Grasp Пандора в Конго Assembled By Albert Sánchez Piñol PDF

книга, която не може да бъде сложена в жанрови рамки. Истории в историята заплетени, интригуващи, мистериозни, приключенски, фантастични, с криминален елемент, с хаплив хумор и сърдечни трепети.
Ако книгата не ми беше препоръчана, надали щях да й обърна внимание. А това щеше да е голям пропуск.
Пиньол разказва увлекателно и успява да задържи вниманието. Авторът изгражда първоначално мрежа за писане на новели, в която са замесени толкова лъжливи и фалшиви елементи, че е истинско предизвикателство да бъде разгадана и разплетена. И в сърцето на тази мрежа спуска главния герой, Томас Томпсън ентусиазиран млад писател, който е съгласен да пише дори като наемник, само и само да се почувства удовлетворен, че неговите мисли оживяват на страниците, макар и на тях да стои нечие друго име. Точно тези събития обаче въвеждат Томи в ситуация, която ще се окаже един от най големите и интригуващи шансове в живота му.
Пиньол се заиграва много изкусно с думите и това разведрява на пръв поглед нагнетената атмосфера. Преводът също е майсторски изпипан и в него открих думички и фрази, които определено звучат закачливо, като например "сводник на словесността", хихи.

Забележителна книга. Заслужава си и то много.




" Целта на щастието е да го предаваш на други"

" Който няма доводи се подчинява на този, който има приумици, "

" Покрусата на един човек трябва да е самотен акт, също като смъртта му. Когато един човек пада, когато се проваля, той трябва да бъде далече от бездушната публичност. Едно привидно поражение обаче може да бъде и успех, защото понякога хората спасяват достойнството си поради самия факт, че са се опитали да го спасят. "

" Няма безнадеждни ситуации, има само хора без надежда. “

" Кой е казал, че любовта е красива Любовта е преди всичко могъща. Любовта може да изкриви морала ни, също както една желязна греда, толкова твърда и здрава, се огъва в пещта. "
I was going to be kind about this novel but there are far to many indulgent reviews on Goodreads, and elsewhere, so I am going to be brutally honest this book stinks on way to many levels it is to long, it is so badly constructed with way to many characters and incidents stuck in just to move the story along.
It also totally improbably units historical setting and, as an Irish man, I find the insertion of Roger Casement as a resident of the Congo inboth ridiculous and distasteful.
Particularly as he is just there as another clunky device to move the plot along,

I have seen it said this novel is a clever denunciation of racism and colonialism, etc, I don't think it is anything of the sort, It is a rather distasteful exploitation of one of the parts of Africa most shamelessly abused by Europeans, the Congo Free State of king Leopold II of Belgium, as the backdrop for another novel in which black Africa provides the 'exotic colour' but whites Europeans are the protagonists.
It is more then distasteful it is obscene treat what happened in Congo and elsewhere in Africa under colonialism in this way, It is correct to compare this novel to those of Rider Haggard because it is written with the same image, if unrealised, Eurocentric racism, We don't need any more Rider Haggard novels, We need to read novels by Africans making up their own stories and legends of those times,

The more I think about the more I hate this book and the anger it makes me, Англия,а година. Томас Томсън, начинаещ писател и литературен негър“, получава поръчка да напише историята на затворник, който очаква да бъде съден за убийството на двама английски аристократи по време на безумна експедиция за диаманти в конгоанската джунгла. Така се ражда разказ за удивителното пътешествие към сърцето на мрака, където случаят и алчната им природа изправят героите пред непозната, враждебна раса. Авторът описва пътуването към една фантастична долна земя“ с изключително майсторство, като ангажира всичките ни сетива и държи в напрежение до последната минута, за да ни поднесе напълно неочаквана развръзка. Книгата съчетава различни жанрови елементи на класическия приключенски роман, на фантастиката и романа на ужасите, но също и на любовния и криминалния роман. И всичко това поднесено със забележително чувство за хумор. Pandora in the Congo is narrated by Thomas 'Tommy' Thomson, writing what he says is the same book yet again some sixty years after he first wrote it.
It's a bit different this time, as he writes the story behind and around the story as well, but still, .

Thomson grew up in an orphanage, so wellliked there that they let him stay another four years after they were supposed to send him out into the wild world at fifteen.
He developed a love of reading there, and the ambition to become a writer, When he left the orphanage he moved into Mrs, Pinkerton's boarding house, set to embark on his writing career, his most prized possession his typewriter, And one early opportunity comes his way when a writer offers him a gig helping to churn out the books in the 'Doctor Flag'series,

For twenty years three Doctor Flag titles, each eighty pages long, appeared each week, Doctor Flag didn't write them, of course, he had a ghostwriter and inthe then nineteenyearold Thomson becomes the ghost to the ghost and, it turns out, not even quite that.
It wasn't great money, but it was an opportunity, and though Thomson was being taken advantage of even if he didn't know how much, . . he was at least writing,

For his first project he gets the outline to a novel to be called 'Pandora in the Congo', He's told to stick to the script, wildly improbable and unrealistic though it is just like all the Doctor Flag books, and despite some reservations he does as he's told.


This particular meal ticket only lasts so long but there's someone who is impressed by Thomson's work, the lawyer Edward Norton, And Norton has a proposition for the newly unemployed wouldbe author, a different kind of ghostwriting, Norton has a client named Marcus Garvey who is to be tried for the murder of two young noblemen, Richard and William Craver, while serving them on an expedition to the Congo.
Garvey is to tell his side of the story to Thomson, who is then to write it in book form, Thomson doesn't understand what good it will do, but Norton says he's run out of

other ideas and hopes that something might come of it,

The money is better than what he got for the Doctor Flag novels, so Thomson takes the job, Garvey is locked up until his trial, and he's only allowed to receive visitors occasionally, so it takes quite a while for Thomson to get the whole story, And in this version he also describes some of what happened in his own life in that period, from life at the boarding house to, eventually, his getting called up to fight in World War I which helps delay the trial itself for years, so everything drags on for quite a while.


Garvey's story is a pretty sensational one, From lowly helper on the family estate, he gets roped into joining the spoiled and crude brothers on their grand African adventure, They head into darkest Congo, searching for gold, and Garvey tells a horrorstory of their exploitation of the natives along the way first chaining them together to carry the supplies deep into the jungle and replacing those who die off with those they grab in the villages they pass through, then forcing them to dig a hole in the ground that becomes their goldmine, and in which their slavelabourers are kept, like in a cage.
There is gold here, but soon there are also odd sounds to be heard down there, .

As in Cold Skin, Sánchez Piñol has a thing for otherworldly creatures, Here they are 'tectons', tall, pale notquitehuman creatures who come up through tunnels in the ground, One of the Africans on the expedition tells Garvey that it's exactly like what his grandfather said about the whites: first they send the missionaries, who threaten them with hell, then come the thieving traders, and finally come the soldiers and it looks like it's much the same with the tectons.


There is, however, also a love interest: Amgam, one of the tectons they capture and whom Garvey falls for but who one of the brothers takes and closely watches as his own property.


Despite the threat of the tectons, the brothers are blinded by the thought of the great riches they are mining daily, and they refuse to give up the place even after their labourers flee.
The tectons, on the other hand, keep coming back for more, and it comes to some serious confrontations, Ultimately, Garvey is the only survivor, .

The book Thomson writes is an heroic tale when it's published it also serves its purpose in helping at Garvey's trial, But Thomson has a few doubts and concerns, There's that tall, veiled woman he sees waiting to visit the jail, for example, .

Thomson and the reader know he's being manipulated the question is, of course, to what extent, Sánchez Piñol has some fun with this, but it's not quite as much fun as one might have hoped for,

Classic adventure yarn and metafictional game Sánchez Piñol aims high but only makes it halfway there, The adventure story is decent but not exceptional enough by itself and it does get fairly drawn out, The local and more domestic parts are often even rougher Mr, MacMahon's farting at the boarding house and Mrs Pinkerton's shellless turtle, Marie Antoinette, both seem fairly desperate attempts to add some humour and colour, and they're far from the only examples.
Sánchez Piñol tries hard, but he doesn't seem to have the right feel for this specifically English kind of tale of colonial adventure of that time it's close, but simply not right.


The final twists and explanations are clever enough in the abstract, but as told come across as a bit of a let down, especially since it's taken so long to get there.
Indeed, the whole novel and the many good ideas behind it from the social commentary and allegories to the take on both reading and writing do better in summary form than in what Sánchez Piñol does with them.
Not that it's a bad read, it's just not nearly as fun or exciting as it should be,
.