The best thing one could say of an author: he enriches us.

- Günter Grass,

Thrilling, nuanced, and chillingly meditative . Ilija Trojanow has written a modern fable tinged with absurd humor, dramatizing the high stakes of our current climate gamble.

- Colum McCann, author of <i>Let the Great World Spin</i>,

This is like the stream of consciousness of our planet's unraveling lifeworld, as channeled through its melting ice and a cruise ship naturalist in love with his doomed subject. Quick, dense, jagged, beautiful.

- Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the <i>Mars Trilogy</i>,

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<i>The Lamentations of Zeno</i> is electric, irresistible, well written and movingly topical. Ilija Trojanow, with several masterpieces to his name, never puts a foot wrong. He is as important a writer in this day and age as Günter Grass was for his-a joy to read.

- Nuruddin Farah, author of <i>Hiding in Plain Sight</i>,

Perfectly paced, keenly insightful and wickedly funny, <i>The Lamentations of Zeno</i> is at once a much-needed indictment of the global climate crisis and a brilliant portrait of middle life. The Antarctic antics of <i>Where'd You Go, Bernadette?</i> meet the wit and wisdom of <i>Herzog</i>, with the politics of<i>Flight Behavior</i> sprinkled on top: a treat!

- Taiye Selasi, author of <i>Ghana Must Go</i>,

There is little that a novelist can tell us on the subject that we do not already know, but Trojanow gives the statistics and prognoses a human dimension . one of Europe's most original contemporary writers.

Times Literary Supplement

Trojanow harnesses his lyrical skill and wows the reader when he focuses on describing Zeno's exploration of the seemingly monochromatic yet thrilling landscape. The book is a sophisticated drama about a scientist's love for a continent that eludes his slippery hold.

Publishers Weekly

A topical polemic about global warming and climate change... <i>The Lamentations of Zeno</i> is half the length and twice as good [as Ian McEwan]. Trojanow has set out on a particular expedition: to unsettle. This wise, cunning book, which does indeed possess the complex depths of an iceberg, achieves exactly that.

Irish Times

<i>The Lamentations of Zeno</i> is a novel of existential dread... in contemplating the already accomplished destruction of habitats, the consumerism that marks nearly every human activity and the digital onslaught that has colonised our minds, the reader may discover that Zeno's soul-sickness speaks to some disquiet in his or her own battered soul.

Financial Times

Short, sharp, bitter, and very funny.

- Nicola Twilley, New Yorker

With a sharp ear for pop song lyrics and a love of glaciers, our antihero seems to be fighting a losing battle against climate change and the clueless humans who foster it.

- Jay Trachtenberg, Austin Chronicle

Zeno Hintermeier is a scientist working as a travel guide on an Antarctic cruise ship, encouraging the wealthy to marvel at the least explored continent and to open their eyes to its rapid degradation. It is a troubling turn in the life of an idealistic glaciologist. Now in his early sixties, Zeno bewails the loss of his beloved glaciers, the disintegration of his marriage, and the foundering of his increasingly irrelevant career. Troubled in conscience and goaded by the smug complacency of the passengers in his charge, he starts to plan a desperate gesture that will send a wake-up call to an overheating world.The Lamentations of Zeno is an extraordinary evocation of the fragile and majestic wonders to be found at a far corner of the globe, written by a novelist who is a renowned travel writer. Poignant and playful, the novel recalls the experimentation of high-modernist fiction without compromising a limpid sense of place or the pace of its narrative. It is a portrait of a man in extremis, a haunting and at times irreverent tale that approaches the greatest challenge of our age-perhaps of our entire history as a species-from an impassioned human angle.
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The best thing one could say of an author: he enriches us.
A literary story of climate disaster and a scientist imploding on a journey to the Antarctic

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781784782191
Publisert
2016-05-03
Utgiver
Vendor
Verso Books
Vekt
337 gr
Høyde
210 mm
Bredde
140 mm
Dybde
18 mm
Aldersnivå
G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
176

Forfatter
Oversetter

Om bidragsyterne

Ilija Trojanow is a German novelist and travel writer, the author of many books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Collector of Worlds, Along the Ganges, and Mumbai to Mecca. His autobiographical debut novel was adapted into the award-winning film The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Just Around the Corner. A vocal critic of domestic surveillance and the NSA, Trojanow was at the center of a cause célèbre in 2013 when the United States refused him entry.