Rosalind Belben Dreaming of Dead People recensie, review en informatie Engelse roman uit 1979. Op 5 augustus 2025 verschijnt bij uitgeverij And Other Stories de heruitgave de roman van de uit Engeland afkomstige schrijfster Rosalind Belben die voor het eerst in 1979 verscheen. Hier lees je informatie over de inhoud van de roman, de auteur en over de uitgave. Een Nederlandse vertaling van het boek is niet verkrijgbaar.
Rosalind Belben Dreaming of Dead People recensie, review en informatie
- “So extraordinarily good that one wants more, recognising a writer who can conjure an inner life and spirit, can envisage, in unconnected episodes, a complete world: one unified not by external circumstances but by patterns of the writer’s mind.” (Isabel Quigly, Financial Times)
- “Belben has written pages about sexual desire, frustration and loss which are clearer and more compelling than any I can think of in literature … An achievement to celebrate.” (Maggie Gee, The Observer)
- “Her heroine is a solitary woman who tells of her past and recalls, often, the countryside, where being alone is not painful and, if there is no meaning to life, the call to the senses is immediate. The book is beautifully written.” (Hilary Baily, The Guardian)
- “By turns shimmering and disquieting, Belben’s exceptional voice deserves a resurgence.” (Irenosen Okojie)
- “Deeply strange, uncompromising and extraordinarily powerful.” (Jonathan Buckley)
Dreaming of Dead People
- Auteur: Rosalind Belben (Engeland)
- Soort boek: Engelse roman uit 1979
- Taal: Engels
- Uitgever: And Other Stories
- Verschijnt: 5 augustus 2025
- Omvang: 144 pagina’s
- Uitgave: paperback / ebook
- Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris
Flaptekst van de roman uit 1979 van de Engelse schrijfster Rosalind Belben
In the ‘middle of life’ – although this is only thirty-six – and with the unsparing eye of a portraitist, Lavinia reviews her frustrations and her solitariness, the grief and the rapture: these are her seeming companions in a pageant presided over, as it were, by the medieval masks of Owl, signifying winter, and Cuckoo, for erotic love. In attendance are dreams of rustic places and once-dear animals. But it is no ordinary procession, for her childhood comes last.
The idiosyncratic Dreaming of Dead People was first published in 1979, yet remains as surprising as ever: it is frank, mordantly funny, true to itself and raw.
Rosalind Belben was born on 1 february 1941 in Dorset in the rural southwest of England where she spent her early childhood. From the age of nine she was at boarding school on the edge of Dartmoor, in Devon. Almost straight from school she went in 1959 to work for the next two years in theatre, meaning to become a writer of stage plays. That didn’t happen. Her subsequent life has been nomadic, her experience and employment varied – with sometimes, nevertheless, years on end passed in a single place.
The countryside of Dorset has been both inspiration and recurrent setting. Quite as much, ‘abroad’ has exerted a powerful draw. There have been many adored destinations. Südtirol or the Alto Adige, the German-speaking Alpine region in the north of Italy, from 1978 – or in the 1990s Tunisia, with its myriad Roman and Phoenician remains and Islamic culture. Many epiphanies.
In 1987 Belben was in West Berlin as a Fellow of the Artist in Residence Program, staying for fifteen months. New editions of Dreaming of Dead People, Is Beauty Good and Choosing Spectacles are forthcoming from And Other Stories. Among her other novels are The Limit, Hound Music and Our Horses in Egypt, which won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2007.
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