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ايوب صابر
مراقب عام سابقا
اوسمتي
مجموع الاوسمة
: 4
تاريخ الإنضمام :
Sep 2009
رقم العضوية :
7857
المشاركات:
12,768
والان مع سر الروعة في رواية :
86
ـ لانارك، للمؤلف
السادير جري
.
Lanark
, subtitled
A Life in Four Books
, is the first novel of Scottish writer
Alasdair Gray
. Written over a period of almost thirty years, it combines
realist
and
dystopian
fantasy
depictions of his home city of
Glasgow
.
Its publication in 1981 prompted
Anthony Burgess
to call Gray "the best Scottish novelist since Walter Scott". The book, still his best known, has since won the
Saltire Society Book of the Year
and David Niven awards, and has become a
cult classic
. In 2008,
The Guardian
heralded Lanark as "one of the landmarks of 20th-century fiction."
Plot summary
Lanark
comprises four books, arranged in the order Three, One, Two, Four (there is also a
Prologue
before Book One, and an
Epilogue
four chapters before the end of the book). In the Epilogue, the author explains this by saying that "I want
Lanark
to be read in one order but eventually thought of in another", and that the epilogue itself is "too important" to go at the end (p. 483).
In Book Three, a young man awakes alone in a train carriage. He has no memory of his past and picks his name from a strangely familiar photograph on the wall. He soon arrives in Unthank, a strange Glasgow-like fantasy city in which there is no daylight and whose disappearing residents suffer from strange symbolic diseases. Lanark begins to associate with a group of twenty-somethings to whom he cannot fully relate and whose mores he cannot understand, and soon begins to suffer from Dragonhide, a disease which turns his skin into scales as an external manifestation of his emotional repression. Lanark is eventually swallowed by the earth, and awakes in The Institute, a sort of hospital which cures patients of their diseases but uses the hopeless cases for power and food. Upon learning this, Lanark is horrified and determines to leave.
Books One and Two constitute a realist
Bildungsroman
beginning in pre-War Glasgow, and tell the story of Duncan Thaw ("
based on myself, he was tougher and more honest
"), a difficult and precocious child born to impecunious and frustrated parents in the East End of Glasgow. The book follows Thaw's wartime evacuation, difficult secondary education and his scholarship to the
Glasgow School of Art
, where his inability to form relationships with women and his obsessive artistic vision lead to his descent into madness and eventual suicide by drowning.
Book Four sees Lanark begin a bizarre, dreamlike journey back to Unthank, which he finds on the point of total disintegration, wracked by political strife, avarice, paranoia and economic meltdown, all of which he is unable to prevent. During various stages of the journey, during which he meets his author, he rapidly ages. He finally finds himself old, sitting in a hilltop cemetery as Unthank breaks down in an apocalypse of fire and flood, and, his time of death having been revealed to him, he ends the book calmly awaiting it.
Interpretation
Lanark could be viewed as Thaw in a personal
Hell
(Thaw drowns in the sea; Lanark arrives in Unthank with the same belongings, and seashells and sand in his pockets). However, the connection between the two narratives is ambiguous. Gray has said that -
·
"
One is a highly exaggerated form of just about the everyday reality of the other
"
[2]
(for example, Thaw's
eczema
is mirrored by Lanark's skin disease 'dragonhide')
- and writes in the novel itself:
·
"
The Thaw narrative shows a man dying because he is bad at loving. It is enclosed by [Lanark's] narrative which shows civilization collapsing for the same reason
" (page 484)
·
(spoken to Lanark) "
You are Thaw with the neurotic imagination trimmed off and built into the furniture of the world you occupy
" (page 493)
·
"
The plots of the Thaw and Lanark sections are independent of each other and cemented by typographical contrivances rather than formal necessity. A possible explanation is that the author thinks a heavy book will make a bigger splash than two light ones
" (page 493).
One of the most characteristically
postmodern
parts of the book is the Epilogue, in which Lanark meets the author in the guise of the character "Nastler". He makes the first two remarks about the book quoted above, and anticipates criticism of the work and of the Epilogue in particular, saying "The critics will accuse me of self-indulgence, but I don't care". An
Index of
Plagiarisms
is printed in the margins of the discussion. For instance, Gray describes much of
Lanark
as an extended 'Difplag' (diffuse plagiarism) of
Charles Kingsley
's
The Water Babies
. However, some of the supposed plagiarisms refer to non-existent chapters of the book.
Gray added an appendix to the 2001 edition of the novel in which he included a brief biography and elaborated on some of the influences on and inspirations for the novel. He cited
Kafka
as a major influence on the atmosphere of the novel. He also referred to his own experiences in the media industry which he states is reflected in Lanark's numerous encounters in labyrinthine buildings with individuals talking in jargon. The Institute he describes as a combination of
Wyndham Lewis
's conception of Hell in
Malign Fiesta
along with three real-life structures: the
London Underground
,
Stobhill Hospital
in Glasgow and
BBC Television Centre
in London. More immediately evident inspiration can be seen in the cathedral and necropolis episodes in Unthank, whose proximity to an urban tangle of roads is mirrored in Glasgow's real-life
Townhead
area.
Glasgow Cathedral
is yards away from the
Necropolis
to the east and the
M8 motorway
(and aborted Inner Ring Road) to the north and west. Gray said Glasgow Cathedral was the only location he purposefully visited to make notes about during the writing of the novel; all other locations he wrote about from memory.
[3]
A hellish encounter in a decaying underpass not far from "New Cumbernauld" is redolent of the under-road pedestrian thoroughfares common in the 1960s
New Town
design of
Cumbernauld
and others.
Genesis
Gray began writing the novel as a student in 1954. Book one was written by 1963, but he was unsuccessful in getting it published. The whole work was finished in 1976, and published in 1981 by the small Scottish publisher
Canongate Press
. The novel was an immediate critical and commercial success.
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