Arnold Bennett, página 2 de 14

- Cette édition est unique;- La traduction est entièrement originale et a été réalisée pour lAle. Mar. SAS;- Tous droits réservés.Sil y a une vertu dans la publicité, et un journaliste devrait être l

''Deeply moving, original, and dealing with material that I had never encountered in fiction, but only in life'' Margaret Drabble.Growing up in the world of the ''five towns'' of industrial England, with their furnaces and chimneys, huddled red-brown streets, prayer meetings and small-minded bigotry, Anna is dominated by her miserly and tyrannical father. When she inherits a fortune and finds love, she struggles to break free from the constraints upon her, even though she is torn between duty and her deepest feelings. Arnold''s novel of parental tyranny and rebellion is a portrayal of a woman of great spirit, complexity and integrity.

¿Hay una combinación más intrínsecamente humana que esa guerra sin cuartel entre libertad y fiesta, violencia y sacrificio, carácter y frustración que es el fútbol? Espejo del Homo ludens descrito por Huizinga: ese afortunado personaje con el don de jugar, el verdadero sentido de su vida. El fútbol todo lo convierte en representación, en espectáculo, pero nunca dejará de ser otras muchas cosas; entre ellas, uno de esos hilos invisibles que padres e hijos se inventan con el fin de unirse para siempre. Instalados frente a una maquinita súper engrasada con millones de euros, dólares, yenes, pesos, y retransmitida urbi et orbe.

Illustrated by Frank Craig

Philosophers have explained space. They have not explained time. It is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible; without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. A highly singular commodity, showered upon you in a manner as singular as the commodity itself!For remark! No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.Talk about an ideal democracy! In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is never rewarded by even an extra hour a day. And there is no punishment. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. No mysterious power will say:"This man is a fool, if not a knave. He does not deserve time; he shall be cut off at the meter." It is more certain than consols, and payment of income is not affected by Sundays. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste to-morrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you.

Why does not some mental efficiency specialist come forward and show us how to make our minds do the work which our minds are certainly capable of doing? I do not mean a quack. All the physical efficiency specialists who advertise largely are not quacks. Some of them achieve very genuine results. If a course of treatment can be devised for the body, a course of treatment can be devised for the mind. Thus we might realize some of the ambitions which all of us cherish in regard to the utilization in our spare time of that magnificent machine which we allow to rust within our craniums. We have the desire to perfect ourselves, to round off our careers with the graces of knowledge and taste. How many people would not gladly undertake some branch of serious study, so that they might not die under the reproach of having lived and died without ever really having known anything about anything! It is not the absence of desire that prevents them. It is, first, the absence of will-powernot the will to begin, but the will to continue; and, second, a mental apparatus which is out of condition, "puffy,""weedy," through sheer neglect. The remedy, then, divides itself into two parts, the cultivation of will-power, and the getting into condition of the mental apparatus. And these two branches of the cure must be worked concurrently

Richard Larch es un joven lleva una vida monótona y aburrida como oficinista en su pueblo natal, Bursley. Su ilusión y su sueño es vivir en una gran ciudad y dedicarse a la literatura. Para ello se traslada a Londres, alquila una habitación en Raphael Street, descubre la belleza de los suburbios, y todo ello mientras trabaja como oficinista para ganarse la vida, intentando al mismo tiempo publicar sus primeros trabajos. En este contexto tendrá sus primeras experiencias amorosas con Adeline, sobrina del señor Aked, excompañero de trabajo y futuro coautor de un libro dedicado a los suburbios londinenses. Pero la carrera literaria no resultará sencilla. Estará llena de dificultades y tendrá que elegir entre su vida personal y su vida profesional.

CHAPTER I. MENTAL EFFICIENCYCHAPTER II. EXPRESSING ONES INDIVIDUALITYCHAPTER III. BREAKING WITH THE PASTCHAPTER IV. SETTLING DOWN IN LIFECHAPTER V. MARRIAGECHAPTER VI. BOOKSCHAPTER VII. SUCCESSCHAPTER VIII. THE PETTY ARTIFICIALITIESCHAPTER IX. THE SECRET OF CONTENT

This preface, though placed at the beginning, as a preface must be, should be read at the end of the book.I have received a large amount of correspondence concerning this small work, and many reviews of itsome of them nearly as long as the book itselfhave been printed. But scarcely any of the comment has been adverse. Some people have objected to a frivolity of tone; but as the tone is not, in my opinion, at all frivolous, this objection did not impress me; and had no weightier reproach been put forward I might almost have been persuaded that the volume was flawless! A more serious stricture has, however, been offerednot in the press, but by sundry obviously sincere correspondentsand I must deal with it. A reference to page 43 will show that I anticipated and feared this disapprobation. The sentence against which protests have been made is as follows:"In the majority of instances he [the typical man] does not precisely feel a passion for his business; at best he does not dislike it. He begins his business functions with some reluctance, as late as he can, and he ends them with joy, as early as he can. And his engines, while he is engaged in his business, are seldom at their full h.p."

In the autumn of 1903 I used to dine frequently in a restaurant in the Rue de Clichy, Paris. Here were, among others, two waitresses that attracted my attention. One was a beautiful, pale young girl, to whom I never spoke, for she was employed far away from the table which I affected. The other, a stout, middle-aged managing Breton woman, had sole command over my table and me, and gradually she began to assume such a maternal tone towards me that I saw I should be compelled to leave that restaurant. If I was absent for a couple of nights running she would reproach me sharply: "What! you are unfaithful to me?" Once, when I complained about some French beans, she informed me roundly that French beans were a subject which I did not understand. I then decided to be eternally unfaithful to her, and I abandoned the restaurant. A few nights before the final parting an old woman came into the restaurant to dine. She was fat, shapeless, ugly, and grotesque. She had a ridiculous voice, and ridiculous gestures. It was easy to see that she lived alone, and that in the long lapse of years she had developed the kind of peculiarity which induces guffaws among the thoughtless. She was burdened with a lot of small parcels, which she kept dropping. She chose one seat; and then, not liking it, chose another; and then another. In a few moments she had the whole restaurant laughing at her. That my middle-aged Breton should laugh was indifferent to me, but I was pained to see a coarse grimace of giggling on the pale face of the beautiful young waitress to whom I had never spoken.I reflected, concerning the grotesque diner: "This woman was once young, slim, perhaps beautiful; certainly free from these ridiculous mannerisms. Very probably she is unconscious of her singularities. Her case is a tragedy. One ought to be able to make a heartrending novel out of the history of a woman such as she.

Hay autores que no tienen el reconocimiento que se merecen. En esa categoría, ocupada en el pasado por nombres ahora tan ilustres de nuevo como Stefan Zweig o Thoreau, Arnold Bennet ocupa un lugar destacado. Bennet es un gran representante de aquellos es