With an imaginative audacity and lyrical brilliance that puts
him in the company of David Mitchell and
Aleksandar Hemon, Rana Dasgupta paints a portrait of a century
though the story of a hundred-year-old blind Bulgarian man in a
first novel that announces the arrival of an exhilarating new voice
in fiction.
In the first movement of Solo we meet Ulrich, the son of a
railroad engineer, who has two great passions: the violin and
chemistry. Denied the first by his father, he leaves for the Berlin
of Einstein and Fritz Haber to study the latter. His studies are
cut short when his father’s fortune evaporates, and he must return
to Sofia to look after his parents. He never leaves Bulgaria again.
Except in his daydreams—and it is those dreams we enter in the
volatile second half of the book. In a radical leap from past to
present, from life lived to life imagined, Dasgupta follows
Ulrich’s fantasy children, born of communism but making their way
into a post-communist world of celebrity and violence.
Intertwining science and heartbreak, the old world and the new,
the real and imagined, Solo is a virtuoso work.
“Utterly unforgettable in its humanity.” —The Guardian
|
内容加载中，请稍后...
商品评论（0条）