The Elegance of the Hedgehog - second hand
A moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us. We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence. Then there's Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter. Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma's trust and to see through Renée's timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us
From the award-winning author of Soldiers of Salamis, a propulsive and riveting narrative investigation into an infamous fraud: a man who has been lying his entire life. Who is Enric Marco? An elderly man in his nineties, living in Barcelona, a Holocaust survivor who gave hundreds of speeches, granted dozens of interviews, received important national honors, and even moved government officials to tears. But in May 2005, Marco was exposed as a fraud: he was never in a Nazi concentration camp. The story was reported around the world, transforming him from hero to villain in the blink of an eye. Now, more than a decade later--in a hypnotic narrative that combines fiction and nonfiction, detective story and war story, biography and autobiography--Javier Cercas sets out to unravel Marco's enigma. With both profound compassion and lacerating honesty, Cercas takes the reader on a journey not only into one man's gigantic lie, but also--through its exploration of our infinite capacity for self-deception, our opposing needs for fantasy and reality, our appetite for affection--into the deepest, most flawed parts of our humanity.
המחיר שלנו:
39
₪
Heart of Darkness Few literary works have achieved the sustained, unflinching pessimism of Heart of Darkness , Joseph Conrad's haunting tale of one man's journey into the African subcontinent. One new novel that can justly make that claim is The Catastrophist , by the talented Irish writer/activist Ronan Bennett. Here, Conrad's classic tale is transmogrified by a century of irony, Westernization, and a tip of the hat to Graham Greene and John le Carré. Benett's Marlow is James Gillespie, an Irish historian turned novelist who travels to the Congo in 1959. Set against the death throes of the age of imperialism, the new nation's violent struggle for independence from Belgium provides ample opportunity for Gillespie to explore the dark territory of political and emotional engagement.
Gillespie's Kurtz, the figure who draws him to the Congo and whose maddening attachment to the place both fascinates and repulses him, is Inès, a fiery Italian journalist, who pens fiercely pro-Congolese articles for a radical newspaper. Inès and Gillespie met in London at the house of Gillespie's publisher, and soon after, were heading to Ireland for a romantic getaway. Inès was smitten instantly ("I am already loving you" she whispers as they first make love), but Gillespie, considerably less headstrong, was slower to recognize his feelings. Following Inès to Léopoldville (Kinshasa), the Congolese capital, was his emotional plunge, his gesture toward commitment. But soon after his arrival, Gillespie realizes that he has been displaced from Inès's attentions by her devotion to Patrice Lumumba, the charismatic Congolese independence leader. Gillespie, on the other hand, is incapable of viewing the disorganized independence movement as anything more than an unfortunate farce; nor does he sympathize with the Belgians in Léopoldville, who live in cloistered luxury, walled off from the cité indigène -- "where the blacks live" -- by well-patrolled walls and their own willful obliviousness.
המחיר שלנו:
25
₪
Argentine author Marcelo Birmajer uses his recurring character, Javier Mosan, to present a complicated political tale with roots in his country’s troubled past. Mosan, a journalist who does his best to avoid writing stories, spends a great deal of time indulging in sexual fantasy. When his editor asks him to interview Elias Traúm, an Argentinean who now lives in Israel, he thinks that it is just another routine assignment. Traúm and two dead friends were known as the “three musketeers” when they fought in the left-wing Peronist guerrilla group, the Montoneros. Javier goes to the airport to meet Traúm and ends up getting a severe beating. Traúm is kidnapped. He is later dumped by the side of the road and, Javier, relieved to learn that they both survived, finds himself drawn to the account of Traúm’s past despite orders from his editor to drop the story. Readers who enjoyed Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases will find this compelling, too. It provides insight into the world of Argentina’s Jewish community as well as a top-notch conspiracy plot.
המחיר שלנו:
25
₪
From the acclaimed author of The Ash Garden —“an illuminating searchlight on the terra incognita where the personal and the political intersect” (Newsday) —an even more ambitious novel that follows a doctor from the trenches of the Great War into subsequent conflicts whose horrors would soon envelop the world. The historical Norman Bethune—legendary in both his native Canada and China—was a visionary whose dedication touched millions, and as the narrator of this novel he springs to vivid life even as he approaches its end. Rebelling in childhood against his father’s religion, he finds a calling himself, saving lives on the battlefield, only after nearly losing his own in the trenches in France. In Republican Spain he fulfills his idealism, yet before long politics destroy a romance, compromise his achievement, and drive him to seek refuge and purpose in the vast expanse of China. Here, in the service of the man eventually known as Mao Zedong, Bethune contends with Nationalist and Japanese enemies and begins this account of failed loves, cherished beliefs, discoveries, and reversals for the only person who still makes a future seem the daughter he has never seen. Storytelling at its best—passionate, wrenching, compelling—about a complex, contradictory man caught in the relentless sweep of history.
המחיר שלנו:
35
₪