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Resumen
In this brilliant retelling of the Norse myth about the end of the world, the award-winning author of Possession and The Children's Book unleashes a story of the destruction of life on this planet and the end of the gods themselves. As the bombs of the Blitz rain down on Britain, one young girl is evacuated to the countryside. She is struggling to make sense of her new life, whose dark, war-ravaged days feel very removed from the peace and love being preached in church and at school. 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. She feels an instant kinship with these vivid, beautiful, terrifying tales of the end of the gods -- they seem far more real, far more familiar during these precarious days. How could this child know that fifty years on, many of the birds and flowers she took for granted on her walks to school would become extinct? War, natural disaster, reckless gods, and the recognition of impermanence in the world are just some of the threads that Byatt weaves into this most timely of books. Linguistically stunning and imaginatively abundant, Ragnarok is a landmark piece of storytelling from "one of the most brilliant minds and speakers of our generation" (The Independent). Just as Wagner used this dramatic and catastrophic struggle for the climax of his Ring Cycle, so A. S. Byatt now reinvents it in all its intensity and glory.Praise for the narration of Ragarok by A.S. Byatt, performed by Harriet Walter:"Narrator Harriet Walter is a superb oracle, telling the ancient tales of conflicts and feuds in dazzling description through the eyes of a young girl absorbed by her book of myths. Byatt reinterprets the prediction of "Ragnarok," or doom of the gods, and Walter delivers every terrible moment....The sensual imagery -- color, texture, sound -- comes through in this vibrant telling. A listening spectacular." Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine
Reseñas (5)
Reseña de Publisher's Weekly
It is apt that Booker Prize-winning English writer Byatt chooses to locate her reimagining of the Norse myth Asgard and the Gods, which describes the destruction of the world, during that most apocalyptic of times in British history, the blitz. The little girl at the center of the story, whom we know only as "the thin child," has been evacuated, with her mother, from London to the idyllic countryside. Her father is a fighter pilot who's "in the air, in the war, in Africa, in Greece, in Rome, in a world that only exist[s] in books." The thin child goes to church and reads Pilgrim's Progress, but finds the concept of "gentle Jesus" naive and untenable in the face of war. Asgard and the Gods, on the other hand, provides, if not a more believable narrative, one that at least reflects the world she lives in: "It was a good story, a story with meaning, fear and danger were in it, and things out of control." The only question that nags at her is how "the good and wise Germans" who wrote it can be the same people bringing terror to the skies over her head at night. Told in lush prose, describing vividly drawn gods and their worlds, this is a book that brings the reader double pleasure; we return to the feeling of reading-or being read-childhood myths, but Byatt (Possession) also invites us to grapple with very grown-up intellectual questions as well. A highly unusual and deeply absorbing book. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Ragnarok is the latest in the Canongate series of reworked myths, to which Byatt adds value with her own experience as a child in the beleaguered England of the early 1940s. "There was a war on," she says. "Possibly there would always be a war on." This sense of eternal conflict acts as an anchor, while interweaving the stories of the Norse gods with the story of how she first read about them makes a kind of bildungsroman. The story becomes as much hers as theirs. Despite this, Byatt's prose, compact and lyrical, treats them with dignity: Odin, unpredictable, "a god both sinister and dangerous"; Loki the undoer, "putting out waves of glamour" and obsessed with chaos theory. Ragnarok is a clever, lucid, lovely book. But it isn't a novel, or even a story in the usual sense. It's a discourse on myth, woven in and around a polemic about pollution and loss of species diversity. Byatt's ideas lie close to the surface and the author herself is waiting patiently at the end of everything, to make sure we take her point. - M John Harrison Ragnarok is the latest in the Canongate series of reworked myths, to which Byatt adds value with her own experience as a child in the beleaguered England of the early 1940s. "There was a war on," she says. "Possibly there would always be a war on." This sense of eternal conflict acts as an anchor, while interweaving the stories of the Norse gods with... - M John Harrison.
Kirkus Review
(Possession, 1991, etc.). As she explains, "Gods, demons and other actors in myths do not have personalities or characters in the way people in novels do. They do not have psychology." Yet her narrative strategy recasts the myth through the perception of a reader known only as the "thin child in wartime," a British girl whose name and age are unknown, who finds resonance in this war of the Gods with the war from which she doesn't expect her father to return. Byatt invites some identification of this girl with the author by dedicating this book to her own mother, "Who gave me Asgard and the Gods," a primary source for this retelling. The girl compares the myth of world's end with the Christian faith into which she was born, and to Pilgrim's Progress, which she has also been reading. "Bunyan's tale had a clear message and meaning. Not so, Asgard and the Gods. That book was an account of a mystery, of how a world came together, was filled with magical and powerful beings, and then came to an end. A real End. The end." The girl doesn't come to believe in the Norse gods, a worshipper of Odin and Thor, but the reading experience leads the author to the conclusion that "the Christian story was another myth, the same kind of story about the nature of things, but less interesting and exciting." While the narrative illuminates the essence and meaning of myth, particularly as it shapes a young girl's wartime experience, it also serves as an environmentalist parable, one where we are "bringing about the end of the world we were born into." Though the cadences are like those of a fairy tale, a narrative seen through the eyes of a child, the chilling conclusion is not.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Reseña de Booklist
*Starred Review* Booker Prize winner Byatt, a writer of exceptionally deep thinking and mischievous humor, who often incisively contrasts the great web of the wild with the tangles of human yearning and invention, presents a commanding retelling of her favorite myth, Ragnarok, the Norse myth to end all myths. Byatt reinvigorates this gripping vision of the end of the world and all its creatures through the eyes of her young self, a thin child evacuated to the countryside during the German Blitz. A thoughtful child who devoured stories with rapacious greed, she becomes utterly engrossed and stringently comforted by Ragnarok. Following the myth's arc of disaster, Byatt first brings its lush, singing world to rhapsodic, scientifically precise life in a grand litany of living things as entwined as the fine threads in a vast, breathing tapestry. Then we meet the flawed, reckless gods: Odin, Thor, Frigg and her beloved son Baldur, and shapeshifter Loki, chaos incarnate, whose pranks turn the gleaming, fecund splendor of life into a wasteland of bone, ash, and darkness. In her bracing closing essay, Byatt shares her fear that we are unconsciously emulating the irresponsible and wayward and mocking Norse gods and truly bringing about the end of nature and ourselves. A gorgeous, brilliant, and significant performance.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Byatt's retelling of Norse mythology has the fearsome immediacy of modern apocalyptic fiction. The novel's only modern character, a young British girl immersed in reading Asgard and the Gods during World War II-surely Byatt herself-is barely fleshed out; Byatt calls her "the thin girl" in an ironic wink. But through her we feel that impending wartime doom, even as we are treated to the poetical lushness of both the English landscape and the mythical Norse world, the latter more wild than any medieval bestiary. And we learn the power of plot and story, which are stronger than the gods, who knew the end was coming but could do nothing to stop it. The Gotterdammerung can be interpreted on many levels: Loki's daughter Jormungandr, a serpent who greedily eats almost any sea life she encounters until she grows so large that she encircles the world and bites herself painfully on the tail, is a prescient metaphor for our ecological shortsightedness. Byatt's vision is grim and unredemptive; she rejects any Christian interpretation as a corruption of the original myth. VERDICT Required reading for those interested in Byatt, Norse mythology, or stirring story craft.-Reba -Leiding, James Madison Univ. Libs., Harrisonburg, VA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.