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Loading... Chronic City (2009)
Work InformationChronic City by Jonathan Lethem (2009)
  
Top Five Books of 2023 (636) » 10 more No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) monicaberger | Jan 22, 2024 |   ) Octavia78 | Nov 28, 2021 | Solamente l'ex critico musicale Perkus Tooth e la sua strana banda di adepti sembra accorgersi che le cose non sono piĂą (o non lo sono mai state)normali e che forse Manatthan non è quello che sembra. Grazie a loro abbiamo quindi uno squarcio di ciò che potrebbe essere la vita quotidiana in una realtĂ che collassa: non molto diversa dalla nostra a dire la veritĂ ...ma questo potrebbe voler dire che probabilmente anche la nostra realtĂ non sta piĂą in piedi da sola... ( ) JoeProtagoras | Jan 28, 2021 | ) dllh | Jan 6, 2021 | ) oonalazlo | Aug 18, 2020 |
 Lethem is able to summon all his PK Dick chops, to channel the media-nuts who circulate in literary scenes, to ask important, hard-to-articulate and impossible-to-answer questions about what is genuine, what is artifice, and when it matters. “The Fortress of Solitude” was a great novel, but also a chaotic sprawl — it addressed gentrification and race relations and comic books and disco and the prison system and more, on and endlessly on. “Chronic City” is more contained, less greedy in its grasp, and it is even better. It limits itself to a single big theme — but then, it’s the biggest there is: the pursuit of truth.  Will Chase be forced to choose between Janice and Oona? Is the tiger rampaging through the city streets a real one or a mechanical contraption that’s part of a government plot? For that matter, are Chase, Oona and all the others playing out roles in a bigger performance-art-like game? Or maybe they’re really avatars in a variation on that old city-building simulation game, SimCity? In the end the reader simply doesn’t care: these creatures inhabit neither a real flesh-and-blood Manhattan nor a persuasive fictional realm, and they’re so clearly plasticky puppets moved hither and thither by Mr. Lethem’s random whims that it’s of no concern to us what happens to them in this lame and unsatisfying novel. [Lethem's] sprawling new novel, “Chronic City,” is not simply uneven. It’s a major disappointment hobbled by a lack of the basics — plot, character development, motive, structure.  The novel functions much like Manhattan used to — a mad scramble of connections made and, more often, missed. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML: A New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.48)
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