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Loading... Gold: The Marvellous History of General John Augustus Sutter (Peter Owen Modern Classic) (original 1924; edition 2003)by Blaise Cendrars (Author), Nina Rootes (Translator)
Work InformationGold: The Marvellous History of General John Augustus Sutter by Blaise Cendrars (1924)
   No current Talk conversations about this book.   andyudis | Mar 10, 2021 |  Kindlegohome | Feb 14, 2016 |  ) Mariul | Dec 7, 2008 |
 Blaise Cendrars has since written the history of General Johann August Sutter, L’Or, a narrative that traces the swiftest leanest parabola of anything I’ve ever read, a narrative that cuts like a knife through the washy rubbish of most French writing of the present time, with its lemon-colored gloves and its rosewater and its holy water and its policier-gentleman cosmopolitan affectation. It’s probably because he really is, what the Quai d’Orsay school pretend to be, an international vagabond, that Cendrars has managed to capture the grandiose rhythms of America of seventy-five years ago, the myths of which our generation is just beginning to create. (As if anyone ever really was anything; he’s a good writer, leave it at that.) In L’Or he’s packed the tragic and turbulent absurdity of ’49 into a skyrocket. It’s over so soon you have to read it again for fear you have missed something. Sutter’s Gold is the easiest of Cendrars’s novels to assimilate. It deals in a compressed, minimalist prose with the epic downfall of his countryman August Sutter, the man who made the mistake of discovering gold on his property. The message of the book is as old as language itself: what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world … ? The tempo and simplicity of the work gained it a wide audience in many languages. Is contained in
In January 1848, John Augustus Sutter, "the first American millionaire," was ruined by one blow of a pickaxe. That blow revealed gold in one of the streams in Sutter's Californian estate, triggering the Gold Rush that brought hordes of greedy miners from every corner of the world to Sutter's vast domain. This is the story of this bankrupt Swiss paper maker who abandoned his family and made his way to America to seek his fortune. From New York he pushed westward, eventually acquiring a huge tract of land of which he was virtually an independent ruler and which was on the point of making him "the richest man in the world" when the Gold Rush brought disaster. For the last 30 years of his life, Sutter tried vainly to get compensation from the U.S. government. He died in 1880, a broken old man. This is a work of breathless pace, fantastic humor, and soaring invention: an extraordinary story extraordinarily told. No library descriptions found. 
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)848Literature French and related languages Miscellaneous French writingsLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.75)
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