعاناة الذهنية ويجلب الراحة
This can be seen as a literary reflection on the Japanese idea of mono no aware.

Ishiguro was born in Japan and has a Japanese name (the characters in the surname Ishiguro mean 'rock' and 'black' respectively). He set his first two novels in Japan; however, in several interviews he has had to clarify to the reading audience that he has little familiarity with Japanese writing and that his works bear little resemblance to Japanese fiction.
In a 1990 interview he said, "If I wrote under a pseudonym and got somebody else to pose for my jacket photographs, I'm sure nobody would think of saying, 'This guy reminds me of that Japanese writer.'" Although some Japanese writers have had a distant influence on his writing — Jun'ichirō Tanizaki is the one he most frequently cites — Ishiguro has said that Japanese films, especially those of Yasujirō Ozu and Mikio Naruse, have been a more significant influence.
Ishiguro left Japan in 1960 at the age of 5 and did not return until 1989, nearly 30 years later, as a participant in the Japan Foundation Short-Term Visitors Program.
غادر اليابان وهو في سن الخامسة ولم يعد اليها الا وهو في الثلاثيين
In an interview with Kenzaburo Oe, Ishiguro acknowledged that the Japanese settings of his first two novels were imaginary: "I grew up with a very strong image in my head of this other country, a very important other country to which I had a strong emotional tie. In England I was all the time building up this picture in my head, an imaginary Japan."

He was featured in the first two Granta Best of Young British Novelists: in 1983 and in 1993. He won the Whitbread Prize in 1986 for his second novel, An Artist of the Floating World. He won the Booker Prize in 1989 for his third novel, The Remains of the Day. An Artist of the Floating World, When We Were Orphans and his most recent novel, Never Let Me Go, were all short-listed for the Booker Prize. A leaked account of a judging committee's meeting revealed that the committee found itself deciding between Never Let Me Go and John Banville's The Sea before awarding the prize to the latter.[9][10]
He was appointed OBE for services to literature in 1995, and was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 1998. On Time magazine's 2005 list of the 100 greatest English language novels published since the magazine formed in 1923, Never Let Me Go was the most recent novel. In 2008, The Times named Ishiguro among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".[11]
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1989.[12]

· A Pale View of Hills (1982)
· An Artist of the Floating World (1986)
· The Remains of the Day (1989)
· The Unconsoled (1995)
· When We Were Orphans (2000)
· Never Let Me Go (2005)
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Eighteen years after his first book, A Pale View of Hills was published, Kazuo Ishiguro, thinks that he has his early success figured out. Ishiguro feels that in the early 1980s when he was arriving on the scene, publishers in Great Britain had, "a great hunger for this kind of new internationalism. After quite a long time of people being preoccupied with the English class system or the middle-class adultery novel or whatever, publishers in London and literary critics and journalists in London suddenly wanted to discover a new generation of writers who would be quite different from your typical older generation of English writer."
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Born in Nagaski in 1954, Ishiguro's family moved to England in 1960 expecting to return to Japan in a year, although they remained in Britain. Ishiguro, whose friends, he says, call him "Ish," attended the University of Kent and the University of East Anglia. On the surface, Ishiguro has achieved the perfect balance of those who immigrate at a very young age. He is, of course, Japanese. But his speech and mannerisms are absolutely British and his accent and way of speaking give away his education and upbringing as well as anything could.
It was perhaps this cultural blend that so endeared him to British publishers early on. "That's how I kind of branded myself right from the start: as somebody who didn't know Japan deeply, writing in English whole books with only Japanese characters in. Trying to be part of the English literary scene like that."
This talk of branding and fashion trends in literary scenes would be easier to swallow if Ishiguro were a different kind of writer. The fact is, every one of his five carefully crafted novels has been published to international acclaim and recognition far beyond most writer's dreams. Four of his novels have been nominated for the Booker Award -- arguably English language literature's most coveted prize -- including his third novel, The Remains of the Day which was awarded the Booker in 1989 and was made into a successful film in 1993 and his most recent novel, When We Were Orphans.
احدث رواية له تسمى " عندما كنا ايتام"
When We Were Orphans is set mainly in Shanghai prior to World War II. The protagonist and narrator is Christopher Banks, a young man who was orphaned in Shanghai when he was a child and sent back to Britain to be raised by an aunt. As an adult in London, Christopher comes to prominence as a detective and realizes he must return to Shanghai to solve the mystery that has driven him throughout his career: the disappearance of his parents.
While it's possible to set any story into a nutshell in this way, readers familiar with Ishiguro's work will realize it doesn't begin to do justice to this postmodernist writer's work. The writer himself compares aspects of When We Were Orphans to expressionist art, "where everything is distorted to reflect the emotion of the artist who is looking at the world. It's kind of like that. The whole world portrayed in that book starts to tilt and bend in an attempt to orchestrate an alternative kind of logic."

Kazuo Ishiguro lives in London with his wife Lorna and their 8-year-old daughter Naomi.
You said that you're very conscious of your international audience. I wonder if part of that might be that you have a more global or cosmopolitan view because of your own background. I know you were born in Nagasaki and that your family left Japan when you were six?
Five, actually.
And your family never intended to stay in Britain, though they did stay there. I wonder if that would help to make your outlook more global?
I don't know if it would make it more global. Certainly dual. Japanese and British. I don't know if I was particularly global in my outlook as a child. But, as a writer, almost accidentally, because I started off writing about Japan -- and I had all kinds of personal reasons for doing that -- I think I kind of unnecessarily put myself in the position of being a kind of international, if you like, quote-unquote writer. That's how I kind of branded myself right from the start: as somebody who didn't know Japan deeply, writing in English, whole books with only Japanese characters in. Trying to be part of the English literary scene like that. Part of the reason that I was able to make my career as a novelist very rapidly in Britain in the 1980s was because there was -- just at that time when I started to write -- a great hunger for this kind of new internationalism. After quite a long time of people being preoccupied with the English class system or the middle-class adultery novel or whatever, publishers in London and literary critics and journalists in London suddenly wanted to discover a new generation of writers who would be quite different from your typical older generation of English writer. And they were damned sure that that writer was going to be somebody very international who could kind of blow British culture out of its inward-looking, postcolonial post-Empire phase. In the 1980s people who were keen on literature went around carrying people like [Gabriel] Garcia Marquez in their pockets: One Hundred Years of Solitude, or Milan Kundera. They became the suddenly fashionable writers, from being utterly obscure writers.
The people writing in English -- people like Salman Rushdie -- became the new heroes. And I think I was almost kind of allowed onto the literary scene because I seemed to be an international writer. I kind of thought that was the role I was supposed to play. That's why I was there. And so I think for that reason I perhaps am very conscious of the whole international thing. But I think most writers of my generation are.
If I can paraphrase -- and tell me if I got this right -- what I just heard you say is that some of your very early success was due almost to fashion, in a way.
Fashion is perhaps putting it too superficially, but yeah: a trend. I think it's more than a fashion because it was part of a serious shift in the way the British thought.
A literary movement?
More than a literary movement. It's to do with a big shift in the way the British thought of themselves. Because you have to remember, for a long, long time Britain thought of itself as the center of a huge empire. For a long time writers who wrote English literature felt they did not need to think consciously about whether they were international or not. They could write about the smallest details of English society and it was, by definition, of interest to people in the far corners of the world because English culture itself was something that was internationally important. So they never had to think about what if somebody in Shanghai wasn't interested in how English people went about having their dinner parties in London: Well, they damn well ought to be interested. That was the attitude because that was the dominant international culture. That was the culture that was being forced or pushed onto other cultures around the world. If you wanted to know about the world for quite a lot of the last two or three centuries, you had to know about British culture.
But that finished, you see. And I think it took a little while after the end of Second World War for the British to realize this. And then suddenly, around the time when I started to write, I think people came to this realization: We're not the center of the universe. We're just this little backwater in Europe. If we want to participate in the world, culturally speaking, we've got to find out what's happening in the rest of the world. Similarly with the literature. It's no good anymore just going on about the difference between an upper middle class Englishman and his lower middle class wife, you know. That's just purely parochialism. You've got to start looking outwards and wider and we want writers and artists who can tell us how we can fit into the rest of the world. We want news from abroad. I think it was that big shift, the basic realization that Britain wasn't the heart of an Empire, but just a little -- albeit a powerful one, still -- just a little country.
American writers now are in a not dissimilar situation to English writers of the last several hundred years. You can write the most inward-looking provincial kind of American novel, because American culture is so dominant around the world. They're writing stuff of world importance. It's easier to write things that everybody should be interested in just by describing your own knee if you're American, you can write something that's very important. The rest of us can't do that.
So I think it was something deeper than just a fashion. And I think it's reflected in many aspects of British life. Literature is just one, small bit of it. The whole attitude to what "English" means has undergone a huge change since I was a child in England. | October 2000

كازو إيشيجورو
-ولد في عام 1954 في نكازاكي- اليابان، وهو روائي بريطاني من اصل ياباني وانتقلت اسرته الى بريطانيا عام 1960
-درس في بريطانيا وحصل على الجنسية البريطانية عام 1982
-انتقلت العائلة الى بريطانيا ليتمكن والده ن العمل في حقل الفط في بحر الشمال
-درس في مدارس بريطانية وبعد انهاء المدرسة الثانوية سافر الى الولايات المتحدة وكندا لمدة عام
-بدأ دراسته الجامعية عام 1974 وانجزها عام 1978 وحصل على شهادة في اللغة الانجليزية والفلسفة
-غالبا ما ينهي رواياته بنهاية حزينة
-ابطاله يتقبلون ماضيهم وهو ما ينهي المعاناة الذهنية ويجلب الراحة
-غادر اليابان وهو في سن الخامسة ولم يعد اليها الا وهو في الثلاثيين
-احدث رواية له تسمى " عندما كنا ايتام"
-يقول انه كتب عن اليابان لانه كان لديه الكثير من الاسباب الشخصية لفعل ذلك.

يكفي انه من نكزاكي لنقول انه مأزوم لكنه لا بد عانى من كونه ياباني يعيش في انجلترا.
لا نعرف تفاصيل عن طفولته لكننا يمكننا ان ندعي بأنه عاش حياة ازمة كونه ياباني عاش في الغربة.

والان مع سر الروعة في الرواية:

92 ـ أوسكار ولوسيندا، للمؤلف بيتركاري.

Main article: Oscar and Lucinda (film)
A film version released in 1997 was directed by Gillian Armstrong and starred Ralph Fiennes, Cate Blanchett, and Tom Wilkinson.

· Peter Carey discusses Oscar and Lucinda on the BBC World Book Club
· Oscar and Lucinda at the National Film and Sound Archive
· Oscar and Lucinda at IMDB

Oscar Hopkins is a high-strung preacher's kid with hydrophobia and noisy knees. Lucinda Leplastrier is a frizzy-haired heiress who impulsively buys a glass factory with the inheritance forced on her by a well-intentioned adviser. In the early parts of this lushly written book, author Peter Carey renders the seminal turning points in his protagonists' childhoods as exquisite 19th-century set pieces. Young Oscar, denied the heavenly fruit of a Christmas pudding by his cruelly stern father, forever renounces his father's religion in favor of the Anglican Church. "Dear God," Oscar prays, "if it be Thy will that Thy people eat pudding, smite him!" Lucinda's childhood trauma involves a beautiful doll bought by her struggling mother with savings from the jam jar; in a misguided attempt to tame the doll's unruly curls, young Lucinda mutilates her treasure beyond repair. Neither of these coming-of-age stories quite explains how the grownup Oscar and Lucinda each develop a guilty passion for gambling. Oscar plays the horses while at school, and Lucinda, now an orphaned heiress, finds comfort in a game of cards with an odd collection of acquaintances. When the two finally meet, on board a ship bound for New South Wales, they are bound by their affinity for risk, their loneliness, and their awkwardly blossoming (but unexpressed) mutual affection. Their final high-stakes folly--transporting a crystal palace of a church across (literally) godforsaken terrain--strains plausibility, and events turn ghastly as Oscar plays out his bid for Lucinda's heart. Yet even the unconvincing plot turns are made up for by Carey's rich prose and the tale's unpredictable outcome. Although love proves to be the ultimate gamble for Oscar and Lucinda, the story never strays too far from the terrible possibility that even the most thunderstruck lovers can remain isolated in parallel lives.

Peter Philip Carey (born 7 May 1943) is an Australian novelist and short story writer. He is one of only two writers, the other being South African–born J. M. Coetzee, to have won the Booker Prize twice. He won his first in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda, and won for the second time in 2001 with True History of the Kelly Gang.[1] In May 2008 he was also nominated for the "Best of the Booker Prize".
روائي استرالي ولد عام 1943
Carey has won the Miles Franklin Award three times. He is frequently named as Australia's next contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
He collaborated on the screenplay of the film Until the End of the World with Wim Wenders. Currently, he is the executive director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York.[4]

Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, in 1943. His parents ran a General Motors dealership, Carey Motors. He attended Bacchus Marsh State School from 1948 to 1953, then boarded at Geelong Grammar School between 1954 and 1960 before graduating.
درس في مدرسة داخلية من عام 1954 وحتى عام 1960
In 1961, Carey enrolled in a science degree program at Monash University in Melbourne, majoring in Chemistry and Zoology, but cut short his study due to a car accident and a lack of interest in his studies.
لم يكمل دراسته الجامعية بسبب حادث سيارة وفقدانه الحافز للدراسة
In 1962, he began to work in advertising. He worked at various Melbourne advertising agencies between 1962 and 1967, and worked on campaigns for Volkswagen and Lindeman's Winery, among many others. It was his advertising work that brought him into contact with the writers Barry Oakley and Morris Lurie who introduced him to recent European and American fiction. Carey married his first wife, Leigh Weetman in 1964.
During this time, he read widely, particularly the works of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and William Faulkner, and began writing on his own in 1964. By 1968, he had written a number of unpublished manuscripts including novels entitled Contacts, The Futility Machine and Wog, as well as a short story collection. Several of these manuscripts were accepted by a publisher, but later rejected.
In the late 1960s, he travelled through Europe and parts of the Middle East, ending up in London in 1968, where he worked in advertising once again. Returning to Australia in 1970, he continued to work in advertising in Melbourne and Sydney.
في نهاية عام 1960 سافر الى اوروبا والشرق الاوسط وسافر الى لندن عام 1968 حيث عمل لشركة دعاية اعلان

While working in advertising, Carey wrote and published a number of short stories in magazines and newspapers such as Meanjin and Nation Review. Most of these were published in The Fat Man In History (1974). In 1974, he divorced Weetman and moved to Balmain in Sydney to work for Grey's Advertising Agency.
In 1976, Carey moved to Queensland and joined an 'alternative community' named Starlight in Yandina, north of Brisbane. He would write for three weeks, then spend the fourth week working in Sydney. It was during this time that he wrote most of the stories collected in War Crimes, as well as Bliss, his first published novel. During the 1970s and 1980s, he lived with the painter, Margot Hutcheson.
Carey started his own advertising agency in 1980, the Sydney-based McSpedden Carey Advertising Consultants, in partnership with Bani McSpedden. In 1981, he moved to Bellingen in northern New South Wales. He married theatre director Alison Summers in 1985, and some time around 1990 sold his share of McSpedden Carey and moved to New York, during the writing of The Tax Inspector.

Carey moved to New York in 1990/1991 with his wife and his son to teach creative writing at New York University (NYU). Carey and Alison Summers have since divorced and Carey now lives with the British-born publisher Frances Coady.
In 1998, he provoked controversy by declining an invitation to meet Queen Elizabeth II after winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Jack Maggs, many believing his response to be motivated by his Australian Republican beliefs, though he cited family and personal reasons at the time. Carey later said he had asked for the meeting to be postponed, and indeed the meeting was rescheduled by the Palace. He has been awarded three honorary degrees and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Australian Academy of Humanities and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Peter Carey was born in Australia in 1943
.
He claims his birthplace of Bacchus Marsh had a population of 4,000. This fact should probably be checked.
He was educated at the local state school until the age of eleven and then became a boarder at Geelong Grammar School. He was a student there between 1954 and 1960 — after Rupert Murdoch had graduated and before Prince Charles arrived.
In 1961 he studied science for a single unsuccessful year at Monash University. He was then employed by an advertising agency where he began to receive his literary education, meeting Faulkner, Joyce, Kerouac and other writers he had previously been unaware of. He was nineteen.
For the next thirteen years he wrote fiction at night and weekends, working in many advertising agencies in Melbourne, London and Sydney.
After four novels had been written and rejected The Fat Man in History — a short story collection — was published in 1974. This slim book made him an overnight success.
From 1976 Carey worked one week a month for Grey Advertising, then, in 1981 he established a small business where his generous partner required him to work only two afternoons a week. Thus between 1976 and 1990, he was able to pursue literature obsessively. It was during this period that he wrote War Crimes, Bliss, Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda. Illywhacker was short listed for the Booker Prize. Oscar and Lucinda won it. Uncomfortable with this success he began work on The Tax Inspector.
In 1990 he moved to New York where he completed The Tax Inspector. He taught at NYU one night a week. Later he would have similar jobs at Princeton, The New School and Barnard College. During these years he wrote The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Jack Maggs, and True History of the Kelly Gang for which he won his second Booker Prize.
In 2003 he joined Hunter College as the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. In the years since he has written My Life as a Fake, Theft, and His Illegal Self.
He is at work on a new novel.

Peter Carey, The Art of Fiction No. 188
Interviewed by Radhika Jones

When I arrived at Peter Carey’s apartment on a chilly March morning for the first of the two conversations that make up this interview, Carey took my coat and hung it up. When we met again ten days later, he gestured toward the closet and said, “You know where the hangers are.” He is a casual man, usually found in jeans and sneakers, and given to genial profanity. For much of our four hours of conversation he reclined in his chair, his feet up on the kitchen table. But if his posture was laid-back, his expression was lively, and he laughed frequently. When talk turned to his childhood in Australia, he hopped up to show me family photographs—of his grandfather, Robert Graham Carey, an aviator, posing in a monoplane in Adelaide in 1917; and of Carey Motors, the car dealership Carey’s parents ran in Ballarat, near the small town of Bacchus Marsh, where he was born in 1943. From a kitchen drawer Carey produced a fistful of comment slips from his boarding-school days, which he displayed with self-deprecatory glee. “Very hard-working,” wrote his house master at Geelong Grammar School, in 1960. “Very intense and serious-minded. He needs to have his leg pulled and learn to laugh at himself. It may be better to concentrate on the Pure Maths next term.”
Carey has instead concentrated on fiction, with prodigious results. Since 1974 he has published two collections of stories, nine novels, a children’s book, and several short works of nonfiction, and he is one of only two novelists to have been awarded the Booker Prize twice: first for Oscar and Lucinda (1988), the story of two Victorian-era misfits for whom gambling becomes a bond of love; and then for True History of the Kelly Gang (2000)—which sold two million copies worldwide—a novel in the form of a letter from Australia’s outlaw-hero Ned Kelly, horse thief and bank robber, who was hanged at the age of twenty-six. In his recent novels Carey has explored the intersection of creativity and deception. My Life as a Fake (2003) was inspired by a notorious Australian poetry hoax. And in Theft: A Love Story, which was published this May, Carey intertwines the voices of an Australian painter, Michael “Butcher” Boone, and his mentally disabled brother, Hugh, as they navigate an international art world marked by forgery and fraud.
In 1990 Carey moved to New York, where he has lived since. For his last few novels, he has had drafts bound into what he calls “working notebooks.” The first one, made for The Kelly Gang, was “huge, heavy, and annoying to carry through the bush”; the more recent ones use lighter paper with wide margins for notes. The pages are rough (“I type so badly, it’s appalling,” he said), with passages highlighted to indicate where further research is necessary; the margins hold chapter plans and plot points, calendars and timelines, and occasionally pasted-in postcards—anything relevant to the story in progress. Though the notebooks speak to Carey's talent for weaving history and legend into his own richly invented worlds, they also illustrate his editorial rigor. “For a writer,” he says, “the greatest thing is to be able to pare away.”

INTERVIEWER

You were raised in small-town Australia—your parents ran an automobile dealership and sent you to Geelong Grammar, the country’s most prestigious prep school. What did they think when you told them you were a writer?

PETER CAREY

I didn’t tell them. I got a job in advertising. So even though I was writing,
I was always supporting myself. That’s the thing that would matter for my father, who was absolutely a creature of the Great Depression. He would worry every time I got a raise. He’d think, Well, Peter can’t be worth all that money, he’ll be the first to be fired. When I finally began to publish, my father never read my work. He’d say, Oh, that’s your mother’s sort of thing. But my mother found the books rather upsetting. I figure she read just enough to know that she didn’t want to go there. I don’t think my brother read my books, but he may have started recently. My sister was the only one who read me.
None of it had to do with disapproval. My mother and father were very proud of my success. Mind you, by the time I won the Booker Prize my mother’s mind had started to wander a little. I’d gone to London, and I called her and said, Mum, you remember that prize? Oh yes, dear, she said. I said, I’ve won it! Oh, that’s good, dear. There were some people here from your work. I said, What work? I don’t know, she said—they had cameras.
A tabloid television crew had arrived at her doorstep. It was some crappy TV show. They said to her, Mrs. CAREY, you must be really pleased! Oh yes, she said, Peter always was special. They said, Did he ring you? And my mother said, Ring me? Why would he ring me? He never rings me.

INTERVIEWER

They sound like regular parents. How did they come to send you to this fancy boarding school?

CAREY

My father left school at the age of fourteen, so this was a man with no deep experience of formal education. My mother was the daughter of a poor schoolteacher—well, that’s a tautology—a country schoolteacher. I think she might have gone one year to a sort of posh school, but she would have been noticeably not well off. So you have to imagine these two people, my parents, in this little town, working obsessively hard in this small-time car business. The local high school was not particularly distinguished—I think it stopped at a certain level—and my mother was a working mother. Geelong Grammar? Because it was the best. It cost six hundred pounds a year in 1954, which was an unbelievable amount of money—and they really weren’t that well off—and they did it. So I think she thought they were doing the very best thing they could do. I suppose it did solve a few child-care problems. I never felt I was being exiled or sent away, but I was only eleven years old. No one could have guessed that the experience would finally produce an endless string of orphan characters in my books.
يصف دراسته في المدرسة الداخليه بأنها كانت السبب في انه انتج عدد لا نهائي من الروايات التي تتحدث عن الايتام فهو يعتبر ابتعاده عن ذوية في سن الحادية عشره نوع من اليتم الذي سبب له الالم الشديد وكان وراء كتاباته عن الايتام

INTERVIEWER

Is that where they come from—your boarding-school experience?

CAREY

Well, it took me ages to figure that out. I thought the orphans were there because it’s just easier—you don’t have to invent a complicated family history. But I think in retrospect that it’s not a failure of imagination. I’m writing a book now about an orphan. But it’s also the story of Australia, which is a country of orphans.
I have the good fortune that my own personal trauma matches my country’s great historical trauma. Our first fleet was cast out from “home.” Nobody really wanted to be there. Convicts, soldiers were all going to starve or survive together. Later, the state created orphans among the aboriginal population through racial policies, stealing indigenous kids from their communities and trying to breed out their blackness. Then there were all these kids sent from England to Dr. Barnardo’s Homes, which were institutions for homeless and destitute children, some of them run in the most abusive, horrible circumstances. There was one near us in Bacchus Marsh called Northcote Farm. This continued until almost 1970.

INTERVIEWER

Was that experience—of being sent off to school, of being orphaned in that way—what made you think of becoming a writer?

CAREY

Good God, no. I thought I would be an organic chemist. I went off to university, and when I couldn’t understand the chemistry lectures I decided that I would be a zoologist, because zoologists seemed like life-loving people. They looked at art, they read poetry. But I was faking my physics experiments, which is very exhausting. You’d think it’s easy enough to start with the answer and work backwards, but my experimental method was terrible. Then I fell in love and everything went to hell. Then I had a very bad car accident, which I thought was a gift from God—because it was just before final exams. I remember waking up in the wreck, my scalp peeled back, blood pouring down my face, and thinking, Fantastic, I’ve got an excuse to fail.

INTERVIEWER

What happened?

CAREY

The bastards gave me supplementary examinations. So there was no escape. But I failed all of those as well, and then I had to get a job. I finally found a job at an advertising agency. It was a strange agency, as it turns out—full of writers and artists and run by a former member of the Communist Party. It sounds ridiculous, but I worked at three different agencies all run by former Communists. If you think about it, it’s not so strange. It was Australia, not the U.S. It was after the war, and they were young intellectuals of the left. In my first job I worked alongside a man named Barry Oakley, an English teacher in his thirties who had come into advertising to support his wife and six children. He was certainly startled to find himself where he was. But he was writing every day, and he ended up being the literary editor of an Australian newspaper and also a distinguished playwright and novelist. There were also some good painters. None of us were real copywriters. I don’t think I got a single piece of copy accepted all the time I worked there. We used to write copy all day, but then our boss would come down from meetings and put on his cardigan, which was a sign that he was going to be creative, and he would rewrite everything we’d done. So Barry and I were a little hysterical because we couldn’t imagine why we were not being fired.

INTERVIEWER

What did you get out of the experience?

CAREY

I was put into an environment where people were writing and talking about books. Geelong Grammar was known as a “good school,” but this reputation turned out to be more about class than anything else. My education really began at this little advertising agency. I started to read. I read all sorts of things in a great huge rush. James Joyce and Graham Greene and Jack Kerouac and William Faulkner, week after week. No nineteenth-century authors at all. No Australian authors, because I thought they were worthless, of course—that’s good colonial self-hatred. I read haphazardly but with great passion. I would sit there earnestly annotating Pound’s Cantos, for instance, almost building a wall between myself and the possibility of reading them.

INTERVIEWER

How did you make the shift from reading voraciously to thinking that you could do this yourself?

CAREY

If you don’t know anything, you don’t know how difficult it is. I looked at Barry and the others tapping away and thought, If they can do it, I can do it. Also, all of my friends were still at university. They weren’t exactly Marxists, but they did have a good old-style repugnance for trade, advertising in particular. So my choice of employment was subjected to some intensely moral weather. I would go to parties and people would ask what I was doing and I would say, I work in advertising, but I am also writing a novel. There was a redemptive aspect to it. I went to work in 1962, and by ’64 I was writing all the time, every night and every weekend. It didn’t occur to me that, having read nothing and knowing nothing, I was in no position to write a book. I wish I could say I was the last person to suffer from this misunderstanding.

بيتركاري
- روائي استرالي ولد عام 1943
- درس في مدرسة داخلية من عام 1954 وحتى عام 1960
- لم يكمل دراسته الجامعية بسبب حادث سيارة وفقدانه الحافز للدراسة
- في نهاية عام 1960 سافر الى اوروبا والشرق الاوسط وسافر الى لندن عام 1968 حيث عمل لشركة دعاية اعلان
- يصف دراسته في المدرسة الداخليه بأنها كانت السبب في انه انتج عدد لا نهائي من الروايات التي تتحدث عن الايتام فهو يعتبر ابتعاده عن ذوية في سن الحادية عشره نوع من اليتم الذي سبب له الالم الشديد وكان وراء كتاباته عن الايتام
- اصيب اصابة بليغة في حادث سيارة وهو في الجامعة
يرى بأن السبب الوحيد الذي يبرر كتابته لعدد من الروايات التي تدور احداثها حول ايتام انه انتقل وهو في سن الحادية عشرة للعيش في مدرسة داخلية حيث يعتبر ذلك يتم ترك اثره على شخصيته وذهنه.
يتيم اجتماعي بسبب المدرسة الداخلية

93 ـ كتاب الضحكوالنسيان، للمؤلف ميلان كونديرا.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Czech: Kniha smíchu a zapomnění) is a novel by Milan Kundera, published in 1979. It is composed of seven separate narratives united by some common themes. The book considers the nature of forgetting as it occurs in history, politics and life in general. The stories also contain elements found in the genre of Magical Realism.

The first section occurs in 1971 and pertains to the story of Mirek, a former supporter now found to be treasonous, as he explores the depths of his memories pertaining to one woman named Zdena. In his attempt to better his life, knowing that he loved the ugly woman left a blemish, and it was his hope to rectify this through destroying love letters that he had sent her. While he travels to her home and back, he is followed by two men, one of whom is described as "a man in a gray jacket, white shirt and tie, and brown slacks." The men make their intentions obvious, even so far as sharing a laugh with Mirek when he manages to lose their tracking thanks to a sports car. Mirek is arrested at his home after several items are confiscated and then sentenced to jail for six years, his son to two years, and ten or so of his friends to terms of from one to six years.
Kundera also describes a photograph from 21 February 1948, where Vladimír Clementis stands next to Klement Gottwald. When Vladimír Clementis was charged in 1950, he was erased from the photograph (along with the photographer Karel Hájek) by the state propaganda. [1][2] This short example from Czechoslovak history underlines the motif of forgetting in his book.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Novel, 1978
English translation by Michael Henry Heim
Review by JOHN UPDIKE
his book, as it bluntly calls itself, is brilliant and original, written with a purity and wit that invite us directly in; it is also strange, with a strangeness that locks us out. The strangeness of, say, Donald Bartheleme or Barry Hannah derives from shifts in a culture that, even if we do not live in Manhattan or come from Mississippi, is American and therefore instinctively recognizable. These authors ring willful changes and inversions upon forms with which we, too, have become bored, and the lines they startle us with turn out to be hitherto undiscerned lines in our own face.
But the mirror does not so readily give back validation with this playful book, more than a collection of seven stories yet certainly no novel, by an expatriate Czech resident in France, fascinated by sex, and prone to sudden, if graceful, skips into autobiography, abstract rumination, and recent Czech history.
Milan Kundera, he tells us, was as a young man among that moiety of Czechs--"the more dynamic, the more intelligent, the better half"--who cheered the accession of the Communists to power in February 1948. He was then among the tens of thousands rapidly disillusioned by the harsh oppressions of the new regime: "And suddenly those young, intelligent radicals had the strange feeling of having sent something into the world, a deed of their own making, which had taken on a life of its own, lost all resemblance to the original idea, and totally ignored the originators of the idea. So those young, intelligent radicals started shouting to their deed, calling it back, scolding it, chasing it, hunting it down."
Kundera, the son of a famous pianist, worked--the book jacket tells us--as a laborer and jazz musician under the Communist regime, and "ultimately chose to devote himself to literature and film. In the 60's he was named professor at the Prague Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies, where his students, notably Milos Forman, were the creators of the Czech New Wave in films." When the gallant Czech attempt at "socialism with a human face" under Alexander Dubcek was crushed by the Russian invasion of Aug. 21, 1968, Kundera was erased from his country's official cultural life. By 1975 even his underground existence within his native country had become intolerable and he emigrated to France. In 1979, the Czech Government, responding to the publication in France of "Le livre du rire et de l'oubli," revoked his Czech citizenship.
So Kundera is an Adam driven from Eden again and again--first, from the socialist idyll of his youthful imagining, then from the national attempt to reclaim that idyll in the brief "Prague Spring" of 1968, and then from the Russian-dominated land itself, and lastly from the bare rolls of citizenship. Such a profound and jagged fall makes the life histories of most American writers look as stolid as the progress of a tomato plant, and it is small wonder that Kundera is able to merge personal and political significances with the ease of a Camus.
For instance, the theme of forgetting is masterfully, effortlessly ubiquitous. On the official level, erasure achieves comic effects. The comrade named Clementis who solicitously placed his own cap upon Klement Gottwald's head on the cold day of party annunciation in 1948 was hanged four years later, and airbrushed out of all propaganda photographs, so that "All that remains of Clementis is the cap on Gottwald's head." The president the Russians installed after Dubcek, Gustav Husak "is known as the president of forgetting.." Official forgetting is echoed by the personal struggle of the subjects of so revisable a government to recover lost letters, to remember details that give life emotional continuity. The expatriate native of Prague called Tamina, in the central and perhaps best of these disparate though linked chapters, recites to herself all the pet names by which her dead husband ever had called her, and, less and less able to remember his face, resorts to a desperate exercise: ". . .she developed her own special technique of calling him to mind. Whenever she sat across from a man, she would use his head as a kind of sculptor's armature. She would concentrate all her attention on him and remodel his face inside her head, darkening the complexion, adding freckles and warts, scaling down the ears, and coloring the eyes blue. But all her efforts only went to show that her husband's image had disappeared for good."
As another holdout, Mirek, puts it, "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against oblivions." He needs to recover some lost letters for quite another reason than Tamina, who wishes to destroy the letters that he, when a party enthusiast, wrote his mistress of those naÔve days, Zdena. She has remained loyal to their youthful orthodoxy, even to supporting the Russian invasion of 1968. But he quite misses the point of her fidelity to the party--that it is fidelity to him and their old love: "What seemed to be political fanaticism was only an excuse, a parable, a manifesto of fidelity, a coded plaint of unrequited love." Throughout these stories of life under Communism, motives are frequently quite mistaken, and emotions of extreme inappropriateness arise. Every life is lobotomized by the severances of tyranny.
Of course, there is comedy here. "Laughable Loves," coming from a Communist state (published in 1969), seemed perhaps even funnier and sexier than it was, like jokes in a courtroom. We were cheering him on. But the theme of laughter, as developed by Kundera in these later stories, is elaborated to the point where it can no longer be felt as laughter. He is deft and paradoxical but too heavy-hearted to be a funny writer' nor can he bring to his heavy-heartedness that touch of traditional religious resignation which converts depression to the cosmic humor of Kafka, or Bruno Schulz, or the early Malamud, or Gogol. Kundera in comparison is a child of the Enlightenment, and what mysteries exist for him occur on the plane of the psychological and the sexual. There is more analysis of laughter--specified as "a wobbly, breathy sound in the upper reaches of [the] vocal register"--than laughter itself. A certain mechanical liveliness, as of French farce, attends the scenes of group sex: In "Mother," the hero's visiting elderly mother unwittingly blunders back into the living room where her son is about to commence entertaining his wife and another scantily clad woman at once; in "The Border," a zealous orgy hostess vigilantly enforces multiple contacts upon couples threatening to find happiness in a corner by themselves.
Sex is sad for Kundera, at bottom, and laughter is cruel. His book's final image is of a group of doctrinaire, self-congratulatory nudists on the (presumably French) beach, "their naked genitals staring duly, sadly, listlessly at the yellow sand." The proclaimed personal freedoms of the West are no liberation for him. The hero of this final episode, named Jan, has earlier reflected that the Jews had gone to the gas chambers in naked groups, and that "nudity is a shroud." And while still a child, Jan had studied a picture of a naked woman and had "dreamed of a creature with a body offering ten or twenty erotic regions", hence, "when he was still very much a virgin, he knew what it meant to be bored with the female body." The keenest moment of sexual desire, for a male, in this "Book of Laughter and Forgetting" occurs when Kundera's autobiographical hero, without the guise of another name, is closeted with a young woman who has jeopardized her own career as editor by giving him some secret assignments, now discovered. She is composed in manner but keeps going to the bathroom. "And now suddenly the butcher knife of fear had slit her open. She was as open to me as the carcass of a heifer slit down the middle and hanging on a hook. There we were, sitting side by side on a couch in a borrowed apartment, the gurgling of the water filling the empty toilet tank in the background, and suddenly I felt a violent desire to make love to her. Or to be more exact, a violent desire to rape her. To throw myself on her and take possession of her with all her intolerably exciting contradictions, her impeccable outfits, her rebellious insides, her reason and her fear, her pride and her misery."
Against the memory of such surges of violation and exposure, which the pressures of the Communist world make possible, the public nudity of the West of course must seem tame. As to the women of Kundera's world, sex is best when it is soulless. Undergoing the charade of triadic sex, the sensitive, jealous Marketa imagines that her husband is headless: "The minute she severed the head from his body, she felt the new and intoxicated touch of freedom. The anonymity of their bodies was sudden paradise, paradise regained." And Tamina, in the second story called "The Angels," sexually beset by a band of children, because for the first time in her life her body had taken pleasure in the absence of the soul, which imagining nothing and remembering nothing, had quietly left the room." In short, pleasure demands suicide of a sort." "Or to put it another way, sexuality freed from its diabolical ties with love had become a joy of angelic simplicity."
The angels in Milan Kundera's complex universe of disjunction are malevolent. These children end by tormenting Tamina and goading her to the death by drowning she had, earlier, sought in vain. In the first story called "The Angels," they dance in the streets of Prague to celebrate some political murders; they dance in circles until they rise into the sky. The angels are the unfallen from the Communist faith; Kundera once danced in their circle, and remembers their bliss. Angels are the heralds of "uncontested. . .meaning on earth"; once fallen from their circle, one never stops falling, "deeper," Kundera tells us, "away from my country and into the void of a world resounding with the terrifying laughter of the angels that covers my every word with its din."
Kundera's prose presents a surface like that of a shattered mirror, where brightly mirroring fragments lie mixed with pieces of lusterless silvering. The Communists idyll he youthfully believed in seems somehow to exist for him still, though mockingly and excludingly. He never asks himself---the most interesting political question of the century--why a plausible and necessarily redistribution of wealth should, in its Communist form, demand such an exorbitant sacrifice of individual freedom? Why must the idyll turn, not merely less than idyll, but nightmare? Kundera describes the terrors and humiliations of the intellectual under totalitarianism, with crystalline authority, yet for all he tells us these barbarities are rooted in the sky, in whims beyond accounting. He keeps ploughing his earthly material back into the metaphors of laughter and forgetting, of angels and children. Tamina, he states, is the book's "main character and main audience, and all the others are variations on her story and come together in her life as in a mirror." Yet in her final appearance she seems allegorized into nothing, and the episode almost whimsical. As in the case of Nabokov, a private history of fracture and outrage is rendered kaleidoscopic by the twists of a haughty artistic will--without, however, Nabokov's conviction that art, the reality we extract from reality, is sufficiently redeeming.
The position of a writer from the Socialist world in the West cannot but be uncomfortable. He cannot but despise us for our cheap freedoms, our more subtle enslavements; and we it may be, cannot but condescend to his discovery, at such heavy cost to his life, of lessons that Messrs. Churchill and Truman so roundly read to us 35 years ago. Survival tactics vary. Solzhenitsyn in Vermont builds a little iron curtain of his own and continues to thunder as if he were still imprisoned in Russia. Joseph Brodsky, the most aloof and metaphysical of dissidents in his Leningrad years, is becoming, amazingly, an American poet. Kundera--who moved, after all, only a few hundred kilometers west, and who unlike many expatriates had enjoyed considerable artistic success and prestige in his own country--seems, five years out, in a middling position. He is crossing that border he describes, to the side that men dread, "where the language of their tortured nation would sound as meaningless as the twittering of birds." A meaning once omnipresent is gone. A habit of vision developed in one context is being broken in another. The sexual descriptions, both tender and shrewd, that had an effect of subversives comment within the Czech context have a somewhat jaded, hollow ring out of it. In "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" a work of social realism and protest coexists with a brittleness, an angelic mockery that, amid much melancholy remembrance and shrewd psychology, makes us uncomfortable

Milan Kundera, born 1 April 1929, is a writer of Czech origin who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1981. He is best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke. Kundera has written in both Czech and French. He revises the French translations of all his books; these therefore are not considered translations but original works. His books were banned by the Communist regimes of Czechoslovakia until the downfall of the regime in the Velvet Revolution of 1989.
روائي من تشيكوسلفاكيا ولد عام 1029 عاش في المنفى منذ عام 1975

Kundera was born in 1929 at Purkyňova ulice, 6 (6 Purkyňova Street) in Brno, Czechoslovakia, to a middle-class family. His father, Ludvík Kundera (1891–1971), once a pupil of the composer Leoš Janáček, was an important Czech musicologist and pianist who served as the head of the Janáček Music Academy in Brno from 1948 to 1961.
مات ابوه عام 1971
Milan learned to play the piano from his father; he later studied musicology and musical composition. Musicological influences and references can be found throughout his work; he has even gone so far as to include musical notation in the text to make a point. Kundera is a cousin of Czech writer and translator Ludvík Kundera. He belonged to the generation of young Czechs who had had little or no experience of the pre-war democratic Czechoslovak Republic. Their ideology was greatly influenced by the experiences of World War II and the German occupation. Still in his teens, he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia which seized power in 1948. He completed his secondary school studies in Brno at Gymnázium třída Kapitána Jaroše in 1948. He studied literature and aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague. After two terms, he transferred to the Film Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where he first attended lectures in film direction and script writing.
In 1950, his studies were briefly interrupted by political interferences. He and writer Jan Trefulka were expelled from the party for "anti-party activities." Trefulka described the incident in his novella Pršelo jim štěstí (Happiness Rained On Them, 1962). Kundera also used the incident as an inspiration for the main theme of his novel Žert (The Joke, 1967). After Kundera graduated in 1952, the Film Faculty appointed him a lecturer in world literature. In 1956 Milan Kundera was readmitted into the Party. He was expelled for the second time in 1970. Kundera, along with other reform communist writers such as Pavel Kohout, were partly involved in the 1968 Prague Spring. This brief period of reformist activities was crushed by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Kundera remained committed to reforming Czech communism, and argued vehemently in print with fellow Czech writer Václav Havel, saying, essentially, that everyone should remain calm and that "nobody is being locked up for his opinions yet," and "the significance of the Prague Autumn may ultimately be greater than that of the Prague Spring." Finally, however, Kundera relinquished his reformist dreams and moved to France in 1975. He taught for a few years in the University of Rennes.[2][3] He was stripped of Czechoslovak citizenship in 1979; he has been a French citizen since 1981.[4]
He maintains contacts with Czech and Slovak friends in his homeland, but rarely returns and always does so incognito.

Although his early poetic works are staunchly pro-communist, his novels escape ideological classification. Kundera has repeatedly insisted on being considered a novelist, rather than a political or dissident writer. Political commentary has all but disappeared from his novels (starting specifically after The Unbearable Lightness of Being) except in relation to broader philosophical themes. Kundera's style of fiction, interlaced with philosophical digression, greatly inspired by the novels of Robert Musil and the philosophy of Nietzsche,] is also used by authors Alain de Botton and Adam Thirlwell. Kundera takes his inspiration, as he notes often enough, not only from the Renaissance authors Giovanni Boccaccio and Rabelais, but also from Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding, Denis Diderot, Robert Musil, Witold Gombrowicz, Hermann Broch, Franz Kafka, Martin Heidegger, and perhaps most importantly, Miguel de Cervantes, to whose legacy he considers himself most committed.
Originally, he wrote in Czech. From 1993 onwards, he has written his novels in French. Between 1985 and 1987 he undertook the revision of the French translations of his earlier works. As a result, all of his books exist in French with the authority of the original. His books have been translated into many languages.

Main article: The Joke (novel)
In his first novel, The Joke (1967), he gave a satirical account of the nature of totalitarianism in the Communist era. Kundera was quick to criticize the Soviet invasion in 1968. This led to his blacklisting in Czechoslavakia and his works being banned there.

Main article: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
In 1975, Kundera moved to France. There he published The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) which told of Czech citizens opposing the communist regime in various ways. An unusual mixture of novel, short story collection and author's musings, the book set the tone for his works in exile. Critics have noted the irony that the country that Kundera seemed to be writing about when he talked about Czechoslovakia in the book, "is, thanks to the latest political redefinitions, no longer precisely there" which is The "kind of disappearance and reappearance" Kundera explores in the book.[8]

Main article: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
In 1984, he published The Unbearable Lightness of Being, his most famous work. The book chronicled the fragile nature of the fate of the individual and theorized that a single lifetime is insignificant in the scope of Nietzsche's concept of eternal return, because in an infinite universe, everything is guaranteed to recur infinitely. In 1988, American director Philip Kaufman released a film version of the novel.

Main article: Immortality (novel)
In 1990, Kundera published Immortality. The novel, his last in Czech, was more cosmopolitan than its predecessors. Its content was more explicitly philosophical, as well as less political. It would set the tone for his later novels.

Kundera's characters are often explicitly identified as figments of his own imagination, commenting in the first-person on the characters in entirely third-person stories. Kundera is more concerned with the words that shape or mould his characters than with the characters' physical appearance. In his non-fiction work, The Art of the Novel, he says that the reader's imagination automatically completes the writer's vision. He, as the writer, wishes to focus on the essential insofar as the physical is not critical to an understanding of the character. For him the essential may not include the physical appearance or even the interior world (the psychological world) of his characters. Other times, a specific feature or trait may become the character's idiosyncratic focus.
François Ricard suggested that Kundera conceives with regard to an overall oeuvre, rather than limiting his ideas to the scope of just one novel at a time. His themes and meta-themes exist across the entire oeuvre. Each new book manifests the latest stage of his personal philosophy. Some of these meta-themes include exile, identity, life beyond the border (beyond love, beyond art, beyond seriousness), history as continual return, and the pleasure of a less "important" life. (François Ricard, 2003) Many of Kundera's characters are intended as expositions of one of these themes at the expense of their fully developed humanity. Specifics in regard to the characters tend to be rather vague. Often, more than one main character is used in a novel, even to the extent of completely discontinuing a character and resuming the plot with a brand new character. As he told Philip Roth in an interview in The Village Voice: "Intimate life [is] understood as one's personal secret, as something valuable, inviolable, the basis of one's originality.[9]
Kundera's early novels explore the dual tragic and comic aspects of totalitarianism. He does not view his works, however, as political commentary. "The condemnation of totalitarianism doesn't deserve a novel," says Kundera. According to the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, "What he finds interesting is the similarity between totalitarianism and "the immemorial and fascinating dream of a harmonious society where private life and public life form but one unity and all are united around one will and one faith..." In exploring the dark humor of this topic, Kundera seems deeply influenced by Franz Kafka.
Kundera considers himself to be a writer without a message. For example, in the Sixty-three Words, a chapter in The Art of the Novel, Kundera recounts an episode when a Scandinavian publisher hesitated about going ahead with the publication of The Farewell Party because of the apparent anti-abortion message contained in the novel. Kundera explains that not only was the publisher wrong about the existence of such a message in the work, but, "...I was delighted with the misunderstanding. I had succeeded as a novelist. I succeeded in maintaining the moral ambiguity of the situation. I had kept faith with the essence of the novel as an art: irony. And irony doesn't give a damn about messages!"[10]
He also digresses into musical matters, analyzing Czech folk music, quoting from Leoš Janáček and Bartók. Further in this vein, he interpolates musical excerpts into the text (for example, in The Joke), or discusses Schoenberg and atonality.

Czech-French novelist, essayist, dramatist and poet, one of the major writers of the late 20th century. Kundera's most famous work is The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), which was also made into a successful movie. Kundera has brought the novel toward philosophy and incorporated essayistic elements into his writing, creating his own concept of the novel as "a feast of many courses."
"Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant." (from The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
Milan Kundera was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) into a cultured family. His father, Ludvik Kundera, was a pianist and musicologist. Kundera was educated at Charles University and at the Film Faculty of the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in Prague. Before becoming a professor of literature at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Prague, he worked as a manual laborer and as a jazz pianist.
Kundera joined the Communist Party for the first time in 1948, the year of the communist takeover. He was dispelled in 1950 after criticizing its totalitarian nature, but in the same year, according to a document found in 2008, he informed on Miroslav Dvoracek, a former pilot and purported Western spy, who was later imprisoned for 14 years. Kundera has rejected the charge. "Communism enthralled me in much the way Stravinsky, Picasso and Surrealism had," Kundera once said. In 1956, his membership was reinstated, continuing until 1970.
Until the age of 25, Kundera was more drawn to music than to literature.His first volume of poetry, Clovek zahrada širá, appeared in 1953. Posledni máj (1955) had a positive hero, the Communist militant and writer Julius Fucik, who was executed by the Nazis. These works were praised by the official cultural establishment. Although Kundera's plays were less known in the West, they were highly regarded in his homeland. The Keepers of the Keys (1962), set in a provincial town during the German occupation, has been called one of the most important plays of the post-Stalinist period. In the 1960s, Kundera grew increasingly uneasy with the policy concerning censorship. His three series of short stories, Laughable Loves (1963-69), which dealt with the themes of love, sex, and self-deception, focused on individual characteristics without attacking directly the system itself. In his review of the book Paul Theroux noted, that a "writer who keeps his sanity long enough to ridicule his oppressors, who has enough hope left to make this ridicule into satire, must be congratulated." (The New York Times, July 28, 1974)
Kundera was a member of the editorial board of Literární noviny (1956-59, 1963-68) and Literání listy (1968-69), a mouthpiece of the Prague Spring. At the age of 38, Kundera published his first novel, The Joke (1967), about how reality takes its revenge on those who play with it. The book was published on the eve of Prague Spring, when the grip of Stalinism weakened for a period. After the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, Kundera became one of the authors, whose books were removed from libraries and banned from legal publication. In 1969, Kundera was fired from his teaching post.
Since 1975, Kundera has lived in France with his wife, Vera Hrabánková. In 1981, two years after the Czech government deprived him of his citizenship, he became a French citizen. From 1975 to 1980 Kundera worked as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Rennes. In 1980 he was appointed professor at École des Hautes Études, Paris. Kundera's many awards include the Writers House prize (1961, 1969), Klement Lukes prize (1963), Czechoslovak Writers' Union prize (1968), Médicis Prize (1973), Mondello prize (1978), Commonwealth award (1984), Europa prize (1982), Los Angeles Times award (1984), Jerusalem prize (1984), Académie Française Critics prize (1987), Nelly Sachs prize (1987), Osterrichischeve state prize (1987), Independent award for foreign fiction (1991).
Kundera made his international breakthrough with The Unbearable Lightness of Being, set in 1968 Czechoslovakia, just prior to the Soviet occupation. The protagonist in the story of four relationships is a Prague surgeon Thomas, who is trapped between love and freedom, politics and eroticism. At the beginning of the novel Kundera refers to the myth of eternal return - a "life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance". But if everything recurs in the same manner ad indefinitum "the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make." Kundera asks, which one is more preferable of the opposing poles, weight or lightness? Life is Elsewhere (1973), Kundera's second novel which was immediately banned in Czechoslovakia, won the prestigious Médicis Prize. The original Czech text was published in 1979 by the émigré press run by Josef Škvorecký, Kundera's friend, who had settled in Canada in 1969. Again, the central theme is misunderstanding of reality. In the story a young Communist poet, Jaromir, who is dominated by his mother, becomes the elated servant of a Stalinist regime, and dies a meaningless death. Despite political readings of his work, Kundera has refused the label of "dissident writer" and emphasized the autonomy of art from all political ideologies. "If you cannot view the art that comes to you from Prague, Budapest, or Warsaw in any other way than by means of this wretched political code," Kundera once said, "you murder it, no less brutally that the worst of the Stalinist dogmatists."
Kundera has defined the novel as a "poetic meditation on existence." Like Robert Musil (1880-1942), Kundera uses the genre as a vehicle for reflections on the essence of the European culture. Kundera has considered Immortality (1990), which portrays such figures as Goethe and Hemingway, his most accomplished version of the "novel as a debate". Noteworthy, the architecture - or "polyphonic composition" in which the coherence of the work is achieved through thematic unity - of his early novels is mostly based on the number seven. Also Kundera's widely translated collection of essays, The Art of the Novel (1987), was divided into seven parts, as well as the essay novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979). Kundera's eighth novel, La Lenteur (1994), was written in French. In Ignorance (2000), about memory and forgetting, the homecoming of two Czech émigrés, Josef and Irena, parallels to the story of Odysseus, but with a melancholic aftertaste.

(Jan Čulík
University of Glasgow)

Milan Kundera is one of the most important contemporary Czech writers. He is one of the few Czech writers who have achieved wide international recognition. In his native Czechoslovakia, Kundera was regarded is an important author and intellectual from his early twenties. Each of his creative works and each of his contributions to the public political and cultural discourse always provoked a lively debate in the context of its time. In the first part of his creative career, Kundera was a communist, although from the inception, his fellow-believers considered him to be an unorthodox thinker. The story of his writing is a story of many Czech intellectuals of his generation: it is the story of freeing themselves of the Marxist dogma and of gaining and communicating important insights, based on the traumatic experience of life under totalitarianism in Central Europe.
The author completed his secondary school studies in Brno in 1948. He then started studying literature and aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University, but after two terms he transferred to the Film Academy, where he first attended lectures in film direction and then in script writing. In 1950, he was temporarily forced to interrupt is studies for political reasons. After graduation in 1952 he was appointed as lecturer in world literature at the Film Academy.
Kundera belonged to the generation of young Czechs who had not properly experienced the pre-war democratic Czechoslovak Republic. Their growing up was greatly influenced by the experiences of the Second World War and the German occupation. Paradoxically, the experience of German totalitarianism instilled in these young people a somewhat black-and-white vision of reality. It propelled them towards Marxism and membership of the communist party. Milan Kundera joined the ruling Czechoslovak communist party in 1948, still in his teens.
Milan Kundera is an extremely private person and he guards the details of his personal life as a secret, which is, as he says "nobody's business".
كنديرا متكتم بشكل كبير على حياته الخاصة وهو يحمي نشر اي تفاصيل عن حياته الشخصية حيث يقول ان حياتة لا تعنى احد
In doing this, he has been undoubtedly influenced by the teaching of Czech structuralism, which argues that literary texts should be perceived on their own merits, as self-contained structures of signs, without the interference of extra-literary reality.
In an interview with the British writer Ian McEwan, Kundera said: "We constantly re-write our own biographies and continually give matters new meanings. To re-write history in this sense - indeed, in an Orwellian sense - is not at all inhuman. On the contrary, it is very human." Kundera feels that it is impossible to produce an objective history of politics, just as it is impossible to produce an objective autobiography or a biography.
He strictly controls the public information about his life.
يحاول التحكم بما يصل الجمهور من معلومات عن حياته
In the latest French editions of Kundera's works, his "official biography" consists only of two sentences: "Milan Kundera was born in Czechoslovakia in 1929 and since 1975 has been living in France."
Kundera now rejects and suppresses most of his literary output produced in the 1950s and the 1960s. He asserts the right of the author to exclude from his work "immature" and "unsuccessful" pieces of writing, the way composers do this.
In Majitelé klíčů, a young couple is sharing cramped accomodation with their in-laws in a small Moravian town during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Young man Jiří Nečas and his twenty-year-old wife Alena live in one room in the small flat, while Alena's narrow-minded and pedantic parents, the Krůtas, live in another room in the same flat. The cramped conditions, the narrow-mindedness of the parents and the uncontrollably destructive emotionalism of particularly the female characters (a typical Kundera theme) are the source of conflict.
.
© Dr Jan Čulík, 2000

ميلان كونديرا

- روائي من تشيكوسلفاكيا ولد عام 1029 عاش في المنفى منذ عام 1975
-مات ابوه عام 1971 ولا يتوفر اي معلومة عن امه.
-انضم في مقتبل العمر الى الحزب الشيوعي الذي استلوى على الحكم عام 1948
-انقطع عن الدراسة في مجال الدراسة الفنية عام 1950
-طرد من الحزب بسبب نشاطاته المخالفة للحزب
-اعيد الى الحزب عام 1956
-تم طرده من جديد عام 1970
-اشترك في ربيع براغ عام 1968
-هاجر الى فرنسا عام 1975
-حصل على الجنسية الفرنسية منذ عام 1981
-فقد كونديرا وظيفته عام 1968 ،بعد الغزو السوفييتى لتشيكوسلوفاكيا ،بعد انخراطه فيما سُمى ربيع براغ،اضطر للهجرة إلى فرنسا عام 1975 بعد منع كتبه من التداول لمدة خمس سنين، وعمل استاذاً مساعداً في جامعة رين ببريتانى (فرنسا)،حصل على الجنسية الفرنسية عام 1981 بعد تقدمه بطلب لذلك بعد إسقاط الجنسية التشيكوسلوفاكية عنه عام 1978 كنتيجة لكتابته كتاب الضحك والنسيان.
-وتحت وطأة هذه الظروف والمستجدات في حياته، كتب كونديرا كائن لاتحتمل خفته التي جعلت منه كاتباً عالمياً معروفاًن لما فيها من تأملات فلسفية تنضوي في خانة فكرة العود الأبدي لنيتشة.
-كونديرا متكتم بشكل كبير على حياته الخاصة وهو يحمي نشر اي تفاصيل عن حياته الشخصية حيث يقول ان حياتة لا تعنى احد
-يحاول التحكم بما يصل الجمهور من معلومات عن حياته

94 ـ هارون وقصص البحار، للمؤلف سلمان رشدي


. 94- Haroun and the Sea of Stories Salman Rushdie - In this entrancing story Rushdie

plays with the idea of narrative itself.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a 1992 children's book by Salman Rushdie. It was Rushdie's first novel after The Satanic Verses. It is a phantasmagorical story that begins in a city so old and ruinous that it has forgotten its name.
Haroun and the Sea of Stories is an allegory for several problems existing in society today, especially in India and the Indian subcontinent. It looks at these problems from the viewpoint of the young protagonist Haroun. Rushdie dedicated this book to his son, Zafar Rushdie, from whom he was separated for some time.
It was made into an audiobook read by Rushdie himself, but the more commonly available 2002 edition of the audiobook was read by Zia Mohyeddin.

Plot summary
The novel opens in the sad city in the country of Alifbay, where Haroun Khalifa lives with his father, a famous storyteller, and his mother. One day, Haroun arrives home from school to learn that his mother has run off with his upstairs neighbor. This neighbor had often been critical of Haroun's father, Rashid, because he did not understand the usefulness of stories. In anger, Haroun assails his father for the uselessness of his stories. This crushes his father. Haroun finds it difficult to concentrate on schoolwork and so his father decides to take him on a storytelling job he is performing for some politicos in the Land of G and the Valley of K. When Rashid attempts to tell his stories, however, no words come out, and the politicos get very mad.
Haroun and Rashid board mail bus bound for the Valley of K. It is driven by a parrot-looking man named Butt who stutters and speaks in riddles. Haroun makes a deal with Butt to drive them on the dangerous road between the Land of G and the Valley of K so that his father can see the Valley of K before sunset in order to attempt to inspire him. Butt drives dangerously and Haroun is worried that he will die. When they reach the beautiful sights of the Valley of K, Rashid tells Haroun that it all reminds him of "khattam-shud," an ancient concept that means silence. When they reach K, Haroun and Rashid meet Mr. Buttoo, the politician, who takes them to his boat on the Dull Lake. As they depart on the lake, they are engulfed in a thick mist.
The mist smells very bad and Haroun realizes that it is a Mist of Misery brought on by his father's foul mood. When the sea begins to rock, Haroun tells everyone to think good thoughts, and when they do, the sea calms. Haroun and Rashid reach the yacht that will take them to their destination the next day. The yacht is very luxurious, but both Rashid and Haroun have difficulty sleeping. Just as Haroun dozes off, he hears a noise in his bedroom. He finds an old man with an onion shaped head, who disappears as soon as he sees Haroun. The old man drops a wrench, which Haroun confiscates. The old man materializes and tells Haroun he is Iff, the Water Genie, and he must have the wrench to turn off the Story Stream for his father, Rashid. When Haroun protests, Iff tells him to take it up with the Walrus in Gup City, Kahani. Haroun demands that the Water Genie take him there, and Iff reluctantly concedes in order to get his wrench back from Haroun.
The Genie tells Haroun to pick a bird and give it a name and it will materialize. He pulls out a handful of tiny magical creatures. Haroun picks the Hoopoe and Iff throws it out the window and into the water where it balloons into a huge bird. They climb on its back and accelerate into space. The Hoopoe looks like Mr. Butt, so Haroun names it Butt the Hoopoe. They are able to communicate telepathically. Butt the Hoopoe lands on the Sea of Stories of Kahani, Earth's second moon, which moves so fast it is undetectable by human instruments. it evenly distributes Story Water across the earth. They land in the ocean so that Iff can give Haroun Wishwater and hopefully bypass meeting the Walrus.
Haroun drinks the Wishwater and wishes for his father's storytelling to return. He can only focus on an image of his mother, however, and after eleven minutes, he loses his concentration. Iff then gives Haroun a cup of water from the Sea that contains a story. Haroun drinks it and then finds himself looking through the eyes of a hero in a Princess Rescue story. As the hero climbs the tower to rescue the princess, he turns into a spider and princess hacks away at him until he falls to the ground. When Haroun wakes from his story, Iff tells him that someone named Khattam-Shud is poisoning the stories.
Haroun, Butt the Hoopoe, and Iff the Water Genie fly to the Land of Gup, where they meet Mali, the Water Gardner, and the Plentimaw fishes. The entire land is preparing for war. The Chupwalas have stolen Princess Batcheat from Gup. In addition, they have polluted the Sea of Stories so that many do not make sense anymore. Prince Bolo, General Kitab, and the Walrus announce their plans for war to the Pages of the Guppee Library (or, army). They bring in a spy with a hood over his head. When the hood is removed, Haroun sees his father.
Rashid tells everyone that he transported to Kahani and was in the twilight strip when he saw the Princess Batcheat captured. The Chupwalas have come under the spell of Cultmaster Khattam-Shud who wants to sacrifice her to Bezaban, an idol to silence. Prince Bolo and General Kitab declare war on Chup and Rashid offers to guide them to the Chupwala encampment. One of the soldiers in the army, Blabbermouth, takes Haroun to his room. They become lost and Haroun knocks the hat off Blabbermouth's head. Long hair falls out and Haroun sees Blabbermouth is a girl. She then entertains him with a juggling act.
The army sails towards Chup, chattering about the causes for the war in a way that Haroun thinks might be mutinous. They enter the land of Darkness and land on the beach. They explore the interior and come upon a dark warrior fighting his own shadow in a kind of seductive dance. The man realizes he is being watched and comes to find the trespassers. The shadow begins to speak. It croaks out unintelligible words until Rashid realizes the warrior is speaking in an ancient gesture language. Rashid interprets the warrior's talk. His name is Mudra and he had been second in command in Chup. He is now fighting against Khattam-Shud in order to bring peace back to Chup. Mudra agrees to help the Guppees defeat Khattam-Shud.
Haroun volunteers to spy for the army because of his love of stories. He, Iff, Butt the Hoopoe, Mali, and the Plentimaw fishes begin to trek towards the Old Zone. The water becomes so poisonous that the fish cannot go on. The remaining crew is suddenly ambushed and captured in nets. They are taken to a giant, black ship. On the deck are cauldrons of poison. To Haroun, it looks like everything is impermanent, like a shadow. Khattam-Shud appears and he is a tiny, weasly, measly man. Haroun realizes that this is Khattam-Shud's shadow that has detached from its owner. The Cultmaster tells them that stories are inefficient and useless and that is why they are being destroyed.
The ship's hull is full of darkness and machines Too Complicated to Explain. The Cultmaster shows them where they are building a great Plug to seal the Story Source at the bottom of the Sea. Haroun sees roots growing through a port window and Mali appears, latching onto the generators and breaking the machines. Haroun breaks free, puts on a protective wetsuit, and dives down into the Sea where he sees the Plug being constructed. He returns to Butt the Hoopoe and takes out a vial of Wishwater given to him by Iff. He drinks it and wishes that the axis of Kahani would spin normally. A few minutes pass and then the entire land is bathed in sunlight. All of the shadows on the ship begin to fade away and soon everyone is free and the poison is destroyed.
In Chup, Khattam-Shud sends an ambassador to the Guppee army. The ambassador begins to juggle and pulls out a bomb. Only Blabbermouth's quick action keeps everyone from being blown up, but it is revealed that Blabbermouth is a girl in the process. Bolo tries to fire her, but Mudra asks her to be a part of his army because of her bravery. The battle between the army commences. Because the Guppees have had such open and honest communication, they fight as a team. The Chupwalas, because of their silence, distrust each other. The Guppee army overwhelms the Chupwala army. As the battle ends, there is a great earthquake and the moon begins to spin. The statue of Bezaban falls and crushes the real Khattam-Shud. Peace is declared and everyone receives a promotion within their rank. Haroun prepares to leave and is told that he must see the Walrus.
In the Walrus's office, Haroun learns that it is all a joke and that he is not in trouble. All his friends are there with him. The Walrus tells him that for his bravery he is to be given a happy ending to his story. Haroun doubts that this is possible, but he wishes for his city to no longer be sad. He wakes up back in the Valley of K where his father is preparing his political story. As he stands up to give it, his father tells the story of Haroun and the Sea of Stories. It is a story that the crowd loves and they turn against their autocratic leader, Mr. Buttoo.
When Rashid and Haroun return home, it is raining and they walk through it getting soaked. All of the people in the sad city are dancing and Haroun asks why. They claim that the city has remembered its name, Kahani, which means "story." Haroun realizes that the Walrus has put a happy ending into the raindrops. When he arrives home, he finds his mother there, telling them that she made a mistake in running off with Mr. Sengupta. The next day, Haroun awakes to find it is his birthday and his mother singing in another room in the house. The novel concludes with an appendix explaining the meaning of each major character's name.

Places
· A work of magic realism, the story begins and takes place partly in "a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad it had forgotten its name", which is located beside "a mournful sea full of glumfish, which were so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy". This city is thickly populated by people, of whom only the lead character Haroun and his parents are ever happy, while in the north of the city are factories wherein sadness is allegedly manufactured and exported. The factories produce air pollution that is only relieved during the monsoon, which also heralds the arrival of pomfret into the nearby waters.
· Most of the Earthly locations present in the book are located in the fictional nation of Alifbay, which is a combination of first two letters of the Arabic script based Urdu alphabet, Alif and Bay and therefore contains many places named after letters, such as the "Valley of K" and the "Tunnel of I (which was also known as J)".
· In the center of the Valley of K is the Dull Lake, which is said in the novel's appendix to be named after the Dal Lake in Kashmir. This implies that Kashmir is the place on which K is based. The Dull Lake itself is the location of the Moody Land, a landscape whose weather changes to reflect the emotions of the people currently present in it. It is the place where the lead characters go at the behest of a corrupt politician, and where their adventures begin.
· The larger part of the plot occurs on a fictional satellite of the Earth's, named Kahani, whose orbit is controlled by "Processes Too Complicated To Explain". These processes enable it to fly over every single point on Earth. Kahani consists of a massive Ocean which is composed of an infinite number of stories, each story taking the form of a current or stream of a unique color. The colors encompass the whole visible spectrum and extend beyond into spectra that are not known to exist. Various islands and a continent are also shown on the moon. The name "Kahani" itself means "Story" in Urdu and Hindi, and is ultimately revealed to be the name of the sad city; a revelation that removes the sadness from the city's people.
· The Moon Kahani is, throughout most of the plot, divided into two sections equal in size, one of which is kept in perpetual daylight and the other in perpetual darkness. The two are separated by a narrow strip of twilight, which is marked by a force field named Chattergy's Wall. The daylight side is called Gup, a Hindi and Urdu word (meaning "gossip", "nonsense", or "fib" in English) and the night-darkened side is called Chup (meaning "quiet"). Inhabitants of Gup value speech and are called "Guppees", meaning "talkative people", while inhabitants of Chup are stated to have historically valued silence and are called "Chupwalas", meaning "quiet fellows". The "u" in "Gup" rhymes with the "u" in "cup", the "u" in "Chup" is pronounced similarly to the "oo" in "good", and the "w" in "Chupwala" resembles a sound lying midway between the English letters "w" and "v". At the South Pole of Kahani is a spring known as the Source of Stories, from which (according to the premise of the plot) originated all stories ever communicated. The prevention of this spring's blockage therefore forms the climax of the novel's plot.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories

In Salmon Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a f*****mous storyteller Rashid Khalifa loses his gift of telling tales after ***** wife leaves him for a man who hates stories. His son Haroun goes to ***** Ocean ***** S*****ries to recover his father's lost powers. Haroun drinks from the ocean, as instructed by ***** Water Genie, but finds out that the ocean of stories is poisoned. When Haroun tries to tell a ple*****ing and ro*****tic story, ***** story suddenly is trans*****med into a nightmare. Haroun finds the source of ***** water's poisoning. He is rewarded for his ingenuity ***** the rightful King ***** Gup, whose land is now freed from the tyrant's grasp. The oppressive tyrant also poisoned the spring from which all stories come. ***** is granted a h*****ppy ending for h***** efforts. "Haroun" is a truly worldly book for, though written in English, it incorporates different dialects and even different languages into the text. The novel draws upon Indian, American, and British idioms and speech, creating a hodgepodge of ***** th*****t animates the characters' dialogue. Snooty Buttoo speaks ***** English when he says, "you will please to provide up-beat sagas only,"(49) whereas Iff uses American idioms, saying "no can do" and "no way, Jose"(59). ***** different dialects do more than give character depth, however, ***** *****y remind us of the number of English dialects, no one of which can properly claim correctness. In "*****," ***** avoids being strictly defined, *****owing a richness of l*****nguage diversity that can serve as a model for story-*****ing: by embracing different versions (in this case, ***** English) one enriches the work and provides a more *****uthentic portrayal of a wide-ranging language" (Acadedemon essay).
Haroun awakes on a houseboat, discovering that his father has ********** his power ***** storytelling once again, and ***** the boy's mother is now restored to him.
Water is a metaphor not only for the ***** and source ***** in ***** novel, but the nature of storytelling in general. All stories, regardless of their culture ***** origin, Rushdie suggests, ***** from the same source or metaphorical ocean. These ***** mingle together in the water and produce more stories. Even ***** name of the King of Gup suggests Guppy, a f*****h th*****t lives in ***** water. It is the genie ***** the water who leads Haroun to reunite h***** family. Water is fluid, un*****, ***** difficult to *****, yet it is also life-giving. This is ***** nature of the glue that holds families and entire societies together, Rushdie *****. When our stories are denied or poisoned w*****h ugliness, we lose not ***** art, ***** the essence ***** life itself. And if we believe in the possibility of ***** hav*****g happy endings, however *****realistic they may seem, there is a chance that our dreams ***** come true.
***** the story, he claims that a big title wave hinder ***** ***** doing what he wanted to do. However, w*****n he accompl*****hed his goal, he claimed ***** title wave was not t*****re at

==

This is not to say that Haroun and the Sea of Stories is strictly a parable. It isn’t. But it does pose an important question and does a bang-up job of keeping us entertained, chuckling and nibbling our nails while artfully making its point, employing language that is as fluid and marvelous as Kahani’s multicolored sea.

==

Set in an exotic Eastern landscape peopled by magicians and fantastic talking animals, Salman Rushdie’s classic children’s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories inhabits the same imaginative space as Gulliver’s Travels, Alice in Wonderland, and The Wizard of Oz. In this captivating adaptation for the stage, Haroun, a 12-year-old boy sets out on an adventure to restore the poisoned source of the sea of stories. On the way, he encounters many foes, all intent on draining the sea of all its storytelling powers.
Winner of the Writers Guild Award
“As eloquent a defense of art as any Renaissance treatise…saturated with the hyperreal color of such classic fantasies as The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland.”―Publishers Weekly

سلمان أحمد رشدي

ويسمى سلمان رشدي ولد في مدينة بومباي في 19 يونيو1947، وهو بريطاني من أصل هندي تخرج من جامعة كنج كولج في كامبردج بريطانيا، سنة 1981 حصل على جائزة بوكر الإنجليزية الهامة عن كتابه "أطفال منتصف الليل". نشر أشهر رواياته آيات شيطانية سنة 1988 وحاز عنها على جائزة ويتبيرد لكن شهرة الرواية جاءت بسبب تسببها في إحداث ضجة في العالم الإسلامي حيث اعتبر البعض أن فيها إهانة لشخص رسول الإسلام محمد.

غريموس تعتبر الرواية الأولى لسلمان رشدي ولكنها لم تحظ بأي اهتمام أو شهرة. الرواية التي اخذت الحيز الواسع من الشهرة والتقدير هي روايته الثانية أطفال منتصف الليل وبها دخل سلمان رشدي تاريخ الأدب وتعتبر اليوم أحد أهم اعماله الادبية. علماء الأدب الإنجليزي أشاروا إلى أن رواية طفل منتصف الليل أثرت بشكل كبير على شكل الأدب الهندي-الإنكليزي وتطوره خلال العقود القادمة.
بعد هذا النجاح جاء سلمان رشدي برواية جديدة بعنوان عيب وبعد هذه الرواية أصدر عمل جديد بني على تجربة شخصية وهو ابتسامة جكوار ثم تأتي اعمال أخرى كثيرة. وفي الفترة الأخيرة ظهر سلمان رشدي في دور قصير في فيلم بريدجيت جونز دايري مع رينية زيلويغر.

هو الابن الوحيد لأنيس أحمد رشدي، محامي خريج جامعة كامبردج تحول إلى رجل اعمال، ونيجين بهات، مدرسة، ولد رشدي في مومباي بالهند. تلقى تعليمه في مدرسة كاتدرائية جون كونن في مومباي، في مدرسة الرجبي، في الكلية الملكية، كامبردج حيث درس التاريخ.
عمل لدى اثنين من وكالات الاعلان (اوجلفي& ماثر وآير باركر) قبل أن يتفرغ للكتابة. تزوج رشدي أريعة مرات، أول زوجاته كانت كلارسيا لوارد من الفترة 1976 إلى 1987 وانجب منها ابنه زافار. زوجته الثانية هي ماريان ويجينز الروائية الأمريكية حيث تزوجا في عام 1988 وتم الطلاق في عام 1993. زوجته الثالثة (من 1997 إلى 2004) كانت إليزابيث ويست، انجبا ابن يدعا ميلان. في عام 2004 تزوج من الممثلة الهندية الأمريكية والموديل بادما لاكشمي. انتهى الزواج في 2 يوليو 2007 حيث صرحت لاكشمي ان نهاية الزواج كات نتيجة لرغبتها هي. في الصحافة البوليودية، كان هناك حديث في 2008 عن علاقة بينه وبين الموديل الهندية ريا سين التي كانت صديقته، وفي رد على ما جاء في وسائل الاعلام قالت ريا في تصريح لها "اعتقد حينما تكون سلمان رشدي، من المؤكد ان تصاب بالملل من الناس الذين دائما ما يتكلمون معك عن الأدب".
في عام 1999، خضع سلمان لعملية "تصحيح وتر" حيث -حسبما صرح- كان يعاني من صعوبة متزايدة في فتح عينيه. وقال" لو لم اخضع لهذه العملية لما تمكنت من فتح عيني نهائيا".

Salman Rushdie is the author of ten novels: Grimus, Midnight’s Children (which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown and The Enchantress of Florence.
He is also the author of a book of stories, East, West, and three works of non-fiction - Imaginary Homelands, The Jaguar Smile, and Step Across This Line. He is the co-editor of Mirrorwork, an anthology of contemporary Indian writing, and of the 2008 Best American Short Stories anthology.
He has adapted Midnight’s Children for the stage. It was performed in London and New York by the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 2004, an opera based upon Haroun and the Sea of Stories was premiered by the New York City Opera at Lincoln Center.
A Fellow of the British Royal Society of Literature, Salman Rushdie has received, among other honours, the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel (twice), the Writers’ Guild Award, the James Tait Black Prize, the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature, Author of the Year Prizes in both Britain and Germany, the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature, the Premio Grinzane Cavour in Italy, the Crossword Book Award in India, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the London International Writers’ Award, and the James Joyce award of University College Dublin.
He holds honorary doctorates and fellowships at six European and six American universities, is an Honorary Professor in the Humanities at M.I.T, and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University. He has received the Freedom of the City in Mexico City, Strasbourg and El Paso, and the Edgerton Prize of the American Civil Liberties Union. He holds the rank of Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters - France’s highest artistic honour.
Between 2004 and 2006 he served as President of PEN American Center, and continues to work as President of the PEN World Voices International Literary Festival, which he helped to create. In June 2007 he received a Knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. In 2008 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named a Library Lion of the New York Public Library. In addition, Midnight’s Children was named the Best of the Booker – the best winner in the award’s 40 year history – by a public vote.
His books have been translated into over forty languages. Films are currently in production of both Midnight's Children and Haroun and he Sea of Stories

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie , احمد سلمان رشدی born 19 June 1947) is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. His style is often classified as magical realism mixed with historical fiction, and a dominant theme of his work is the story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the Eastern and Western worlds.
His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was the centre of a major controversy, drawing protests from Muslims in several countries. Some of the protests were violent, in which death threats were issued to Rushdie, including a fatwā against him by AyatollahRuhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on February 14, 1989.
He was appointed a Knight Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II for "services to literature" in June 2007. He holds the rank Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France. He began a five-year term as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University in 2007. In May 2008 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2008, The Times ranked Rushdie thirteenth on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". His latest novel is Luka and the Fire of Life, published in November 2010. In 2010, he announced that he has begun writing his memoirs.
The only son of Anis Ahmed Rushdie, a Cambridge University-educated lawyer turned businessman, and Negin Bhatt, a teacher, Rushdie was born in Bombay (now known as Mumbai), India, into a Muslim family of Kashmiri descent.
من عائلة هندية مسلمة من اصل كشميري
He was educated at Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai, Rugby School, and King's College, Cambridge University where he studied history.
درس في مدرسة داخليه في الهند ثم في مدرسة داخليه في انجلترا ثم درس التاريخ في كلية كنجس وجامعة كامبرج
Rushdie has been married four times. He was married to his first wife Clarissa Luard from 1976 to 1987 and fathered a son, Zafar. His second wife was the American novelist Marianne Wiggins; they were married in 1988 and divorced in 1993. His third wife, from 1997 to 2004, was Elizabeth West; they have a son, Milan. In 2004, he married the Indian American actress and model Padma Lakshmi, the host of the American reality-television show Top Chef. The marriage ended on 2 July 2007, with Lakshmi indicating that it was her desire to end the marriage. In 2008 the Bollywood press romantically linked him to the Indian model Riya Sen, with whom he was otherwise a friend. In response to the media speculation about their friendship, she simply stated "I think when you are Salman Rushdie, you must get bored with people who always want to talk to you about literature."
In 1999, Rushdie had an operation to correct ptosis, a tendon condition that causes drooping eyelids and that, according to him, was making it increasingly difficult for him to open his eyes. "If I hadn't had an operation, in a couple of years from now I wouldn't have been able to open my eyes at all," he said.

Rushdie's first career was as a copywriter, working for the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, where he came up with "irresistibubble" for Aero and "Naughty but Nice" for cream cakes, and for the agency Ayer Barker, for whom he wrote the memorable line "That'll do nicely" for American Express. It was while he was at Ogilvy that he wrote Midnight's Children, before becoming a full-time writer.[13][14][15] John Hegarty of Bartle Bogle Hegarty has criticised Rushdie for not referring to his copywriting past frequently enough, although conceding: "He did write crap ads...admittedly."[16]

Major literary work

His first novel, Grimus, a part-science fiction tale, was generally ignored by the public and literary critics. His next novel, Midnight's Children, catapulted him to literary notability. It significantly shaped the course that Indian writing in English followed over the next decade, and is regarded by many as one of the great books of the last 100 years. This work won the 1981 Booker Prize and, in 1993 and 2008, was awarded the Best of the Bookers as the best novel to have received the prize during its first 25 and 40 years. Midnight's Children follows the life of a child, born at the stroke of midnight as India gained its independence, who is endowed with special powers and a connection to other children born at the dawn of a new and tumultuous age in the history of the Indian sub-continent and the birth of the modern nation of India. The character of Saleem Sinai has been compared to Rushdie.
After Midnight's Children, Rushdie wrote Shame (1983), in which he depicts the political turmoil in Pakistan, basing his characters on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Shame won France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book) and was a close runner-up for the Booker Prize. Both these works of postcolonial literature are characterised by a style of magic realism and the immigrant outlook that Rushdie is very conscious of as a member of the Indian diaspora.
Rushdie wrote a non-fiction book about Nicaragua in the 1980s, The Jaguar Smile (1987). The book has a political focus and is based on his first-hand experiences and research at the scene of Sandinista political experiments.
His most controversial work, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988 (see section below). Rushdie has published many short stories, including those collected in East, West (1994). The Moor's Last Sigh, a family epic ranging over some 100 years of India's history was published in 1995. The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) presents an alternative history of modern rock music. The song of the same name by U2 is one of many song lyrics included in the book, hence Rushdie is credited as the lyricist. He also wrote "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" in 1990.
Rushdie has had a string of commercially successful and critically acclaimed novels. His 2005 novel Shalimar the Clown received, in India, the prestigious Hutch Crossword Book Award, and was, in Britain, a finalist for the Whitbread Book Awards. It was shortlisted for the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
In his 2002 non-fiction collection Step Across This Line, he professes his admiration for the Italian writer Italo Calvino and the American writer Thomas Pynchon, among others. His early influences included James Joyce, Günter Grass, Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Lewis Carroll. Rushdie was a personal friend of Angela Carter and praised her highly in the foreword for her collection Burning your Boats.

Rushdie has quietly mentored younger Indian (and ethnic-Indian) writers, influenced an entire generation of Indo-Anglian writers, and is an influential writer in postcolonial literature in general.[20] He has received many plaudits for his writings, including the European Union's Aristeion Prize for Literature, the Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy), and the Writer of the Year Award in Germany and many of literature's highest honours.[21] Rushdie was the President of PEN American Center from 2004 to 2006.
He opposed the British government's introduction of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, something he writes about in his contribution to Free Expression Is No Offence, a collection of essays by several writers, published by Penguin in November 2005.

In 2006, Rushdie joined the Emory University faculty as Distinguished Writer in Residence for a five-year term.[22] Though he enjoys writing, Salman Rushdie says that he would have become an actor if his writing career had not been successful. Even from early childhood, he dreamed of appearing in Hollywood movies (which he later realized in his frequent cameo appearances).
Rushdie includes fictional television and movie characters in some of his writings. He had a cameo appearance in the film Bridget Jones's Diary based on the book of the same name, which is itself full of literary in-jokes. On 12 May 2006, Rushdie was a guest host on The Charlie Rose Show, where he interviewed Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta, whose 2005 film, Water, faced violent protests. He appears in the role of Helen Hunt's obstetrician-gynecologist in the film adaptation (Hunt's directorial debut) of Elinor Lipman's novel Then She Found Me. In September 2008, and again in March 2009, he appeared as a panelist on the HBO program "Real Time With Bill Maher".
Rushdie is currently collaborating on the screenplay for the cinematic adaptation of his novel Midnight's Children with noted director Deepa Mehta. The film will be called Midnight's Children. While casting is still in progress, Seema Biswas, Shabana Azmi, Nandita Das, and Irrfan Khan are confirmed as participating in the film. Mehta has stated that production will begin in September, 2010.
Rushdie announced in June 2011 that he had written the first draft of a script for a new television series for the U.S. cable network Showtime, a project on which he will also serve as an executive producer. The new series, to be called The Next People, will be, according to Rushie, "a sort of paranoid science-fiction series, people disappearing and being replaced by other people." The idea of a television series was suggested by his U.S. agents, said Rushdie, who felt that television would allow him more creative control than feature film. The Next People is being made by the British film production company Working Title, the firm behind such projects as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Shaun of the Dead.
Rushdie is a member of the advisory board of The Lunchbox Fund , a non-profit organization which provides daily meals to students of township schools in Soweto of South Africa. He is also a member of the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America, an advocacy group representing the interests of atheistic and humanistic Americans in Washington, D.C. In November 2010 he became a founding patron of Ralston College, a new liberal arts college that has adopted as its motto a Latin translation of a phrase ("free speech is life itself") from an address he gave at Columbia University in 1991 to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
He took on Facebook over the use of his name in 2011. He won. Rushdie had asked to use his middle name Salman, which he is most recognised by. He described his online identity crisis in a series of messages posted on Twitter, among them ""Dear #Facebook, forcing me to change my FB name from Salman to Ahmed Rushdie is like forcing J. Edgar to become John Hoover" and "Or, if F. Scott Fitzgerald was on #Facebook, would they force him to be Francis Fitzgerald? What about F. Murray Abraham?" Messages such as these were then circulated online. Facebook eventually relented and allowed him to call himself by the name is known as internationally

سليمان رشدي


Anglo-Indian novelist, who uses in his works tales from various genres – fantasy, mythology, religion, oral tradition. Rushdie's narrative technique has connected his books to magic realism, which includes such English-language authors as Peter Carey, Angela Carter, E.L. Doctorow, John Fowles, Mark Helprin or Emma Tennant.

"Insults are mysteries. What seems to the bystander to be the cruelest, most destructive sledgehammer of an assault, whore! slut! tart!, can leave its target undamaged, while an apparently lesser gibe, thank god you're not my child, can fatally penetrate the finest suits of armour, you're nothing to me, you're less than the dirt on the soles of my shoes, and strike directly at the heart." (in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 1999)

Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay, India, to a middle-class Moslem family. His paternal grandfather was an Urdu poet, and his father a Cambridge-educated businessman. At the age of fourteen Rushdie was sent to Rugby School in England.

ارسل وه في سن الرابعة عشره الى مدرسة رجبي في انجلترا

In 1964 Rushdie's parents moved to Karachi, Pakistan, joining reluctantly the Muslim exodus – during these years there was a war between India and Pakistan, and the choosing of sides and divided loyalties burdened
Rushdie heavily.
عام 1964 انتقل والديه من الهندي الى باكستان وتبع ذلك الحرب التي دارت بين الباكستان والهند وقد احس رشيد بنكبة ان عليه ان يختار في اي جانب يكون ، وكان عمره عند ذلك 17 سنه

Rushdie continued his studies at King's College, Cambridge, where he read history. After graduating in 1968 he worked for a time in television in Pakistan. He was an actor in a theatre group at the Oval House in Kennington and from 1971 to 1981 he worked intermittently as a freelance advertising copywriter for Ogilvy and Mather and Charles Barker.
As a novelist Rushdie made his debut with Grimus (1975), a fantastical science fiction, which draws on the 12th-century Sufi poem The Conference of Birds. The title of the novel is an anagram of the name "Simurg," the immense, all-wise, fabled bird of pre-Islamic Persian mythology. Rushdie's the next novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize and brought him international fame. Written in exuberant style, this comic allegory of Indian history revolves around the lives of the narrator Saleem Sinai and the 1000 children born after the Declaration of Independence. All of the children are given some magical property. Saleem has a very large nose, which grants him the ability to see "into the hearts and minds of men." His chief rival is Shiva, who has the power of war. Saleem, dying in a pickle factory near Bombay, tells his tragic story with special interest in its comical aspects. The work aroused a great deal of controversy in India because of its unflattering portrait of Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay, who was involved in a controversial sterilization campaign. Midnight's Children took its title from Nehru's speech delivered at the stroke of midnight, 14 August 1947, as India gained its independence from England.
Shame (1983) centered on a well-to-do Pakistani family, using the family history as a metaphor for the country. The story included two thinly veiled historical characters – Iskander Harappa, a playboy turned politician, modeled on the former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and General Raza Hyder, Iskander's associate and later his executioner. Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) was written for children, and wove into the story an affable robot, genies, talking fish, dark illains, and an Arabian princess in need of saving. Luca and the Fire of Life (2010), the sequel, told about the younger brother of Haroun, who enters into adventures in the World of Magic.
Rushdie won in 1988 the Whitbread Award with his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses. The story opens spectacularly. Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, two Indian actors, fall to earth after an Air India jumbo jet explodes 30,000 feet above the English Channel. This refers to a real act of terrorism, when an Air India Boeing 747 was blown up in 1985 – supposedly by Sikh terrorist. Gibreel Farishta in Urdu, means Gabriel Angel, which makes him the archangel whom Islamic tradition regards as "bringing down" the Qur'an from God to Muhammad. "'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die. Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again...' Just before dawn one winter's morning, New Year's Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky." (in The Satanic Verses) Gibreel Farishta and Saladin are miraculously saved, and chosen as protagonist in the fight between Good and Evil. In the following cycle of bizarre adventures, dreams, and tales of past and future, the reader meets Mahound, the Prophet of Jahilia, the recipient of a revelation in which satanic verses mingle with divine. "'I told you a long time back,' Gibreel Farishta quietly said, 'that if I thought the sickness would never leave me, that it would always return, I would not be able to bear up to it.' Then, very quickly, before Salahuddin could move a finger, Gobreel put the barrel of the gun into his own mouth; and pulled the trigger; and was free." The character modelled on the Prophet Muhammad and his transcription of the Quran is portrayed in an unconventional light. The quotations from the Quran are composites of the English version of N.J. Dawood and of Maulana Muhammad Ali, with a few touches of Rushdie's own.
Shortly before the publication of The Satanic Verses Rushdie had said in an interview, "It would be absurd to think that a book can cause riots." The novel was banned in India by the ministry of finance – about a week after it had been published in Britain – and South Africa and burned on the streets of Bradford, Yorkshire. Videoed images of the protest spread across the world. When Ayatollah Khomeini called on all zealous Muslims to execute the writer and the publishers of the book, Rushdie was forced into hiding. Also an aide to Khomeini offered a million-dollar reward for Rushdie's death. In 1993 Rushdie's Norwegian publisher William Nygaard was wounded in an attack outside his house. In 1997 the reward was doubled, and the next year the highest Iranian state prosecutor Morteza Moqtadale renewed the death sentence. During this period of fatwa violent protest in India, Pakistan, and Egypt caused several deaths. In 1990 Rushdie published an essay In Good Faith to appease his critics and issued an apology in which he reaffirmed his respect for Islam. However, Iranian clerics did not repudiate their death threat.
Since the religious decree, Rushdie has shunned publicity, hiding from assassins, but he has continued to write and publish books. The Moor's Last Sight (1995) focused on contemporary India, and explored those activities, directed at Indian Muslims and lower castes, of right-wing Hindu terrorists. In the character of Moor, the first person narrator, Rushdie promoted an ideal of hybrid India, in opposition to the Hindu-nationalist agenda. In his introduction to Imaginary Homelands (1991), a collection of essays, Rushdie said: "It is a paradoxical fact that secularism, which has been much under attack of late, outside India as well as inside it, is the only way of safeguarding the constitutional, civil, human and, yes, religious rights of minority groups."
The Ground Benath Her Feet (1999), set in the world of hedonistic rock stars, was a mixture of mythology and elements from the repertoire of science fiction. In Fury (2001) Malik Solanka, a former Cambridge professor, tries to find a new life in New York City. He has left his wife and son and created an animated philosophising doll, Little Brain, which has its own successful TV series. In New York he has blackouts and violent rages and becomes involved with two women, Mila, who looks like Little Brain, and a beautiful freedom fighter named Neela Mahendra. "Though Mr. Rushdie weaves his favorite themes – of exile, metamorphosis and rootlessness – around Solanka's story, though he tries hard to lend his hero's experiences an allegorical weight, Fury lacks the fierce, visionary magic of The Moor's Last Sigh and Midnight's Children." (Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, August 31, 2001) Step Across This Line (2003) was a collection of non-fiction from 1992-2002. Most of its articles were written while the fatwa was in place.
Rushdie has been married four times, first in 1976 to Clarissa Luard and after divorce in 1988 to the American writer Marianne Wiggins. The marriage broke up during their enforced underground life. In September 1998 the Iranian government announced that the state is not going to put into effect the fatwa or encourage anybody to do so, but Ayatollah Hassan Sanei promised in 1999 a 2,8 million dollar reward for killing the author. However, when the threat was formally lifted, Rushdie ended his hiding. I n the beginning of 2000, he left his third wife upon falling in love with the actress Padma Lakshmi and moved from London to New York. They married in 2004, but in June 2007, Rushdie agreed to divorce.
After Rushdie was made a knight by Britain's Queen Elizabeth II in 2007, demonstrations broke out across the Islamic world. A government minister in Pakistan declared that Rushdie's knighthood justifies suicide bombing. The Enchantress of Florence (2008), finished in the aftermath of divorce, was a historical romance about the mutual suspicion and mistrust between East and West, in this case Renaissance Florence and India's Mughal Empire.
In addition to giving interviews to the media, Rushdie has played himself in television films and was cast as Dr. Masani, a gynecologist, in Helen Hunt's comedy Then She Found Me (2007). For the US network Showtime Rushdie began in 2011 to write a teleplay, Next People, about contemporary American life. Rushdie's book of memories is due to appear in 2012. Following President Bashar Assad's brutal crackdown on the country's uprising, Rushdie and other writers, such as Umberto Eco, David Grossman, Amos Oz, Orhan Pamuk and Wole Soyinka, urged in June 2011 the United Nations to condemn the repression in Syria as a crime against humanity.