A Friend of the Earth

ISBN-13: 9780141002057 / Angielski / Miękka / 2001 / 368 str.

T. Coraghessan Boyle

Opis

In the tradition of The Tortilla Curtain, T.C. Boyle blends idealism and satire in a story that addresses the universal questions of human love and the survival of the species. In the year 2025 global warming is a reality, the biosphere has collapsed, and 75-year-old environmentalist Ty Tierwater is eking out a living as care-taker of a pop star's private zoo when his second ex-wife re-enters his life.
Both gritty and surreal, A Friend of the Earth represents a high-water mark in Boyle's career-his deep streak of social concern is effortlessly blended here with genuine compassion for his characters and the spirit of sheer exhilarating playfulness readers have come to expect from his work.

Recenzje

Praise for A Friend of The Earth:

"Funny and touching, antic and affecting . . . while Boyle's humor is as black as ever, he demonstrates that satire can coexist with psychological realism, comedy with compassion." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"As disaster tales go, this is a sly, hip one...Boyle has always liked to play circus barker for life's extremes and what better freak show than the environmental apocalypse itself?" The Washington Post

"Fiction about ecological disaster tends to be written in a tragic key. Boyle, by contrast, favors the darkly comic."  Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

"Both entertaining and informative...hits like a warning shot from twenty-five years into the future." Chicago Tribune

"A Friend of the Earth is about people and nature coming to terms with each other. In many ways it is a far more convincing argument for sustainable living in nature than any nonfiction environmental tract." San Francisco Chronicle 

"Boyle gives us a vivid, grim, hilarious portrait of our world . . . he has a marvelous gift for translating large-scale environmental scenarios into immediate, palpable terms . . . What gives A Friend of the Earth's comically dismal future its bite is how profoundly it is embedded in the present . . . Boyle's energetic prose achieves a fine balance between wacky comedy and serious reflection." The San Diego Union-Tribune

"Ripped from tomorrow's headlines, the ecobiography of Tyrone Tierwater failed monkeywrencher, ex-husband, ex-con, ex-zookeeper of the last Patagonian fox, and still-grieving father of the tree-dwelling Sierra, a twenty-first-century martyr to the redwoods." Outside 

"The story careens along with the breathless authority of a roller coaster . . . In A Friend of the Earth, Boyle sets himself a new challenge, swinging a leg wide to plant a foot solidly on new ground. Part antic comedy, part ecological intelligencer, part heartfelt plaint, it is a comic novel on grievous themes, a serious exploration of tragic truths. It not only marks Boyle's progress as a literary talent but demonstrates his consistent ability to entertain." Los Angeles Times 

"Boyle is still one of the most inventive and exhilerating novelists around, showing how you can drive a narrative and still have fun with language." The Philadelphia Inquirer 

"Boyle's wonderful writing is simultaneously wild, talky, and charming. If A Friend of the Earth is a provoker of conscience, it is also and foremost rich entertainment." The Cleveland Plain Dealer

O autorze

T.C. Boyle is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the late 1970s, he has published sixteen novels and ten collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988 for his novel World s End, and the Prix Médicis étranger for The Tortilla Curtain in 1995; his 2003 novel Drop City was a finalist for the National Book Award. His honors include the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, the Henry David Thoreau Prize for excellence in nature writing, and the Rea Award for the Short Story. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and lives in Santa Barbara.