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Today, "Make the earth explode soon" by Karl Marlantes, published on August 17, 2022 by Éditions Calmann-Lévy.
Emily Café Powell, contributor to the 20 Minutes
Books reading group
and blogger, recommends
Make the earth explode soon
by Karl Marlantes, published on August 17, 2022 by Éditions Calmann-Lévy.
His favorite quote:
“With the people you love, you accept the fact that there are only two ways not to suffer when they pass away.
Either we stop loving them, or we die first.
»
Why this book?
Because Karl Marlantes offers us a
dense and precise historical novel, which runs over several decades and revisits the myth of the American West, land of freedoms and opulence.
If the American Dream gladly takes it for its rank, the old world is not left out... It is for the author the opportunity to produce a complete and fascinating panorama of the first decades of the 20th century, a pivotal period of the History both in America and in Europe.
Because the author has chosen the prism of political commitment
to build his fiction: he then describes with talent the trade union struggles, the dreams of revolution and the evolution of the image of communism specific to the time.
Nor is he silent about the repressions on the one hand, and the plans for violent action on the other.
Because it is also and above all a well-run family fresco,
around an endearing clan.
The author details the unions, the births, the small pleasures and the great happinesses, but does not silence either the tragedies, the failures and disappointments.
Because
Exploding the Earth Soon
has the epic breath
of a great novel, one that allows the reader to detach himself from the triviality of the events in the lives of the characters to fly over decades of world history.
Dense and rough, this book draws its sources from the Kalevala, Finnish mythology, while revisiting the myth of the American West and the legendary figure of the American lumberjack.
The essentials in 2 minutes
The plot.
A family and historical fresco, Make the Earth Soon Burst plunges us into the daily lives of lumberjacks in Northwestern America at the turn of the 20th century.
Characters.
Under the pen of Karl Marlantes evolves a sibling of three young Finns determined to build a new life in America.
Two brothers and a sister: it is the latter, Aino, who stands out the most, by the strength of her political convictions.
Places.
Finland under Russian occupation, first of all: a harsh country, a source of great frustration for the heroes.
Then America, a brand new continent in full expansion.
We follow the heroes to Oregon near the Columbia River in the Lumberjack West.
The time.
From the end of the 19th century until the dawn of the 1970s, from Russian domination in Finland until the advent of American modernity, the reader follows a family over several generations through a war, a revolution, a pandemic…
The author.
Karl Marlantes is American and grew up in a small logging town in Oregon.
This is his third novel published in France.
This book was read with
passion!
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