Em 2014 li dois romances do escritor norte-americano Richard Yates (1926 – 1992), “O Desfile da Primavera” (1976) – 5 estrelas e “Perto da Felicidade” (1986) – 4 estrelas. In spite of the title not all of these stories are about loneliness. No, some of them deal with one or more of the following: frustration, disappointment, rejection, feelings of worthlessness, grief, and miscalculation. Bennett, Dan (22 March 1992). "Music: Ramones show there's nothing like the real thing with 'Loco Live' ". North County Times. Each story in this collection, despite some of their datedness (a few take place in TB wards, for example), draws you in with lovely spare writing, and sensitively drawn characters who intrigue, even if they aren't particularly likeable. Each story also features a clever title. There may not be anything “fussy or pretentious” about his writing, but it flows smoothly and its flawed characters, both the appealing and unappealing, seem authentic.

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (album) - Wikipedia Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (album) - Wikipedia

First published in 1962, a year after Revolutionary Road, this sublime collection of stories seems even more powerful today. Out of the lives of Manhattan office workers, a cab driver seeking immortality, frustrated would-be novelists, suburban men and their yearning, neglected women, Richard Yates creates a haunting mosaic of the 1950s, the era when the American dream was finally coming true - and just beginning to ring a little hollow. In queste storie troviamo molte tracce di Yates: la vita militare, la tubercolosi, il matrimonio, la figlia, il divorzio, il fallimento… Home – Part 2: The Telling Question – His wife senses something is terribly wrong. Finally, looking him in the eyes, she says: “Tell me the truth. Is it the job? Is it about – what you were afraid of last week? The faint lines in her face seemed to have deepen. She suddenly looked severe and much older.I'm not sure why it took all the years of my life up until this point to discover the brilliance of Richard Yates, but it did. Like frustrated suburban wives we fed on each other’s discontent; we became divided into mean little cliques and subdivided into jealously shifting pairs of buddies, and we pieced out our idleness with gossip.” A callous and pedantic spinster of a teacher, a fake and stupid patriot, rich and hypocritical idlers, a sad Christmas in the tuberculosis wards, a failed ghostwriter and a courageous fighter for justice who turned out to be just a fool fighting shadows…

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness: Richard Yates: 9780099518570 Eleven Kinds of Loneliness: Richard Yates: 9780099518570

Decimo racconto: I festeggiamenti delle feste natalizie in un sanatorio. Che tu prenda venti individui e tu li metta in una caserma, in un convento, in un ospedale o nella casa del grande fratello, assisterai sempre a comportamenti simili. Yates is a realist par excellence, the natural heir to Hemingway's pared-to-the-bones style and the antecedent of Carver's flat minimalism. There is something else though: a kind of transparency, almost a translucency, that owes more to Fitzgerald, his great literary hero... Read and weep" (Kate Atkinson Guardian)Lasciar andare le cose per il loro verso e prenderle come veniva il più serenamente possibile era stato in un certo senso, il criterio costante della sua vita. Impossibile negare che il ruolo di chi sa perdere con disinvoltura avesse sempre avuto su di lui uno strano fascino.

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness : Stories - Google Books

Primo racconto: la storia di un ragazzino e della sua integrazione nella nuova scuola. L’insegnante cerca di favorirlo e lui anziché riconoscenza matura odio nei suoi confronti The B.A.R. Man is about nostalgia for the comradeship and adventures of youth. John Fallon is a succesful clerk in a big insurance company, but he is not happy in his childless mariage. His despair is drowned in alcohol and pathetic attempts to recapture the thrills of his past years carrying a Browning Automatic Rifle in the war. It is Yates’s relentless, unflinching investigation of our secret hearts, and his speaking to us in language as clear and honest and unadorned and unsentimental and uncompromising as his vision, that makes him such a great writer.”—Richard Russo,Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire FallsSesto racconto: Un lattoniere grafomane abbandona il posto ben retribuito che occupa, per entrare nella redazione di un giornale e accetta di essere sottopagato Richard Yates's unflinchingly realistic stories explore loneliness, but they don't neglect failure, cruelty, and heartbreak. Most of the stories feature men who have been disappointed, somehow, by their inability to go on and fulfill the promise of their youth. Fun With a Stranger is a return to the classroom, but this time for a look at Miss Snell, a teacher who seems unable to relate to children and to relax in their company, preferring instead to rely on the rigid authority of her position. For me she is another delusional person who has either forgotten what she was like as a child or who was rejected early in life by everybody, like the boy from the opening story. The Disbelief – Walter tells Mary, his secretary, and colleagues Joe Collins and Fred Holmes he’s leaving since he got the ax. Right on cue, as if a mini Greek chorus, all three raise their eyebrows, shake their heads and fume at the injustice. “How can they?” “What the hell’s the matter with these people?” Too bad Hollywood people are not present - they could give out Emmy awards.

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates | Waterstones

Then Fred Holmes chimed in, very grave and sorry, clearly pleased with the news: “Gee, boy, that’s a damn shame.” Yates lived the kind of life he might have written about - indeed, he wrote about little else. By the time he died, of emphysema, in 1982, all his work was out of print. It is even possible that a part of him would have relished history's treatment of him. In "A Glutton for Punishment" he describes, with startling acuity, the inner processes of a man with a flair for, and warped appreciation of, his own failure. But this was his genius: the precise dissection of people's unhappiness. "I'm grateful that I know a little more now about honesty in the use of words," says the narrator of "Builders". For all that the narrator may be at that point not quite as honest as he avers, this honest use of language is Yates's central concern, and the reason his stories are so fulfilling, so rich, even as they delineate their characters' internal poverty. I have perhaps not made these stories seem enticing, but I assure you they are: you may groan with second-hand despair as you read, but they are still the kind of stories you sneak off to read when you should be doing something else. That's how good they are.Richard Yates shone bright upon the publication of his first novel, Revolutionary Road, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961. It drew unbridled praise and branded Yates an important, new writer. Kurt Vonnegut claimed that Revolutionary Road was The Great Gatsby of his time. William Styron described it as "A deft, ironic, beautiful novel that deserves to be a classic." Tennessee Williams went one further and said, "Here is more than fine writing; here is what, added to fine writing, makes a book come immediately, intensely, and brilliantly alive. If more is needed to make a masterpiece in modern American fiction, I am sure I don't know what it is." The B.A.R. Man A man seeks the nostalgia of the past as his present is quite sad. Drinking and reflecting on pathetic adventures as a rifleman, have become his failed attempts to combat a dull but successful job as an insurance salesman in a loveless childless marriage. Clever.