A Week in December Feature
- ISBN13: 9780385532914
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
A Week in December Overview
From the author of the bestselling Birdsong comes a powerful novel that melds the moral heft of Dickens and the scrupulous realism of Trollope with the satirical spirit of Tom Wolfe.
London: the week before Christmas, 2007. Over seven days we follow the lives of seven major characters: a hedge fund manager trying to bring off the biggest trade of his career; a professional footballer recently arrived from Poland; a young lawyer with little work and too much time to speculate; a student who has been led astray by Islamist theory; a hack book reviewer; a schoolboy hooked on reality TV and genetically altered pot; and a Tube train driver whose Circle Line train joins these and countless other lives together in a daily loop.
With daring skill and savage humor, A Week in December explores the complex patterns and crossings of modern urban life; as the novel moves to its gripping climax, its characters are forced, one by one, to confront the true nature of the world they—and we all—inhabit.
Customer Reviews
A week of December, is a tour de force that provides high entertainment value and provocative ideas. 'S so beautiful a "novel just published, as I read in the last five years.
First, the conversation: The novel presents a dozen main characters (and two dozen other secondary) in four major inter-related stories (and a handful of secondary) are involved in this development and convergence with a week of December - - in particular, 16. December by22nd December 2008. The interior is modern, multicultural London (where now 75% of births to mothers who were not born in the United Kingdom). The great stories are born global financial services coup was to wrest billions of pounds for a hedge fund at the expense of a major British bank and the financial burden of millions of pensioners, farm workers subsistence-level African and (of course) the taxpayers Islamic terrorist plot, the descent into psychosis by 16 yearsThe son of a billionaire financier, with easy access to £ 700 for marijuana GM and touching and improbable love story. The story unfolds and intertwines the stories and sent this very minor, creating a faster disk than a week, and the stories that takes place towards its dissolution. All this makes a novel set heavy.
Now for ideas: one week in December has examined topics such as Islam and terrorism,Alice in Wonderland world of high finance in the last thirty years, with its exotic financial instruments and the unbridled greed, the penetration of the Internet world of virtual reality to the reality of "real life" schizophrenia, dumbing down of education in the West, and total rudeness and superficiality of the "culture" in the UK (and this list represents only the tip of the iceberg).
For example, in relation to Islam, the more thoughtful characters Faulksreflected in the novel as follows: "As soon as an initial theological debate, once and for all that the Qur'an was literally and in every syllable, the unmediated word of God chosen, therefore, by definition, all Muslims," fundamentalist "was . It was his nature, in contrast with Judaism or Christianity, it is inside, and rather apologetic, a fundamentalist religion. There was, of course, a world of difference between 'fundamental' and 'militant' - much less " aggressive ", but the truth nonehas remained constant: that, so pure, so generous and so uncompromising that Islam was the kind of believers say it could be limited. "
Another example to do with the company's approach to knowledge and education: "In pre-modern society the goal of people was simply to keep what he had learned not to lose it." But in the twentieth century, Western society, especially in Europe, had adopted the goal of universal education and a net profit of knowledge among all those who, from generation toGeneration. * * "It is now abandoned as a destination. * From now on there will be a net loss of knowledge in Europe. The difference between a peasant community in the fourteenth century, Iran and modern London, but when she and its scarce resources, the villagers occasionally slipped back, it was not for lack of trying. But we, here in England, was a positive choice. We decided that we know less. "
Reading a week in December is almost effortless. And 'writtenTime and twisted with humor and compassion. Some of the characters are stereotypical in nature, but this is probably the inevitable product of the way of parody, often at the forefront in the novel. I doubt that the novel, the impact of twenty, so that now, so that probably will not be classified as "great literature". But it is so funny and thoughtful as I could expect from a novel topical.
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