As every schoolboy knows, you can fit the whole of England on the Isle of White. Grotesque, visionary tycoon Sir Jack Pitman takes the saying literally and does exactly that. He constructs on the island 'The Project', a vast heritage centre containing everything 'English', from Big Ben to Stonehenge, from Manchester United to the white Cliffs of Dover. The project is monstrous, risky, and vastly successful. In fact, it gradually begins to rival 'Old' England and even threatens to supersede it… One of Barnes' finest and funniest novels, „England, England” calls into question the idea of replicas, truth vs. fiction, reality vs. art, nationhood, myth-making, and self-exploration.
England, England 11 csillagozás
Eredeti megjelenés éve: 1998
Enciklopédia 3
Kedvencelte 2
Várólistára tette 3
Kívánságlistára tette 1
Kiemelt értékelések
Ez egy méltatlanul elhanyagolt regény, különösen, mivel a megjelenése (1996) óta bekövetkezett a Brexit, ami a regény írásakor még ugye pajzán gondolat sem volt – itt viszont tényleg megtörténik, spoiler.
Az egész egy vitriolos szatíra, egyrészt a sikeres üzletember figurája olyan botrányba keveredhetne spoiler, hogy attól megrendülne a teljes multinacionális cége, és aki tudomást szerez róla, persze jól meg is zsarolja. De a hatalmi harc persze nem áll meg az első vereségnél/győzelemnél, vannak emberek, akik nem viselik jól a vereséget… Ahhoz, hogy valaki lekoppintsa egy nép ezeréves történelmét, összes jól eladható műemlékét, és erre alapítson egy új országot – nos ez vagy a legnagyobb innováció vagy a legnagyobb pofátlanság, amiről valaha hallottunk.
Barnes szatirikus regénye rendkívül nyugtalanító kérdéseket vet fel, ráadásul nem is próbál választ adni ezekre. Hogyan lehetséges, hogy a modern ember beéri az eredeti dolgok, élmények másolatával? Ennyire elértéktelenedtek a valódi helyszínek, műalkotások, történelmi személyek? Csak az lett a fontos, hogy elmondhassuk: láttuk, készítettünk róla egy-két képet, és bevásároltunk szuvenírekből?
https://litfan.blog.hu/2016/06/30/julian_barnes_england…
Népszerű idézetek
Well, women have traditionally accommodated themselves to men’s needs. Men’s needs being, of course, double. You put us on a pedestal in order to look up our skirts. When you wanted models of purity and spiritual value, something to idealize while you were away tilling the soil or killing the enemy, we accommodated ourselves.
Had she been older, Martha might have thought the cruellest thing to do was let Jessica James and her smirking courtier continue in knees-together smugness until the day they walked up the aisle past the Crusader with his feet on the dog and into the sunset of the rest of their lives.
But Martha was not yet so sophisticated.
16. oldal, 1: England
You could always blame luck, but you can't blame your parents, you can't blame Sir Jack and his Project, you can't blame Paul, or any of his predecessors, you can't blame English history. So what is there left to blame, Martha? Yourself and luck. Let youself off tonight Martha. Blame luck. It's just bad luck you were not born a tomato. Things would have been much simpler. All you would have needed was a banana.
206. oldal (Vintage, 1999)
Madam, you cannot have the warm sun of the West Indian climate without the thunder, the lightning, and the earth quakes.
211. oldal (Vintage, 1999)
‘You – we – England – my client – is – are – a nation of great age, great history, great accumulated wisdom. Social and cultural history – stacks of it, reams of it – eminently marketable, never more so than in the current climate. Shakespeare, Queen Victoria, Industrial Revolution, gardening, that sort of thing. If I may coin, no, copyright, a phrase, We are already what others may hope to become. This isn’t self-pity, this is the strength of our position, our glory, our product placement. We are the new pioneers. We must sell our past to other nations as their future!
33. oldal
Once there was only the world, directly lived. Now there is the representation – let me fracture that word, the re-presentation – of the world. It is not a substitute for that plain and primitive world, but an enhancement and enrichment, an ironization and summation of that world. This is where we live today. A monochrome world has become Technicolor, a single croaking speaker has become wraparound sound. Is this our loss? No, it is our conquest, our victory.
Before they went to sleep, he said, 'So, to summarize the minutes of the meeting, if I change my job and get a salary rise and falsify my birth certificate and hang on to a door to make myself taller and get contact lenses, you might think of going out with me.'
'I'll consider it. '
79. oldal (Vintage, 2008)
Sir Jack had interests in many leisure organisations, and was sick to death of the self-opinionated claim that genteel ‘travel’ had been superseded by vulgar ‘tourism.’ What snobs and ignoramuses the complainers were. Did they imagine all those old-style travellers on whom they fawned were such idealists? That they hadn’t ‘travelled’ for much the same reasons as today’s ‘tourists’? To get out of England, to be somewhere else, to feel the sun, to see strange sights and stranger people, to buy things, to quest for the erotic, to return home with souvenirs and memories and boasts?
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