News From A Foreign Country Came

Manguel, Alberto

ISBN 10: 0517583437 / ISBN 13: 9780517583432

Published by Clarkson Potter 1899-12-30, 1899

About this Item

0517583437 Signed by author on title page, 1991 UK 1st edition, Near Fine/Near Fine DJ, dustjacket has very slight wear- in new Mylar with price intact, mild bump at fore-edge of front board, no other markings found, not a remainder, a nice copy. .Carefully packaged to protect the corners. Bookseller Inventory # C00735

Bibliographic Details

Title: News From A Foreign Country Came

Publisher: Clarkson Potter 1899-12-30

Publication Date: 1899

Binding: Hardcover

Book Condition: Very Good

Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

Follows French ex-army officer Antoine Berence and his wife and daughter across four decades, and a terrible secret which will tear apart the family, in a novel exploring the evil existing in "decent" men

From Publishers Weekly:

The inverted syntax of this book's title weakly signals the dramatic pretensions that follow in this overwrought first novel. An Argentine now living in Canada, Manguel traces the life of French military officer Antoine Berence: from his days in Algeria during its struggle for independence; to Argentina, where he serves in a bureaucratic post throughout the post-Peron crackdown; to his retirement in Quebec City. In the flashback narrative, Berence is an impossibly mannered creation, made the more ponderous by his habit of speaking to himself in precious poetic phrases rendered by the author without irony and annoyingly in italics. In Canada, Berence's wife becomes an innocent victim of an act of retribution meant for him (it seems he was more than a bureaucrat in Buenos Aires), and virtually the rest of the book is her first-person account of the history of their marriage. Unaccountably, the relentlessly postured Berence becomes simply a dull apparatchik in his wife's telling. A preposterous, overblown ending, in which Berence admits his sins to his 10-year-old daughter Ana, provides one consolation--Ana walks away into the night. Readers may wish they had done so earlier.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.