St. Louis, Missouri, post Seconde Guerre mondiale. Jack Boughton, un vagabond blanc épris de poésie, fait la rencontre de Miss Della Miles, professeure d'anglais noire, et fille de pasteur comme lui. L'évidence de leur amour, le risque qu'il leur fait courir dans une ville divisée par la ségrégation, le regard que porte la famille de Della sur une telle union et les penchants destructeurs de Jack convergent pour donner à ce roman auréolé de spiritualité la tension, la beauté et la grandeur d'un chef- d'oeuvre.
Marilynne Robinson écrit ici la plus bouleversante des histoires d'amour, d'une profondeur vibrante d'émotion, qui met en jeu deux belles âmes, deux pensées, deux postures morales, deux coeurs purs.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION and THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK
In 1956, towards the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son: 'I told you last night that I might be gone sometime . . . You reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in my life saw on any other face besides your mother's. It's a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern. I'm always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after I've suffered one of those looks. I will miss them.'
'A visionary work of dazzling originality' ROBERT MCCRUM, OBSERVER
'Writing of this quality, with an authority as unforced as the perfect pitch in music, is rare and carries with it a sense almost of danger' JANE SHILLING, DAILY TELEGRAPH
'A beautiful novel: wise, tender and perfectly measured' SARAH WATERS
'A masterpiece' SUNDAY TIMES
Ainsi que les lecteurs de Gilead et de Chez nous s'en souviendront sans doute, Lila est la seconde épouse du révérend John Ames qui exerce son sacerdoce à Gilead, une petite ville de l'Iowa. C'est à ce personnage féminin, très discret dans les deux romans précédents, que Marilynne Robinson, remontant le temps de sa propre fiction, consacre ce troisième ouvrage, bouclant ainsi, à rebours, le cycle de ce qui apparaît désormais comme une trilogie romanesque. À la manière de certains écrivains dont toute l'oeuvre semble hantée par un "territoire" unique, et comme si écrire s'apparentait pour elle à un geste d'ordre quasi généalogique, la romancière ne quitte donc pas les parages de Gilead, centre du monde en forme de champ magnétique où tout se joue pour les personnages, "sur la terre comme au ciel"...
Un roman bouleversant sur la famille, les secrets qu'elle recèle, la fuite du temps et la succession des générations. S'articulant autour des questions de l'amour, de la mort et de la foi, ce livre est probablement le chef-d'oeuvre de l'auteur (prix Pulitzer 2005) dans la manière inimitable qu'il a d'incarner les émotions et les affects les plus profonds et les plus universels.
Dans une petite ville du Far West naguère éprouvée par une tragédie ferroviaire dont le souvenir obsède tous les habitants, Ruth et Lucille, hantées par le sentiment d'une précarité universelle, grandissent puis survivent dans leur maison de famille cernée de paysages mutants en convoquant les rituels du quotidien pour tenir à distance les dangereux mystères d'une nature omniprésente et prédatrice.
WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2009
AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK
Jack Boughton - prodigal son - has been gone twenty years. He returns home seeking refuge and to make peace with the past. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold down a job, Jack is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton's most beloved child. His sister Glory has also returned, fleeing her own mistakes, to care for their dying father. A moving book about families, about love and death and faith, Home is unforgettable. It is a masterpiece.
'One of the greatest living novelists' BRYAN APPLEYARD, SUNDAY TIMES
'A luminous, profound and moving piece of writing. There is no contemporary American novelist whose work I would rather read' MICHAEL ARDITTI, INDEPENDENT
'Her novels are replete with a sense of felt life, with a deep and abiding sympathy for her characters and a full understanding of their inner lives' COLM TOIBIN
'Utterly haunting' JANE SHILLING, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
Dans ce recueil d'essais, Marilynne Robinson convoque une pensée élaborée sur la longue durée pour approfondir les grands thèmes qui n'ont cessé de nourrir son oeuvre et d'accompagner son parcours : de la fragmentation sociale à l'oeuvre dans nos sociétés à la vulnérabilité de l'homme en passant par la question - pour elle centrale - de la foi. S'élevant contre la tentation contemporaine de séculariser et de rationaliser le monde à outrance, ce livre d'intervention qui interroge les choix politiques et économiques de nos sociétés et les limites de plus en plus patentes d'un capitalisme manipulateur, constitue un plaidoyer contre l'austérité sous toute ses formes et défend la primauté de l'éthique pour accéder à des solutions authentiques allant de pair avec un nécessaire dépassement de soi.
A profound essay collection from the beloved author of Gilead, Houskeeping and Lila, including Marilynne Robinson's conversation with President Barack Obama.
'Grace and intelligence ...[her work] defines universal truths about what it means to be human' BARACK OBAMA
Robinson has plumbed the depths of the human spirit in her trilogy of novels - Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, Orange-Prize winning Home and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Lila - and in her moving essay collection When I Was a Child I Read Books.
Now, in The Givenness of Things, she brings a profound sense of awe and an incisive mind to the essential questions of contemporary life and faith. Through fourteen essays of remarkable depth and insight, Robinson explores the dilemmas of our modern predicament. How has our so-called Christian nation strayed from so many of the teachings of Christ? How could the great minds of the past, like Calvin, Locke and Shakespeare, guide our lives? And what might the world look like if we could see the sacredness in each other?
Exquisite and bold, these essays are a necessary call for us to find wisdom and guidance in our cultural treasures, to seek humanity and compassion in each other. The Givenness of Things is a reminder of what a marvel our existence is in its grandeur - and its humility.
From the author of the magnificent, award-winning novels GILEAD, HOME and LILA comes this wonderful, heart-warming collection of essays about reading.
'Grace and intelligence ...[her work] defines universal truths about what it means to be human' Barack Obama
Marilynne Robinson is not only a writer of sharp, subtly moving fiction, but also a rigorous thinker and incisive essayist. In this luminous collection she returns to the themes which have preoccupied her bestselling novels: the place literature has in life, the role of faith in modern living, the contradictions inherent in human nature. Clear-eyed and forceful as ever, Robinson demonstrates once again why she is regarded as one of our best-loved writers.
New essays by the Women's Prize and Pulitzer Prize winning author of Gilead, Home and Lila. In this collection, Marilynne Robinson impels us to action and offers us hope.
'Grace and intelligence ...[her work] defines universal truths about what it means to be human' BARACK OBAMA
Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home, winner of the Orange Prize; and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith.
Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.
'[Her work] defines universal truths about what it means to be human' Barack Obama
'Marilynne Robinson is one of the greatest writers of our time' Sunday Times
'Jack is the fourth in Robinson's luminous, profound Gilead series and perhaps the best yet' Observer
Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the American National Humanities Medal, returns to the world of Gilead with Jack, the final in one of the great works of contemporary American fiction.
Jack tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the loved and grieved-over prodigal son of a Presbyterian minister in Gilead, Iowa, a drunkard and a ne'er-do-well. In segregated St. Louis sometime after World War II, Jack falls in love with Della Miles, an African-American high school teacher, also a preacher's child, with a discriminating mind, a generous spirit and an independent will. Their fraught, beautiful story is one of Robinson's greatest achievements.
