Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man: Siegfried Sassoon - Hardcover

Sassoon, Siegfried

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571337260 ISBN 13: 9780571337262

Verlag: Faber and Faber, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

I can hear the creak of the saddle and the clop and clink of hoofs as we cross the bridge over the brook by Dundell Farm; there is a light burning in the farmhouse window, and the evening star glitters above a broken drift of half-luminous cloud. It is with a sigh that I remember simple moments such as those, when I understood so little of the deepening sadness of life, and only the strangeness of the spring was knocking at my heart.In the 1920s, a young man, grappling with the horrors of the war from which he had just returned, decided to write about a happier time. A time of cricket matches and fox-hunting, the busyness of village life and the shyness of youth.That man was Siegfried Sassoon, and this is his book., Originally published anonymously, it went on to become Faber & Faber's first bestseller. A classic depiction of pre-First World War Britain, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man tells two mirrored stories, about a boy coming of age and a country losing its innocence.

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Críticas:

To most readers, a book about fox hunting is hardly an enticing proposition. Hearty, red-faced country types in tight trousers boring on about their dogs and horses? No thanks. However, Siegfried Sassoon's sensitive, elegiac memoir will appeal even to sensitive metropolitans who wouldn't so much as tickle a fox, let alone hunt one.

TE Lawrence once remarked that "if I were trying to export the ideal Englishman to an international exhibition, I think I'd like to choose Siegfried Sassoon for chief exhibit". Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, published in 1928 and attractively reissued by Faber, is that ideal Englishman's regretful (sometimes slightly cloyingly nostalgic) lament for an ideal, vanished England. The book ends with Sassoon heading off to the war that would inspire his famous poems.

The book's greatest pleasures lie in Sassoon's evocation of the English countryside, where he spent his "queer and not altogether happy" childhood living with his aunt. How about this for an English country morning: "The air was Elysian with early summer and the shadows of steep white clouds were chasing over the orchards and meadows; sunlight sparkled on green hedgerows that had been drenched by early morning showers." Idyllic. Maybe I could grow to like the hunting life after all. I'll be on the first train out of London - save me a fox.

(The Times)

In Siegfried Sassoon's novels, the war hero poet summons a lost England. Sassoon is an amazingly likeable prose writer, modest, observant, good company. everything he writes seems quietly and ordinarily and completely true. (Ben Markovits The Telegraph)

A most delightful picture of English country life. (The Times)

One of the most subtle and moving narratives of youth's education in life, of the gradual breakdown of an egocentric universe that is happy, innocent and hopeless. (Angus Wilson Observer)

One of the best books of its kind that has ever been written. (Daily Express)

Not only a prose masterpiece, but also a picture of the England which was shattered by the War. (Edmund Blunden)

The most satisfying piece of autobiography to be published in our time. All the equipment of a novelist is Sassoon's. But what novel could equal in fascination this true story? (Howard Spring Evening Standard)

Possesses that peculiar magic that will endear any kind of book to any kind of reader. (Sunday Times)

This is an enchanting book... a piece of authentic communication: it is literature. (J. B. Priestley)

It is difficult to praise it adequately without seeming to be ridiculous... it is the reality and the beauty of the telling that absolutely hold one. (The London Mercury)

Biografía del autor:

Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886. He served in the trenches during WWI, where he began to write the poems for which he is remembered. Apart from the War Poems of 1919, he published eight volumes of verse during his lifetime. But it is as a novelist and autobiographer that he is perhaps better known. Sassoon's semi-autobiographical trilogy, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston's Progress (1936), became classics of war-era literature.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: Faber and Faber
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0571337260
• ISBN 13: 9780571337262
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352