ما سر "الروعة" في افضل مائة رواية عالمية؟ دراسة بحثية - الصفحة 34

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والان مع سر الروعة في رواية :

97 ـ التوبة، للمؤلفإيان مكوين

97. Atonement Ian McEwan - Acclaimed short-story writer achieves a contemporary classic of mesmerising narrative conviction.
Atonement is a 2001 novel by British author Ian McEwan.
On a fateful day, a young girl (who aspires to be a writer) makes a terrible mistake that has life-changing effects for many people. Consequently, she lives seeking atonement—which leads to an exploration on the nature of writing.
It is widely regarded as one of McEwan's best works and was one of the most celebrated and honoured books of its time]. It was shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize for fiction. TIME Magazine named Atonement in its list All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels. In 2007, the book was adapted into a BAFTA and Academy Award nominated film, starring James McAvoy and Keira Knightley, and directed by Joe Wright.

Plot summary

Part one

In the summer of 1935, Briony Tallis, an English girl with a talent for writing, lives at her family's country estate with her older sister Cecilia, and their cousins, twins Jackson and Pierrot, and Lola. One day, Briony sees a moment of sexual tension between Cecilia and Robbie Turner, the son of the Tallis family housekeeper and a childhood friend of Cecilia's. Robbie realizes he is attracted to Cecilia, whom he has not seen in some time, and writes several drafts of a love letter to her, giving a copy to Briony to deliver. By accident he gives her a version he had meant to discard, which contains lewd and vulgar references ("Cunt"). Briony reads the letter and becomes disturbed as to Robbie's intentions. Later she walks in on Robbie and Cecilia making love in the library. Briony misinterprets the sexual act as rape and believes Robbie to be a "sex maniac."
Later on at a family dinner party attended by Briony's brother Leon and his friend Paul Marshall, it is discovered that the twins have run away and the dinner party breaks into teams to search for them. In the darkness, Briony discovers her cousin Lola, apparently being raped by an assailant she cannot clearly see. Lola is unable or unwilling to identify the attacker, but Briony decides to accuse Robbie and identifies him to the police as the rapist. Robbie is taken away to prison, with only Cecilia and his mother believing his protestations of innocence.

Part two

By the time World War II has started, Robbie has spent 2–3 years in prison. He is then released on the condition of enlistment in the army to fight in war. Cecilia has studied and become a nurse. She cuts off all contact with her family because of the part they took in sending Robbie to jail. Robbie and Cecilia have only been in contact by letter, since she was not allowed to visit him in prison. Before Robbie has to go to war in France, they meet once for half an hour during Cecilia's lunch break. Their reunion starts awkwardly, but they share a kiss before leaving each other.
In France, the war is going badly and the army is retreating to Dunkirk. As the injured Robbie goes to the safe haven, he thinks about Cecilia and past events like teaching Briony how to swim and reflecting on Briony's possible reasons for accusing him. His single meeting with Cecilia is the memory that keeps him walking, his only aim is seeing her again. At the end of part two, Robbie falls asleep in Dunkirk, one day before the evacuation.

Part three

Remorseful Briony has refused her place at Cambridge and instead is a trainee nurse in London. She has realized the full extent of her mistake, and realizes it was Paul Marshall, Leon's friend, whom she saw raping Lola. Briony still writes, although she does not pursue it with the same recklessness as she did as a child.
Briony is called to the bedside of Luc, a young, fatally wounded French soldier. She consoles him in his last moments by speaking with him in her school French, and he mistakes her for an English girl whom his mother wanted him to marry. Just before his death, Luc asks "Do you love me?", to which Briony answers "Yes," not only because "no other answer was possible" but also because "for the moment, she did. He was a lovely boy far away from his family and about to die." Afterward, Briony daydreams about the life she might have had if she had married Luc and gone to live with him and his family.
Briony attends the wedding of her cousin Lola and Paul Marshall before finally visiting Cecilia. Robbie is on leave from the army and Briony meets him unexpectedly at her sister's. They both refuse to forgive Briony, who nonetheless tells them she will try and put things right. She promises to begin the legal procedures needed to exonerate Robbie, even though Paul Marshall will never be held responsible for his crime because of his marriage to Lola, the victim.

Part four

The fourth section, titled "London 1999", is written from Briony's perspective. She is a successful novelist at the age of 77 and dying of vascular dementia.
It is revealed that Briony is the author of the preceding sections of the novel. Although Cecilia and Robbie are reunited in Briony's novel, they were not in reality. It is suggested that Robbie Turner may have died of septicaemia, caused by his injury, on the beaches of Dunkirk and Cecilia may have been killed by the bomb that destroyed the gas and water mains above Balham Underground station. Cecilia and Robbie may have never seen each other again. Although the detail concerning Lola's marriage to Paul Marshall is true, Briony never visited Cecilia to make amends.
Briony explains why she decided to change real events and unite Cecilia and Robbie in her novel, although it was not her intention in her many previous drafts. She did not see what purpose it would serve if she gave the readers a pitiless ending. She reasons that they could not draw any sense of hope or satisfaction from it. But above all, she wanted to give Robbie and Cecilia their happiness by being together. Since they could not have the time together they so much longed for in reality, Briony wanted to give it to them at least in her novel.

Main characters

· Briony Tallis – The younger sister of Leon and Cecilia, Briony is an aspiring writer. She is a thirteen-year-old at the beginning of the novel and takes part in sending Robbie Turner to jail when she claims that Robbie assaulted Lola. Briony is part narrator, part character and we see her transformation from child to woman as the novel progresses. At the end of the novel, Briony has realized her wrong-doing as a "child" and decides to write the novel to find atonement.
· Cecilia Tallis – The middle child in the Tallis family, Cecilia has fallen in love with her childhood companion, Robbie Turner. After a tense encounter by the fountain, Robbie and she don't speak again until they meet before a formal dinner. Upset over the loss of her love, to jail and war, she has almost no contact with her family again.
· Leon Tallis – The eldest child in the Tallis family, Leon returns home to visit. He brings his friend Paul Marshall along with him on his trip home.
· Emily Tallis – Emily is the mother of Briony, Cecilia, and Leon. Emily is ill in bed for most of the novel, suffering from severe migraines.
· Jack Tallis – Jack is the father of Briony, Cecilia, and Leon. Jack often works late nights and it is alluded to in the novel that he is having an affair.
· Robbie Turner – Robbie is the son of Grace Turner, who lives on the grounds of the Tallis home. Having grown up with Leon, Briony and Cecilia, he knows the family well. He attended Cambridge University with Cecilia and when they come home on break, they fall in love.
· Grace Turner – The mother of Robbie Turner, she was given permission from Jack Tallis to live on the grounds. She has become the family's maid and does laundry for the Tallises. After the conviction of her son for a crime she doesn't believe he committed, she leaves the Tallis family.
· Lola Quincey – Lola is a 15-year-old girl who is Briony, Cecilia, and Leon's cousin. She comes, along with her brothers, to stay with the Tallises after her parents' divorce. She is red-headed and fair-skinned with freckles.
· Jackson Quincey – Jackson is a young boy (Pierrot's twin) who is Briony, Cecilia, and Leon's cousin. He comes, along with his sister and his twin, to stay with the Tallises after his parents' divorce.
· Pierrot Quincey – Pierrot is a young boy (Jackson's twin) who is Briony, Cecilia, and Leon's cousin. He comes, along with his sister and his twin, to stay with the Tallises after his parents' divorce.
· Danny Hardman – The handyman for the Tallis family.
· Paul Marshall – A friend of Leon's, who rapes Lola and, some years later, marries her.
· Corporal Nettle – Nettle is Robbie's companion during the Dunkirk evacuation.
· Corporal Mace – Mace is Robbie's companion during the Dunkirk evacuation.
· Betty – The Tallis family's servant, described as "wretched" in personality.

Themes and motifs

· Atonement
"I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me," Briony says at the end of the novel. Briony recognizes her sin (i.e., wrongfully accusing Robbie and ruining his and Cecilia's chances of a life together) and attempts to atone for it through writing her novel. She does not grant herself forgiveness. Rather, she attempts to earn atonement through giving Robbie and Cecilia a life together in her writing.
· Book/Author Relationship
McEwan reiterates the comparison between himself, a writer in reality, and Briony, a writer of fiction in his story. Throughout the novel, McEwan compares himself, an author of literary fiction, to Briony and both her literary fiction and real-life fiction. This comparison draws a relationship between the life of the author and the life of Briony in the story.
· Truth versus Imagination
Throughout the novel, Briony constructs her own world due to immaturity and misunderstanding, both in her literature and in her mind. Briony's fabricated reality is often positive and optimistic, such as the inclusion of Robbie and Cecilia meeting at the end of her story. However, her false reality initiated the plot of the story, as she lied about the rape of Lola.
· Peace
The motif of peace is shown through the stillness and calm the characters experience at the Tallis Estate at the beginning of the novel. The estate is portrayed as being an isolated and calm environment in a world of chaos and confusion where most characters seem to enjoy being separated from the chaos of society. However, Cecilia states her discontentment with the solitary and calm atmosphere at the estate, as she wants to move on to more exciting and worthwhile things in her life.
· Death
Throughout the second half of the novel, the motif of death contrasts the motif of life shown in the beginning of the novel. The motif of death occurs mostly while Briony is working in the hospital, as she encounters the death of many soldiers and bystanders from the war.
Death is also portrayed during the war, when Robbie is participating in the retreat. Robbie witnesses the death of many soldiers and innocent bystanders, and many bystanders experience the death of others around themselves.

12-23-2011, 11:29 PM

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إيان مكوين

Ian Russell McEwan CBE, FRSA, FRSL (born 21 June 1948) is a British novelist and screenwriter, and one of Britain's most highly regarded writers. In 2008, The Times named him among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
روائي بريطاني ولد عام 1948
McEwan began his career writing sparse, Gothic short stories. The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981) were his first two novels, and earned him the nickname "Ian Macabre". These were followed by three novels of some success in the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1997, he published Enduring Love, which was made into a film. He won the Man Booker Prize with Amsterdam (1998). In 2011, he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize. In 2001, he published Atonement, which was made into an Oscar-winning film. This was followed by Saturday (2003), On Chesil Beach (2007) and Solar (2010).

Early life

McEwan was born in Aldershot, Hampshire, on 21 June 1948, the son of David McEwan and Rose Lilian Violet (née Moore).
He spent much of his childhood in East Asia (including Singapore), Germany and North Africa (including Libya), where his father, a Scottish army officer, was posted.
قضى معظم طفولته في شرق اسيا بما في ذلك سنغافوره والمانيا وشمال افريقيا بما في ذلك ليبيا حيث كان والده يعمل كضابط في الجيش
His family returned to England when he was twelve.
عادت العائلة الى انجلترا عندما كان في الثانية عشرة
He was educated at Woolverstone Hall School; the University of Sussex, receiving his degree in English literature in 1970; and the University of East Anglia, where he was one of the first graduates of Malcolm Bradbury's pioneering creative writing course.

Career

McEwan's first published work was a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1975), which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976. He achieved notoriety in 1979 when the BBC suspended production of his play Solid Geometry because of its supposed obscenity.[2] His second collection of short stories, In Between the Sheets, was published in 1978. The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981) were his two earliest novels, both of which were adapted into films. The nature of these works caused him to be nicknamed "Ian Macabre".[3] These were followed by The Child in Time (1987), winner of the 1987 Whitbread Novel Award; The Innocent (1990); and Black Dogs (1992). McEwan has also written two children's books, Rose Blanche (1985) The Daydreamer (1994).
His 1997 novel, Enduring Love, about the relationship between a science writer and a stalker, was popular with critics, although it was not shortlisted for the Booker Prize.[4][5] It was adapted into a film in 2004. In 1998, he won the Man Booker Prize for Amsterdam.[6] His next novel, Atonement (2001), received considerable acclaim; Time magazine named it the best novel of 2002, and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.[7] In 2007, the critically acclaimed movie Atonement, directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, was released in cinemas worldwide. His next work, Saturday (2003), follows an especially eventful day in the life of a successful neurosurgeon. Saturday won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 2005, and his novel On Chesil Beach (2007) was shortlisted for the 2007 Booker Prize. McEwan has also written a number of produced screenplays, a stage play, children's fiction, an oratorio and a libretto titled For You with music composed by Michael Berkeley.
Solar, was published by Jonathan Cape and Doubleday in March 2010.[8] In June 2008 at the Hay Festival, McEwan gave a surprise reading of this work-in-progress. The novel concerns "a scientist who hopes to save the planet."[9] from the threat of climate change, with inspiration for the novel coming from a trip McEwan made in 2005 "when he was part of an expedition of artists and scientists who spent several weeks aboard a ship near the north pole to discuss environmental concerns". McEwan noted "The novel's protagonist Michael Beard has been awarded a Nobel prize for his pioneering work on physics, and has discovered that winning the coveted prize has interfered with his work".[9] He said that the work was not a comedy: "I hate comic novels; it's like being wrestled to the ground and being tickled, being forced to laugh",[9] instead, that it had extended comic stretches. McEwan is working on his twelfth novel, historical in nature and set in the 1970s.[10]
In 2006 he was accused of plagiarism; specifically that a passage in Atonement (2001) closely echoed a passage from a memoir, No Time for Romance, published in 1977 by Lucilla Andrews. McEwan acknowledged using the book as a source for his work.[11][12] McEwan had included a brief note at the end of Atonement, referring to Andrews’s autobiography, among several other works.[13] Writing in The Guardian in November 2006, a month after Andrews' death, McEwan professed innocence of plagiarism while acknowledging his debt to the author.[14][15][16] Several authors defended him, including John Updike, Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Keneally, Zadie Smith, and Thomas Pynchon.[17][18][19]

Awards and honours

McEwan has been nominated for the Man Booker prize six times to date, winning the Prize for Amsterdam in 1998. His other nominations were for The Comfort of Strangers (1981, Shortlisted), Black Dogs (1992, Shortlisted), Atonement (2001, Shortlisted), Saturday (2005, Longlisted), and On Chesil Beach (2007, Shortlisted). McEwan also received nominations for the Man Booker International Prize in 2005 and 2007.[20]
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, in 1999. He is also a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association. He was awarded a CBE in 2000.[21] In 2005, he was the first recipient of Dickinson College's prestigious Harold and Ethel L. Stellfox Visiting Scholar and Writers Program Award,[22] in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In 2008, McEwan was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature by University College, London, where he used to teach English literature. In 2008, The Times named McEwan among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".[23]
In 2010, McEwan received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
On 20 February 2011, he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society.[24] He accepted the prize, despite controversy[25] and pressure from groups and individuals opposed to the Israeli government.[26][27] McEwan responded to his critics, and specifically the group British Writers in Support of Palestine (BWISP), in a letter to The Guardian, stating in part, "There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics, and for me the emblem in this respect is Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra – surely a beam of hope in a dark landscape, though denigrated by the Israeli religious right and Hamas. If BWISP is against this particular project, then clearly we have nothing more to say to each other."[28] McEwan's acceptance speech discussed the complaints against him and provided further insight into his reasons for accepting the award.[29] He also said he will donate the amount of the prize, "ten thousand dollars to Combatants for Peace, an organisation that brings together Israeli ex-soldiers and Palestinian ex-fighters."[29]

Personal life

He has been married twice.
تزوج مرتين
His second wife, Annalena McAfee, was formerly the editor of The Guardian's Review section. In 1999, his first wife, Penny Allen, took their 13-year-old son to France after a court in Brittany ruled that the boy should be returned to his father, who had been granted sole custody over him and his 15-year-old brother.[30]
In 2002, McEwan discovered that he had a brother who had been given up for adoption during World War II; the story became public in 2007.[31] The brother, a bricklayer named David Sharp, was born six years earlier than McEwan, when his mother was married to a different man. Sharp has the same parents as McEwan but was born from an affair between them that occurred before their marriage. After her first husband was killed in combat, McEwan's mother married her lover, and Ian was born a few years later.[32] The brothers are in regular contact, and McEwan has written a foreword to Sharp's memoir.

12-23-2011, 11:55 PM

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Born on 21 June 1948 in Aldershot, Kent, the son of David McEwan, a career soldier, and Rose Moore McEwan, Ian Russell McEwan spent part of his childhood in Singapore and North Africa, where his father was posted. His siblings were considerably older, and he describes himself as "psychologically, an only child." Returned to England for schooling, he attended Woolverstone Hall in Suffolk, then the University of Sussex (B.A.
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his third novel, The Child in Time (1987), which is warmer, broader, and considerably more committed than his previous fiction, dealing as it does with politics and parenthood, loss and desire.

Read more: Ian ), (Ian Russell McEwan), First McEwan (Ian Russell McEwan) Biography - (1948– Love, Last Rites, In Between the Sheets, The Cement Garden - JRank Articles http://www.jrank.org/literature/pages/4874/Ian-McEwan-(Ian-Russell-McEwan).html#ixzz1hONTFWbo
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Ian McEwan (1786 words)

Born on June 21 1948, Ian Russell McEwan grew up in Aldershot, as well as at military stations in countries such as Singapore and Libya. His mother had two much older children from an earlier marriage, but McEwan always considered himself very much “an only child” right up to the point in 2007 when a long-lost brother was suddenly made known to him. The new sibling, David, was the product of an affair McEwan's mother had had with his father during the war, before they were married.
After an army childhood largely spent abroad, McEwan attended Woolverstone state boarding-school in Suffolk from 1959 to 1966. Subsequently he read English and French at the University of Sussex before enrolling for the modern fiction and creative ...
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Ian Russell McEwan (muhk-YEW-uhn) was born on June 21, 1948, in the military town of Aldershot (southern England), to Rose Lillian Violet (Moore) McEwan and David McEwan. His mother was a war widow with two children; his father, later to become a major, had joined the army in face of the bleak employment situation in Glasgow. As a soldier’s son, Ian spent a significant part of his early childhood at military outposts in Singapore and Libya. In an interview with Ian Hamilton, he remembered life in Africa with “very open air, a great deal of running free, swimming, exploring the coast....

امه كانت متزوجة قبل والده ولها اطفال ...يموت زوجها العسكري فتتزوج لاحقا والده العسكري ، يعيش الطفل في البركسات العسكرية في عدة دول حتى سن الثانية عشرة ليرسل الى مدرسة داخلية للدراسة في لندن وربما ان هذا جعله يتيم اجتماعي خاصة انه يصف نفسه بأنه كان ولدا وحيدا رغم ان له اخوة اكبر منه بكثير ويقال انه عثر بعد سنوات طويلة اي في عام 2007 على اخ لم يعرفه من قبل كانت امه قد انجبته قبل ان تتزوج والده. لا نعرف متى مات والديه لكنه حتما عاش حياة اشبه باليتم خاصة كنتيجة لدراسته في مدرسة داخليه.

فهو يتيم اجتماعي

12-24-2011, 12:01 AM

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والان ما سر الروعة في رواية :

98 ـ أنوار الشمال، للمؤلف فيليب بولمان

. Northern Lights Philip Pullman -98 Lyra's quest weaves fantasy, horror and the play of ideas into a truly great contemporary children's book.

Northern Lights, known as The Golden Compass in North America, is the first novel in English novelist Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Published in 1995, the fantasy novel is set in a universe parallel to our own and tells of Lyra Belacqua's journey north in search of her missing friend, Roger Parslow, and her imprisoned father, Lord Asriel, who has been conducting experiments with a mysterious substance known as Dust. Winner of the Carnegie Medal in 1996, the novel has been adapted into a Hollywood feature film, released in 2007 as The Golden Compass along with an accompanying video game.

Title

The original title The Golden Compasses comes from a line in Milton's Paradise Lost,[1] where they denote God's circle-drawing instrument used to establish and set the bounds of all creation:
Then staid the fervid wheels, and in his hand
He took the golden compasses, prepared
In God's eternal store, to circumscribe
This universe, and all created things:
One foot he centered, and the other turned
Round through the vast profundity obscure
— Book 7, lines 224–229
For some time during pre-publication, the series of novels were known as The Golden Compasses. This is a reference to God's poetic delineation of the world, and not (as often believed) a reference to the navigational compass which the main character's "alethiometer" resembles
Pullman eventually settled on Northern Lights as the title for the first book, and The Golden Compasses as the name for the trilogy.
In the United States, in their discussions over the publication of the first book, the publishers Alfred A. Knopf had been calling it The Golden Compass (omitting the plural), which they mistakenly believed referred to Lyra's alethiometer, because the device superficially resembles a navigational compass. Meanwhile, in the UK, Pullman had replaced The Golden Compasses with His Dark Materials as the title of the trilogy. According to Pullman, the publishers had become so attached to The Golden Compass that they insisted on publishing the U.S. edition of the first book under that title, rather than as Northern Lights, the title used in the UK and Australia.[1]

Plot summary

The story takes place in a parallel universe to ours, controlled in part by the Magisterium, a body of the Church in that world which guards against heresy. Lyra Belacqua— an 11-year-old girl who has been allowed to run somewhat wild – awaits the arrival of her uncle and guardian at Jordan College, Oxford, the explorer Lord Asriel. Hiding in the forbidden 'Retiring Room', she and her dæmon, Pantalaimon (shortened to "Pan", an animal-formed, shape-shifting manifestation of her soul) see the college Master attempt to poison Lord Asriel's wine. She prevents him drinking, and Asriel, though angry at her trespass, allows her to stay hidden during the upcoming meeting where he presents his latest findings. He has identified mysterious particles ("Dust") descending from the Aurora Borealis (the 'Northern Lights' of the title) which appear to reveal another universe and to be strangely attracted to conscious life. He is awarded funds to develop a way to travel to these other worlds; the Magisterium seeks to end his research -forcefully- as heresy.
Her friend Roger is kidnapped by Gobblers, a recent urban legend, and Lyra vows to rescue him. Instead an important visitor, a woman named Mrs. Marisa Coulter offers to take Lyra away from Jordan College to become her assistant. As she leaves, she is entrusted secretly by the Master of the college with a priceless rare object known as an alethiometer, a "truth teller" which resembles a golden, many-handed pocket-watch that can answer any question asked by a skilled user. Although unable to read or understand its complex symbols, Lyra takes it with her.
Lyra discovers that Mrs. Coulter heads an organization known as the 'General Oblation Board' and that this board is in fact, the 'Gobblers' who have been kidnapping children. Horrified, Lyra flees and is rescued by the Gyptians (nomadic, canal-boat-dwelling people) who reveal that Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter are Lyra's father and mother. She also learns that many children have been disappearing and the Gyptians are planning an expedition to the north to rescue them. Lyra begins to intuitively learn how to operate the alethiometer.
On a stop in Trollesund, Lyra meets Iorek Byrnison, an outcast sapient prince of the armoured bears ("panserbjørn"). His armor, tricked from him by the villagers, is akin to his soul, and without it Iorek is bound in servitude to the village. Lyra uses her alethiometer to locate the armor, allowing Iorek to free himself. Both he and a travelling balloonist, Lee Scoresby, offer their support to Lyra. She also learns that Lord Asriel is held prisoner by the Panserbjørn. A local Witch-Consul states there is a prophecy about Lyra's destiny, which she must not know, and it is also learned that witch-clans are choosing their allegiances in an upcoming war.
The Gyptians and Lyra continue north to Bolvangar, where they believe the Gobblers keep the children. Lyra stops at a village on the way and guided by the alethiometer, finds a boy who had been severed from his dæmon. Lyra realizes that the Gobblers are attempting to sever the bond between human and dæmon (the process being called "intercision"), a horrific action in that world, and the boy dies. She is captured by bounty hunters and taken to Bolvangar, where she locates Roger and devises an escape plan. Mrs. Coulter arrives, evidently supervising the facility, and Lyra is caught spying by staff. The staff decide to silence her using the same process; she is rescued by Mrs. Coulter who is shocked to see her as an intercision subject. Mrs. Coulter tries to take the alethiometer from her but the container contains an insect-like device that renders her unconscious. Lyra escapes, leads the other children from the facility, and is rescued by Lee Scoresby, Iorek, the Gyptians, and their allies, the witch-clan of Serafina Pekkala.
Lyra is determined to deliver the alethiometer to Lord Asriel, believing that he needs it for his purposes. She tricks the usurping bear-king Iofur Raknison into fighting Iorek Byrnison, by claiming that she was Iorek's dæmon, and that if Iofur killed Iorek, then she would become Iofur's dæmon – something no bear has and Iofur wants. Iorek is victorious and regains his throne. Lyra - nicknamed "Lyra Silvertongue" by Iorek as a token of her ability - travels onward to Lord Asriel’s cabin, accompanied by Iorek and Roger.
Despite being imprisoned, Lord Asriel has become so influential that he has accumulated the necessary equipment to continue his experiments on Dust. He explains to Lyra what he knows of Dust, the Church's view that it is deeply sinful, his belief that Dust is somehow related to the source of all death and misery, the existence of parallel universes, and his goal - to visit the other universes, find the source of death and misery, and destroy it, bringing the end of "centuries of darkness", which the Church fears "with good reason". As Lyra sleeps, he departs, taking Roger and much scientific equipment. Lyra pursues them, having discovered that she has indeed brought her father what he wanted, though not in the way she thought. It was not the alethiometer he needed, but Roger: the severing of the child's dæmon will releases an "enormous" amount of energy, which Lord Asriel needs to complete his task. Roger dies when Lord Asriel separates him from his dæmon, and Lord Asriel is able to tear a hole through the sky into a parallel universe. Lord Asriel offers to bring Mrs. Coulter, who had come by means of her zeppelin, with him, but she declines. Lord Asriel walks through into the new universe alone. Devastated at her part in rescuing Roger only to bring him to his death, Pan and Lyra follow.
This concludes the first novel, with the trilogy continuing in the next book, The Subtle Knife.

12-24-2011, 12:03 AM

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Characters

· Lyra Belacqua and Pantalaimon: The principal characters. Lyra is described as having blue eyes and blond hair, along with being short for her age and quite thin but is still quite attractive. Though young and attractive she is brave, curious, and crafty. Her dæmon is Pantalaimon, nicknamed Pan. Because she is still a child, Pan is capable of changing into any shape he wishes, through he frequently appears as a brown moth, a wildcat, a white ermine, and a mouse. Lyra has been prophesied by the witches to help the balance of life, but must do so without being aware of her destiny.
· Roger Parslow: One of Lyra's friends, a boy whose family works at Jordan College. When he is kidnapped and taken north, Lyra pursues him in hopes of rescuing him. He is killed at the end of Northern Lights by Lord Asriel.
· Lord Asriel: Lyra's uncle, though it is later revealed that he is actually her father. He performs experiments in the north on the Dust, which are considered threatening for the Magisterium as they are part of Asriel's fight against the Authority. His dæmon is Stelmaria, a snow leopard.
· Mrs. Marisa Coulter: An agent of the Magisterium, who does not hesitate to manipulate the Church to obtain funds for her projects. She is intelligent and beautiful, but extremely ruthless and callous. She is revealed to be Lyra's mother; as a result, she is unexpectedly kind to Lyra. Her dæmon is a golden monkey.
· Iorek Byrnison: A panserbjørn (a race of armored white bears living in the far North and capable of human speech), first encountered in servitude having been tricked out of his armor, which Lyra helps him recover. He becomes very protective of Lyra and joins the expedition to find the children seized by Gobblers. After Lyra successfully tricks usurper Iofur Raknison into submitting to Iorek, Iorek gives her the name "Lyra Silvertongue."
· Iofur Raknison: A panserbjørn who wants a dæmon and has usurped Iorek's authority as king. Lyra tricks him into fighting the exiled Iorek Byrnison by pretending to be Iorek's dæmon, and promising that when Iofur wins the fight, she will become his.
· Serafina Pekkala: A witch who closely follows Lyra on her travels. She is aware of Lyra's destiny. Serafina's dæmon is Kaisa, a snow goose, who is capable of physically moving separately from Serafina over long distances, a quality that only witches' dæmons appear to possess.
· Lee Scoresby: A Texan aeronaut who transports Lyra in his balloon. He and Iorek Byrnison are good friends and Lee comes to see Lyra as a surrogate daughter. His dæmon is Hester, an arctic snow hare.

[edit] Critical reception

Northern Lights (The Golden Compass in America) was highly acclaimed and won prestigious book awards, putting Pullman on the literary map. It won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Fiction Prize in England, and was named a Horn Book Fanfare Honor Book, a Bulletin Blue Ribbon Book, Publishers Weekly Book of the Year, and Booklist Editors Choice - Top of the List.
See also: Religious perspective of Pullman's trilogy
Some critics have asserted that the trilogy and movie adaptation present a negative portrayal of the Church and religion,[2][3][dead link] while others have argued that Pullman's works should be included in religious education courses.[4] Peter Hitchens views the His Dark Materials series as a direct rebuttal of C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia series.[5] Literary critic Alan Jacobs (of Wheaton College) argues that in his recasting of Lewis's Narnia series, Pullman replaces a theist world-view with a Rousseauist one.[6]

12-24-2011, 12:10 AM

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فيليب بولمان

Philip Pullman CBE, FRSL (born 19 October 1946) is an English writer from Norwich. He is the best-selling author of several books, most notably his trilogy of fantasy novels, His Dark Materials, and his fictionalised biography of Jesus, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. The first book of His Dark Materials has been turned into the film The Golden Compass and the first two books from his Sally Lockhart series as well as his children's novel I was a Rat! or The Scarlet Slippers have been adapted for television.
In 2008, The Times named Pullman in its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Life and career

Philip Pullman was born in Norwich, England, the son of Audrey Evelyn Pullman (née Merrifield) and Royal Air Force pilot Alfred Outram Pullman. The family travelled with his father's job, including to Southern Rhodesia where he spent time at school.
كان ابوه طيار وعاشت العائلة معه بعض الوقت في روديسيا وقضى الروائي بعض سنوات دراسته في الطفولة هناك
His father was killed in a plane crash in 1953 when Pullman was seven, being awarded posthumously the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC).
قتل ابوه في حادث صقوط طائرة في عام 1953 وهو في سن السابعة
Pullman said at the beginning of a 2008 exchange that to him as a boy, his father "was a hero, steeped in glamour, killed in action defending his country" and had been "training pilots, I think." Pullman was then presented with a report from The London Gazette of 1954 "which carried the official RAF news of the day [and] said that the medal was given for 'gallant and distinguished service' during the Mau Mau uprising. 'The main task of the Harvards [the squadron of planes led by his father] has been bombing and machine-gunning Mau Mau and their hideouts in densely wooded and difficult country.' This included 'diving steeply into the gorges of [various] rivers, often in conditions of low cloud and driving rain.' Testing conditions, yes, but not much opposition from the enemy, the journalist in the exchange continued. Very few of the Mau Mau had guns that could land a blow on an aircraft." Pullman responded to this new information, writing "my father probably doesn't come out of this with very much credit, judged by the standards of modern liberal progressive thought" and accepted the new information as "a serious challenge to his childhood memory."
His mother remarried and, with a move to Australia, came Pullman's discovery of comic books including Superman and Batman, a medium which he continues to espouse. From 1957 he was educated at Ysgol Ardudwy in Harlech, Gwynedd, and spent time in Norfolk with his grandfather, a clergyman. Around this time Pullman discovered John Milton's Paradise Lost, which would become a major influence for His Dark Materials.
تزوجت والدته وقضى هو الكثير من الوقت مع جده بينما سافرت امه الى استراليا
From 1963, Pullman attended Exeter College, Oxford, receiving a Third class BA in 1968.[3] In an interview with the Oxford Student he stated that he "did not really enjoy the English course" and that "I thought I was doing quite well until I came out with my third class degree and then I realised that I wasn’t — it was the year they stopped giving fourth class degrees otherwise I’d have got one of those".[4] He discovered William Blake's illustrations around 1970, which would also later influence him greatly.
Pullman married Judith Speller in 1970 and began teaching middle school children ages 9 to 13 at Bishop Kirk Middle School in Summertown, North Oxford and writing school plays. His first published work was The Haunted Storm, which joint-won the New English Library's Young Writer's Award in 1972. He nevertheless refuses to discuss it. Galatea, an adult fantasy-fiction novel, followed in 1978, but it was his school plays which inspired his first children's book, Count Karlstein, in 1982. He stopped teaching around the publication of The Ruby in the Smoke (1986), his second children's book, whose Victorian setting is indicative of Pullman's interest in that era.
Pullman taught part-time at Westminster College, Oxford, between 1988 and 1996, continuing to write children's stories. He began His Dark Materials in about 1993. Northern Lights (published as The Golden Compass in the US) was published in 1995 and won the Carnegie Medal, one of the most prestigious British children's fiction awards, and the Guardian Children's Fiction Award.
Pullman has been writing full-time since 1996, but continues to deliver talks and writes occasionally for The Guardian. He was awarded a CBE in the New Year's Honours list in 2004. He also co-judged the prestigious Christopher Tower Poetry Prize (awarded by Oxford University) in 2005 with Gillian Clarke. Pullman also began lecturing at a seminar in English at his alma mater, Exeter College, Oxford, in 2004,[5][6] the same year that he was elected President of the Blake Society.[7] In 2004 Pullman also guest-edited The Mays Anthology, a collection of new writing from students at the University of Oxford and University of Cambridge.
In 2005, he was awarded The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award by the Swedish Arts Council.
In 2008, he started working on The Book of Dust, a sequel to his completed His Dark Materials trilogy, and "The Adventures of John Blake", a story for the British children's comic The DFC, with artist John Aggs.[8][9][10]
On 23 November 2007, Pullman was made an honorary professor at Bangor University.[11] In June 2008, he became a Fellow supporting the MA in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University.[12] In September 2008, he hosted "The Writer's Table" for Waterstone's bookshop chain, highlighting 40 books which have influenced his career.[13] In October 2009, he became a patron of the Palestine Festival of Literature.
Pullman has a strong commitment to traditional British civil liberties and is noted for his criticism of growing state authority and government encroachment into everyday life. In February 2009, he was the keynote speaker at the Convention on Modern Liberty in London[14] and wrote an extended piece in The Times condemning the Labour government for its attacks on basic civil rights.[15] Later, he and other authors threatened to stop visiting schools in protest at new laws requiring them to be vetted to work with youngsters—though officials claimed that the laws had been misinterpreted.[16] In 2010, Pullman left the Liberal Democrats, the party he supported.[17]
On 24 June 2009, Pullman was awarded the degree of D. Litt. (Doctor of Letters), honoris causa, by the University of Oxford at the Encænia ceremony in the Sheldonian Theatre.[18]

His Dark Materials

Main article: His Dark Materials
His Dark Materials is a trilogy consisting of Northern Lights (titled The Golden Compass in North America), The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. Northern Lights won the Carnegie Medal for children's fiction in the UK in 1995. The Amber Spyglass was awarded both 2001 Whitbread Prize for best children's book and the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in January 2002, the first children's book to receive that award. The series won popular acclaim in late 2003, taking third place in the BBC's Big Read poll. Pullman later wrote two companion pieces to the trilogy, entitled Lyra's Oxford, and Once Upon a Time in the North. A third companion piece Pullman refers to as the "green book" will expand upon his character Will. He has plans for one more, the as-yet-unwritten The Book of Dust. This book is not a continuation of the trilogy but will include characters and events from His Dark Materials.
In 2005 Pullman was announced as joint winner of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for children's literature.

12-25-2011, 12:12 PM

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والان مع سر الروعو في رواية :

99ـ الأميركي الرعوي، للمؤلف فيليب روث

99. American Pastoral Philip Roth -For years, Roth was famous for Portnoy's Complaint . Recently, he has enjoyed an extraordinary revival.
American Pastoral is a Philip Roth novel concerning Seymour "Swede" Levov, a Jewish-American businessman and former high school athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the "indigenous American berserk". The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and was included in Time's "All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels".[1] The film rights to it were later optioned by Paramount Pictures. In 2006, it was one of the runners-up in the "What is the Greatest Work of American Fiction in the Last 25 Years?" contest held by the New York Times Book Review.[2]
The framing device in American Pastoral is a 45th high school reunion attended by frequent Roth alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, who is the narrator. At the reunion, in 1995, Zuckerman meets former classmate Jerry Levov who describes to him the tragic derailment of the life of his recently deceased older brother, Seymour "Swede" Levov. After Seymour's teenage daughter Merry in 1968 set off a bomb in protest against American involvement in the Vietnam War, killing a bystander, and subsequently went into hiding, Seymour Levov remained traumatized for the rest of his life. The rest of the novel consists of Zuckerman's posthumous recreation of Seymour Levov's life, based on Jerry's revelation, a few newspaper clippings and Zuckerman's own impressions after two brief run-ins with "the Swede", in 1985 and shortly before his death. In these encounters, which take place early in the novel, Zuckerman learns that Seymour has remarried and has three young sons, but Seymour's daughter Merry is never mentioned. In Zuckerman's reimagining of Seymour's life this second marriage has no part; it ends in 1973 with Watergate unraveling on TV while the previous lives of all the protagonists completely fall apart.

Plot

Seymour Levov is born and raised in the Weequahic section of Newark as the son of a successful Jewish-American glove manufacturer. Called "the Swede" because of his anomalous blond hair, blue eyes and Nordic good looks, he is a star athlete in three sports and narrator Nathan Zuckerman's idol and hero. The Swede eventually takes over his father's glove factory, Newark Maid, and marries Dawn Dwyer, an Irish-American Miss New Jersey 1949 winner (the actual winner that year was Betty Jane Crowley).
Levov establishes what he believes to be a perfect American life with a beloved family, a satisfying business life, and a beautiful old home in rural Old Rimrock, New Jersey. Yet as the Vietnam War and racial unrest wrack the country and destroy inner-city Newark, Seymour's teenage daughter Merry, born with an emotionally debilitating stutter, and outraged at the United States' conduct in Vietnam, becomes more radical in her beliefs and in 1968 commits an act of political terrorism. In protest against the Vietnam War and the "system", she plants a bomb in a local post office and the resulting explosion kills a bystander. In this singular act, Levov is cast out of the seemingly perfect life he has built and thrown instead into a world of chaos and dysfunction. Like a number of real-life members of the Weather Underground, Seymour's daughter goes permanently into hiding. In Zuckerman's narration, a reunion of father and daughter takes place in 1973 in Newark's ruined inner city, where Merry is living in abysmal conditions. During this reunion, she claims that since the first bombing she has set off several other bombs resulting in more deaths and that she has been repeatedly raped while living in hiding. Though informed by Merry that she acted consciously and willingly in the murders, Seymour decides to keep their meeting a secret, unwilling to give up his notion of her as essentially an innocent who has been manipulated by stronger influences in the form of an unknown political group.
Zuckerman concludes his version with a dinner party with Seymour's parents and several friends, during which Seymour discovers that his wife has been having an affair with a mutual friend and attendee of the party. The narrator also reveals that Seymour himself has had an affair with Merry's speech therapist who is also attending the party, and had been responsible for hiding Merry in their home after the first bombing. Seymour concludes that all the members of the party have a veneer of respectability, yet each participates in subversive behavior, and that he is unable to understand the truth about anyone based on the actions they reveal outwardly. In this final scene, the narrator reveals Seymour to have concluded that his daughter's actions have made him to see the truth about the chaos beneath the pastoral surface of things, something he can no longer ignore.

Historical setting

The novel alludes extensively to the social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It refers to the 1967 Newark riots, the Watergate scandal, the sexual revolution and Deep Throat, the code name of the secret source in the Watergate scandal and the title of a 1972 pornographic film. In the novel's final scene, both the Watergate scandal and the pornographic film are discussed at a dinner party during which the first marriage of "the Swede" begins to unravel when he discovers his wife is having an affair. The novel also alludes to the rhetoric of revolutionary violence of the radical fringe of the New Left and the Black Panthers, the trial of the leftist African-American activist Angela Davis, and the bombings carried out between 1969 and 1973 by the Weathermen and other radicals opposing the US military intervention in Vietnam. The novel quotes from Frantz Fanon's A Dying Colonialism, which Zuckerman imagines as one of the texts that inspire Merry to carry out her bombing of a local post office.
In the novel, Merry's bombing takes place in February 1968, during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, after which she flees her parental home. By that time she has had a "Weathermen motto" tacked up in her room for many months. In reality this would have been impossible. The Weathermen group was in fact formed in the summer of 1969. The lines of the "motto" which appear in the novel ("We are against everything that is good and decent in honky America. We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the incubation of your mothers' nightmares.") allude to a speech by John Jacobs at a Weathermen "war council" in December 1969.
The inspiration for the Levov character was a real person: Seymour “Swede” Masin, a phenomenal, legendary all-around Jewish athlete who, like the Levov character, attended Newark’s Weequahic High School. Like the book’s protagonist, Swede Masin was revered and idolized by many local middle-class Jews.
Both “Swedes” were tall and had distinctively blond hair and blue eyes, which stood out among the typically dark-haired, dark-complexioned local residents. Both attended a teacher’s college in nearby East Orange; both married out of their faith; both served in the military and, upon their return, both moved to the suburbs of Newark.
==
BOOK SUMMARY
As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all our century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father's glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him.

For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth's masterpiece.

Winner - Pulitzer Prize.

12-25-2011, 12:13 PM

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BOOK REVIEWS

Media Reviews
Booklist - Ted Leventhal
Pastoral, like Roth's 21 previous works, is well crafted with vivid, crisp prose, but unlike the others, it's empty....Roth vents his bitterness with America and himself. Once again, no one escapes the misery that personifies modern America.

Publishers Weekly
The protagonist of Roth's new novel, a magnificent meditation on a pivotal decade in our nation's history, is in every way different from the profane and sclerotic antihero of Sabbath's Theater.

Kirkus Reviews
Roth's elegiac and affecting new novel, his 18th, displays a striking reversal of form--and content--from his most recent critical success, the Portnoyan Sabbath's Theater (1995). Here, and in more conventionally expository authorial passages, meditativeness and discursiveness predominate over drama. Nevertheless, passion seethes through the novel's pages. Some of the best pure writing Roth has done. And Swede Levov's anguished cry "What the hell is wrong with doing things right?" may be remembered as one of the classic utterances in American fiction.

Library Journal - Barbara Hoffert
In his latest novel, Roth shows his age. Not that his writing is any less vigorous and supple. But in this autumnal tome, he is definitely in a reflective mood, looking backward. .... In the end, the book positively resonates with the anguish of a father who has utterly lost his daughter. Highly recommended.

Salon - Albert Mobilio
Structurally, the book is poorly shaped. Roth doesn't circle back to the 90-page preamble featuring Zuckerman, the ending feels arbitrary and the gratifying if bracing payoff that American Pastoral vigorously promises throughout is denied. But, if you want a Philip Roth book that isn't just another bulletin from his life, this one is that and more.

The Atlantic Monthly, Ralph Lombreglia
.... an allegory seemingly conceived in an abstracted realm of big notions and fixed ideas. American Pastoral is a relentlessly mental book, full of inconclusive rumination on material often left strangely undramatized. And that, along with the book's mystifyingly haphazard structure, prevents it from becoming a "genuine imaginative event."

The New York Times Book Review, Michael Wood
American Pastoral is a little slow--as befits its crumbling subject, but unmistakably slow all the same--and I must say I miss Zuckerman's manic energies. But the mixture of rage and elegy in the book is remarkable, and you have only to pause over the prose to feel how beautifully it is elaborated, to see that Mr. Roth didn't entirely abandon Henry James after all. A sentence beginning "Only after strudel and coffee," for instance, lasts almost a full page and evokes a whole shaky generation, without once losing its rhythm or its comic and melancholy logic, until it arrives, with a flick of the conjuror's hand, at a revelation none of us can have been waiting for.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
One of Roth's most powerful novels ever...moving, generous and ambitious...a fiercely affecting work of art.

Boston Globe
Dazzling...a wrenching, compassionate, intelligent novel...gorgeous.

San Francisco Chronicle
At once expansive and painstakingly detailed.... The pages of American Pastoral crackle with the electricity and zest of a first-rate mind at work.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5 by debbie
Repetition, Anyone?
I chose to read this book because it was a Pulitzer winner and I cannot understand why [it won]. The story goes in circles, the writing style is wordy without much substance. How many times and ways can you say what essentially is the same thing

12-25-2011, 12:14 PM

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الرعوية الأميركية

هو فيليب روث الرواية المتعلقة سيمور "السويدي" Levov ، وهو اليهودي الاميركي السابق ورجل الأعمال رياضي في المدرسة الثانوية من نيوارك بولاية نيو جيرسي . Levov's happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the "indigenous American berserk ". Levov سعيد التقليدية و الطبقة المتوسطة العليا هي التي دمرت حياة الاضطرابات الاجتماعية والسياسية المحلية من 1960s ، والذي في الرواية يوصف بأنه مظهر من مظاهر "الأميركية الأصلية هائج ". The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and was included in Time 's "All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels" . [ 1 ] The film rights to it were later optioned by Paramount Pictures . الرواية فازت بجائزة بوليتزر في عام 1998 وأدرجت في وقت "ليالي "روايات كل مرة 100 اكبر" . [1] كان optioned حقوق الفيلم في وقت لاحق من قبل ل باراماونت . In 2006, it was one of the runners-up in the "What is the Greatest Work of American Fiction in the Last 25 Years?" في عام 2006 ، انها واحدة من المتابعة في المركز الثاني "ما هو أعظم عمل روائي الاميركي في السنوات ال 25 الماضية؟" contest held by the New York Times Book Review المسابقة التي أجرتها نيويورك ريفيو كتاب تايمز .
The framing device in American Pastoral is a 45th high school reunion attended by frequent Roth alter ego Nathan Zuckerman , who is the narrator. و الجهاز تأطير الرعوية في أمريكا هو 45 مدرسة ثانوية لم الشمل حضره متكررة روث الأنا ناثان زوكرمان ، الذي هو الراوي. At the reunion, in 1995, Zuckerman meets former classmate Jerry Levov who describes to him the tragic derailment of the life of his recently deceased older brother, Seymour "Swede" Levov. في لم الشمل ، في عام 1995 ، يجتمع زوكرمان زميل السابق جيري Levov الذي يصف له انحراف المأساوي من حياة شقيق المتوفى مؤخرا الأكبر منه سنا ، سيمور "السويدي" Levov. After Seymour's teenage daughter Merry in 1968 set off a bomb in protest against American involvement in the Vietnam War , killing a bystander, and subsequently went into hiding, Seymour Levov remained traumatized for the rest of his life. بعد ميلاد سعيد لابنة في سن المراهقة سيمور في عام 1968 تفجير قنبلة في احتجاج ضد التورط الأميركي في حرب فيتنام لا تزال سيمور Levov مما أدى الى مقتل أحد المارة ، وذهب بعد ذلك إلى الاختباء ، صدمة بالنسبة لبقية حياته. The rest of the novel consists of Zuckerman's posthumous recreation of Seymour Levov's life, based on Jerry's revelation, a few newspaper clippings and Zuckerman's own impressions after two brief run-ins with "the Swede", in 1985 and shortly before his death. بقية الرواية تتألف من الترفيه زوكرمان وبعد وفاته الحياة سيمور Levov ، على أساس الوحي جيري ، وقصاصات من الصحف القليلة والانطباعات زوكرمان نفسه بعد سنتين وجيزة الإضافية تشغيل مع "السويدي" ، وعام 1985 ، وقبل وقت قصير من وفاته. In these encounters, which take place early in the novel, Zuckerman learns that Seymour has remarried and has three young sons, but Seymour's daughter Merry is never mentioned. في هذه اللقاءات ، التي تجري في وقت مبكر من الرواية ، ويتعلم أن زوكرمان سيمور وقد تزوج ولديه ثلاثة أبناء ، ولكن لم يذكر سيمور ابنة ميري. In Zuckerman's reimagining of Seymour's life this second marriage has no part; it ends in 1973 with Watergate unraveling on TV while the previous lives of all the protagonists completely fall apart. في reimagining زوكرمان للحياة سيمور لهذا الزواج الثاني ليس لديه جزء ، بل تنتهي في عام 1973 مع ووترغيت الكشف على شاشة التلفزيون في حين أن حياة سابقة من جميع الفرقاء تقع تماما عن بعضها البعض.