A Man of his Time - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Alan Sillitoe (Read On) #6

Read On

Alan Sillitoe on Reading

‘AS A READER I want a bit of veracity and I prefer, if I can, to read about people I don’t know very much about, because that’s also what I write. If I read about ten pages and I don’t find anything in it stylistically, I stop. I love stories, of course — the Bible and Shakespeare I couldn’t be without. I read the Bible all the while I was writing Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

‘One of the modern writers I like is John King. I thought The Football Factory, which they’ve made into a film, was excellent; he’s a very fine writer. I tend to read a lot of writers from Israel — David Grossman, Amos Oz — there’s plenty of good stuff at the moment. I’ve just come to the end of a long novel by Oz, a story of life and death, that’s simply wonderful, but I’d recommend his autobiography, A Tale of Love and Darkness; it’s translated by Nicholas de Lange, who is first rate.’

The Nottingham Books

A MAN OF HIS TIME concludes a series of Sillitoe’s novels and stories — beginning with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning — that feature various members of the Seaton family. Below is a complete list of Sillitoe’s Nottingham books.

1. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958)

2. Key to the Door (1961)

3. Raw Material (1972)

4. The Storyteller (1979)

5. Down from the Hill (1984)

6. The Open Door (1989)

7. Leonard’s War (1991)

8. The Broken Chariot (1998)

9. Birthday (2001)

10. New and Collected Stories (2003)

11. A Man of His Time (2004)

For anyone wanting to discover more about the man who inspired the fictional Ernest Burton, Sillitoe’s novelistic memoir Raw Material (1972) and his compelling and beautifully written autobiography Life Without Armour (1995) are well worth seeking out.

Have You Read? Other titles by Alan Sillitoe

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958)

Working all day at a lathe leaves Arthur Seaton with energy to spare in the evenings. A hard-drinking, hard-fighting young rebel of a man, he knows what he wants and he’s sharp enough to get it. And before long, his carryings-on with a couple of married women are local gossip. But then one evening he meets a young girl in a pub, and Arthur’s life begins to look less simple.

Alan Sillitoe’s classic novel of the 1950s is a story of timeless significance.

‘A novel of today with a freshness and raw fury that makes Room at the Top look like a vicarage tea party’

Daily Telegraph

‘His writing has real experience in it and an instinctive accuracy that never loses its touch. His book has a glow about it as though he had plugged it into some basic source of the working-class spirit’

Guardian

‘Brilliant … if he never writes anything more, he has assured himself a place in the history of the English novel’

New Yorker

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959)

Smith is an incorrigible and defiant young rebel, inhabiting a no-man’s land of institutionalized Borstal. Watched over by an indifferent sunlight, as his steady jog-trot rhythm transports him over an unrelenting, frostbitten earth, he wonders why, for whom and for what he is running.

‘Graphic, tough, outspoken, informal’

The Times

‘A beautiful piece of work, confirming Sillitoe as a writer of unusual spirit and great promise’

Guardian

The Broken Chariot (1998)

When Herbert Thurgarton-Strang was seven, his parents — as loving, as doting as any parents of their generation — took him away from India and left him in a boarding school in England.

Through the years which follow, Herbert is held together by his desire for revenge on those loving parents, and by the knowledge that, out there, a new world beckons.

And when he’s seventeen, he steals away from school and becomes a different person.

‘Sillitoe’s sheer narrative drive manages to suspend most of the reader’s disbelief. This is an old-fashioned novel — technically conventional, pulling off the usual tricks of character and motivation — but oddly alive in a way that a great deal of modern fiction, written by those as yet unborn when Sillitoe began his career, patently is not’

Mail on Sunday

‘The Broken Chariot explores familiar themes for Sillitoe: working in factories, drinking in pubs and chasing women in post-war Nottingham. But the writer has found a fresh, new approach to his specialist subject; one that again allows him to tackle the issue of class in a way that is often surprising and always entertaining’

Yorkshire Post

Birthday (2001)

Birthday is the long-awaited sequel to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Four decades on from the novel which was at the forefront of the new wave of British literature, we rediscover the Seaton brothers: older, certainly; wiser — possibly not.

‘Sequels are seldom better than the original but this one is’

Allan Massie

‘There are parallels here with Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils — another old man’s book about old age. But it is well worth reading, both for its evocation of a vanished way of working-class life, and for its steadfast depiction of the horrors of old age and the valour and comradeship that can, in part at least, redeem it’

Daily Telegraph

If You Loved This, You’ll Like …

Silvertown

by Melanie McGrath

An evocative novelistic portrait of London’s now vanished East End — a world of docks, disease, grim tenements, bread and dripping and the dogs — dominated by McGrath’s testy grandmother, Jenny Fulcher.

Ulverton

by Adam Thorpe

This panoramic, ingenious novel chronicles 350 years in the life of a rural English village.

Living

by Henry Green

Set in an iron foundry in Birmingham, Green’s 1929 novel grittily and entertainingly parallels the lives of the workers and the owners.

Another World

by Pat Barker

Barker’s powerful novel looks at a family haunted by events dating back to the First World War.

About the Author

Alan Sillitoe left school at fourteen to work in various factories until becoming an air traffic control assistant with the Ministry of Aircraft Production in 1945. He began writing after four years in the RAF, and lived for six years in France and Spain. In 1958, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was published, and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature, came out the following year. Both these books were made into films.