Ragnarok kapak görseli

Ragnarok

The End of the Gods

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Ragnarok

Yazan: A.S. Byatt
Seslendiren: Harriet Walter
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As the bombs rain down in the Second World War, one young girl is evacuated to the English countryside. She is struggling to make sense of her new wartime life. Then she is given a copy of Asgard and the Gods - a book of ancient Norse myths - and her inner and outer worlds are transformed. War, natural disaster, reckless gods and the recognition of impermanence in the world are just some of the threads that A.S. Byatt weaves into this most timely of books. Just as Wagner borrowed from this dramatic Norse saga for the climax of the Ring Cycle, so Byatt reinvents it for our time in all its intensity and glory. Linguistically stunning and imaginatively abundant, this is a landmark piece of storytelling from one of the world's truly great writers.©2011 A.S. Byatt Fantastik Genre Fiction Kurgu Literary Fiction Sihir Vikingler Mitoloji
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Eleştirmen yorumları

"Byatt's prose is majestic, the lush descriptive passages - jeweled one minute, gory the next - a pleasure to get lost in"
"Byatt paints beautiful and fantastic word-pictures, glittering verbal special effects" (Allan Massie)
"Colour and sensation flood Byatt's writing . . . One of the most brilliant minds and speakers of our generation."
"Byatt's prose, compact and lyrical, treats [the gods] with dignity...Ragnarok is a clever, lucid, lovely book" (M. John Harrison)
"Thanks to a rare fusion of imagination and intellect, sensual poetry and cerebral prose, youthful joy and elderly wisdom [,Byatt has made]...an entire world, compressed but energetically alive in all its details. When we have artists like this, who needs gods?" (Peter Conrad)
"Byatt peels back the cover of the book that the girl reads and takes us deep inside it as she delights in reimagining the twilight of the gods and the destruction of the world. ... Like Wagner before her, [she] dares to dream how the world might end ... this rewriting of the Ragnarok is a story for our time of overpopulation and anthropomorphic climate change, and of all time"
"Surely among the most beautiful and incisive [pages] Byatt has ever written"
"Byatt's retelling of Ragnarok is permeated with the loving familiarity of long acquaintance. Her language is lapidary. The terrible archness that can infest the narratives of sophisticated writers who attempt to master myth is resoundingly absent. ... It is pleasant to imagine some lonely, bookish child discovering it and becoming entranced" (Jane Shilling)
"A brilliant, highly intelligent, fiercely personal rendition of the Scandinavian mythology...a gorgeous enrichment and interpretation" (Ursula K. Le Guin)
"Byatt's writing, impassioned and liberated from the strictures of the novel, has never been so beautiful"
"Byatt's prose is majestic, the lush descriptive passages - jeweled one minute, gory the next - a pleasure to get lost in."
"In her addition to Canongate's series of "Myths", Byatt dramatically retells Nordic legends of the twilight of the gods."
"Energy and power drip from Byatt's writing. ... There are too many glittering sentences to quote here in full."
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Beautifully written and read culminating in the fearsome thrill of the armageddon of the gods.

Valhalla evoked

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I’ve always found it difficult to read the myths: whether the Greek, Roman, Nordik - whatever - there’s something about them that makes them incomprehensible to me; I quickly get lost amongst all the names and creatures and feuds, and I always thought that it was because I didn’t have the background knowledge, or the ‘classics’ education, to be able to follow the stories. And that's just how it was feeling, once again, as I was listening to this ... I love the stories, and the sheer imaginative strangeness of the tales, but couldn’t help feeling I was missing more than I was picking up, and if the book wasn’t so short I probably wouldn’t have made it to the end - and that wonderful last chapter. In it, A.S. Byatt explains her own difficulty with the myths - even after a lifetime of reading, studying and retelling them - and she gives a beautiful account of how they've shaped her view of humanity, and her work too, and in so doing she made the whole tale of Ragnarok make (some sort of) sense to me ... Wonderful stuff. I'll definitely be listening to this again in the future. (It helped that the narrator was brilliant: perfect tone for this tale.) So, overall a very satisfying and enjoyable experience, and a thoroughly recommended part of the Cannongate Myth series - though I would say to listen to the last chapter first!

Wonderful.

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Wartime Britain provides the starting-point for Byatt's retelling of the Norse tales of gods and the end of things. A mother and daugher flee the London blitz. The girl, referred to as 'the thin child in wartime', has as her only source of solace an academic account of the Norse myths written by a German professor (I'm sure this happened all the time). As the girl reads the book, we are drawn into the timeless tales of Odin, Thor and Loki; of Fenris wolf and Yggdrasil. Byatt is at her best when retelling the myths themselves, weilding her purple pen to produce abundant aliteration and countless catalogues. The weakest part of the book is the framing story, with the precocious 'thin child' coming across as a bit of a ghoul – virtually longing for the death of her soldier father. As a retelling of the Norse myths by a contemporary author, Ragnarok is thin gruel beside Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology. Harriet Walter's narration is appropriately winsome.

Hit and myth

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Would you listen to Ragnarok again? Why?

I had kept this in my wish list until I had a cash credit and wish I had bought is months ago. It is definitely worth a credit. The story is, as it says in the review, based around Norse mythology from the perspective of a modern - 2nd world war -perspective. It is so much more. It contemplates 'the big questions' of creation and destruction using beautiful language and vivid imagery. the story is told from the view point of a child growing and developing in wartime. Her views and understanding shift and evolve as she assimilates classical mythology into her present reality.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Ragnarok?

There are a dozen or more lovely moments. The imagery is perfect; poetic thought inspiring but not to flowery. That said the use of common names for the 'flora and fauna' in the descriptions were very good. The seasons for flowers were correct - I'm a Botanist and it jars me, out of the story, when this sort of detail is wrong. I know nothing of Norse mythology this story made me curious.

Which scene did you most enjoy?

Personally I enjoyed the descriptions of the girl's walk to school. It brought back memories from my own -although different -childhood and captures the joy of playing outside, discovering and being a part of nature.

Did you have an emotional reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

The story made me reflect and day dream. In fact I fell asleep listening to it, not at all because I was bored. I was so relaxed imagining the pictures painted by the words and excellent narration that I drifted away, odd really as some of the descriptions are quite gruesome. Definitely worth a listen.

Any additional comments?

The only bit I didn't like was the end, sorry. No need for the thoughts on myths bit.Metaphor is a better medium.

Listen to this story

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Listening to the authors postscript made everything click into place and was very thought provoking. The story itself was reminiscent of my school days, listening to the teacher read a story to the class. As a whole the book is very cleverly written and once fully explained perhaps deserves another listening.

Deserves a second listen

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