David Lodge, página 2 de 6

Surrounded by quarrelling honeymooners, a freeloading anthropologist and assorted tourists in search of their own personal paradise, and with his father whisked off to hospital after an unfortunate accident, Bernard is beginning to regret ever coming to Haiwaii.

Framed by a dramatic and moving account of Henry James's last illness, Author! Author! begins in the early 1880s, describing James's friendship with the genial Punch artist, George Du Maurier, and his intimate but problematic relationship with fellow American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson. At the end of the decade Henry, worried by the failure of his books to sell, resolves to achieve fame and fortune as a playwright while Du Maurier diversifies into writing novels. The consequences that ensue mingle comedy, irony, pathos, and suspense. As Du Maurier's novel Trilby becomes the bestseller of the century, Henry anxiously awaits the opening night of his make-or-break play, Guy Domville. This event, on January 5, 1895, and its complex sequel form the climax to Lodge's absorbing novel. Thronged with vividly drawn characters, some of them with famous names, Author! Author! presents a fascinating panorama of literary and theatrical life in late Victorian England. But at its heart is a portrait, rendered with remarkable empathy, of a writer who never achieved popular success in his lifetime or resolved his sexual identity, yet wrote some of the greatest novels about love in the English language.

Dans son dernier roman, Pensées secrètes, l'écrivain Henry James apparaissait en filigrane. Dans celui-ci, il se tient au centre de la scène. L'histoire commence en décembre 1915, alors que Henry James meurt entouré de ses proches et de ses domestiques - puis recule pour lever le rideau sur les années 1880. Apparaissent alors George du Maurier, l'ami cher, artiste et illustrateur de métier et Constance Fenimore Woolson, écrivain américain avec qui James entretient des relations aussi étroites que platoniques. C'est à cette époque que Henry James décide, pour contrer le faible succès public de ses livres, de chercher la fortune et la renommée au théâtre. Il se lance dans l'écriture de pièces tandis que son ami George, dont la vue s'affaiblit, se met, lui, à écrire des romans. Les conséquences pour les deux hommes vont être tout à la fois comiques, tragiques, surprenantes et ironiques : tandis que Trilby , le roman de Georges, devient le best-seller du siècle au grand étonnement de l'auteur lui-même, Henry se voit hué le soir de la première de sa pièce Guy Domville.

Our self-consciousness as human beings entails creating a narrative of our lives. How the sense of self is produced, and whether it is anything more than an illusory by-product of brain activity, are questions that have been closely studied and fiercely debated in the sciences in recent years. David Lodge shows here, the novel has for centuries been attempting to map this same territory.

Con la amenidad y el humor característicos de todas sus obras, David Lodge analiza los mecanismos internos de la novela. Ofrece así un libro agradable y altamente instructivo que se ha convertido en un texto imprescindible para estudiantes de literatura, escritores en ciernes y todo aquel que desee averiguar y comprender los mecanismos y resortes técnicos del arte de la ficción.

Adrian Ludlow, a novelist with a distinguished reputation and a book on the A-level syllabus, is now seeking obscurity in a cottage beneath the Gatwick flight path, with his wife Eleanor. Their old university friend Sam Sharp, now a hugely successful screenwriter, drops in on the way to Los Angeles, fuming over a vicious profile of himself by Rottweiler interviewer Fanny Tarrant in a Sunday newspaper. Together the two men decide to take revenge on the journalist, though Adrian is risking what he values most: his privacy.

" Irrésistible de drôlerie, réaliste jusqu'à la cruauté, le livre de David Lodge est surtout délicieusement mais parfaite

The art of fiction is considered under a wide range of headings, such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Time-shift, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and each topic is illustrated by a passage or two taken from classic or modern fiction. Drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James and Martin Amis, Jane Austen and Fay Weldon and Henry Fielding and James Joyce, David Lodge makes accessible to the general reader the richness and variety of British and American fiction.