'Everyone who cares about freedom and justice for women should read The Second Sex' Guardian Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote, 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman'. In this groundbreaking work of feminism she examines the limits of female freedom and explodes our deeply ingrained beliefs about femininity. Liberation, she argues, entails challenging traditional perceptions of the social relationship between the sexes and, crucially, in achieving economic independence. Drawing on sociology, anthropology and biology, The Second Sex is as important and relevant today as when it was first published in 1949.
"A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world," writes Milan Kundera in The Curtain, his fascinating new book on the art of the novel. "Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight-errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose." For Kundera, that curtain represents a ready-made perception of the world that each of us has—a pre-interpreted world. The job of the novelist, he argues, is to rip through the curtain and reveal what it hides. In this entertaining and always stimulating essay, Kundera cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization. Too often, he suggests, a novel is thought about only within the confines of the language and nation of its origin, when in fact the novel's development has always occurred across borders: Laurence Sterne learned from Rabelais, Henry Fielding from Cervantes, Joyce from Flaubert, García Márquez from Kafka. The real work of a novel is not bound up in the specifics of any one language: what makes a novel matter is its ability to reveal some previously unknown aspect of our existence. In The Curtain, Kundera skillfully describes how the best novels do just that.
Identiteit vertelt het verhaal van een crisis. Een crisis tussen een man en een vrouw, Jean-Marc en Chantal, die veel van elkaar houden. Beiden hebben ze in het bestaan van de ander de voorwaarde voor hun evenwicht en ontwikkeling gevonden. Hij neigt naar een leven in de marginaliteit en heeft een rijke verbeelding. Zij is op haar hoede, fragiel en realistisch. Sinds jaren leven ze samen in de rustige zekerheid van hun geluk. De problemen ontstaan uit het niets, althans uit bijna niets. Er is geen ramp, geen overspel en toch belanden Jean-Marc en Chantal in een proces vol misverstanden dat, juist omdat ze van elkaar houden, op hun scheiding lijkt af te koersen. Alleen Milan Kundera kan zo'n verontrustend gegeven in een mooie, heldere liefdesroman omzetten.
From the author of "The Enchantment of Lily Dahl" comes a powerful and heartbreaking novel that chronicles the epic story of two families, two sons, and two marriages.
