"In the next few months, there will be only a few last strong islands of life - our mother will be tormented by treatment. She was plowed and slammed like a car on the side of a highway. Remember how you slam the driver's door in the air when you finally managed to reopen the damn wreckage and pray for a few more miles?
Every day it was like a factory like this.
We drove through a little bit and stalled again".
It was seven years ago, it was freezing and I was afraid the car wouldn't start after the movie theater, the battery was weak. But we still went to the movies because the soul asked for some joy in the middle of this Arctic chill, the girl in the grey coat on the poster seemed so cute. And the main title, "Thief of books". And I cried almost all the time as the film went on. Kill me, I don't understand why. He is quite sentimental, and I am not at all hard stone, and over a touching story sometimes drop a tear or two, but to almost sobbing and sobbing - this does not happen. Come and see what kind of hidden strings in your soul touched this movie, which is not kicked only by a legless man.
But it was because the impression of the film was so strong, the book was afraid to read. And when I did take "Book Thief", it was a completely different story, also beautiful but different. That's why the next book by Markus Zuzak waited and was afraid: it's always scary that the new book by the author of the masterpiece will not meet expectations. Yes, he was in no hurry with the new one, so many years passed. And here is "Clay Bridge".
At the beginning of the rush. "What the ****? - I was wondering about a fifth of the volume of the book".
Some kind of fierce postmodern. A mixture of strange jerks in time of action; animals with mythological names; guys who fight and quarrel with their mothers: or the sports team or the prisoners of the penal colony for troubled teenagers. To top it off, the strange Killer who wanders in the midst of this bedlam, stumbling upon all corners, being attacked by all creatures, earthly and heavenly, who inhabit the ark. And what to do with it is not clear at all.
The book has an extremely high density of superficial tension, it is very difficult to absorb the reader. But it is worth it. Zuzak knows what he's doing. It's like giving up an uncomplicated horse: having exhausted it at the start, he gets an obedient author's will, ready to cooperate, not waiting for a sweet handout for any manifestation of understanding of the partner. With whom all the barriers and thresholds of this difficult story will be overcome.
It is no coincidence that they will be here about horses, as well as Zuzak's favorite race. Both will be part of the history of the Dunbar family, so inhospitable at the beginning of the book. What did you expect? Five boys: the eldest eighteen, the youngest six. My father left the family six months after my mother's death, whose death lasted for two long years. During this time, they all died a little, too, and Mike Dunbar killed each of his sons when he decided to disappear.
No, no one is judging anybody, it just doesn't add up that way. A boy whose father died (he was a firefighter) and one of the charity parcels collected on the principle that you, God, are the ones who are not happy with me, have an old calendar "12 men who changed the world" in the family. The boy was inspired by an example of expired idols and became an artist. A good one. And married the best girl in the world. And then she left him and he no longer painted. The girl, who dreamed of connecting her life with music, and the deposits she had. But the bread emigration was more than she could imagine, at first had to earn money washing sorting, and then studied at the teacher "English as a foreign language".
They miraculously met, fell in love with each other, two scumbags making paradise on ashes. And they gave birth to those five boys: Matthew, Rory, Henry, Clay and Tommy. And there was happiness. Until Penelope started dying. And the strangest thing was that happiness was both at the time and after. Less, muted, to the signet and painted in shades of gray, but sad feeling is not in this book. Yes, Zuzak is sentimental, but the family drama is sensitive. And, to give him credit, he does not crush the reader's tear gland with his knee.
The novel has a story, the development of which is interesting to follow. There is a funny, sad, tragic. There is about how to die and about how to revive life. There are heroes, none of which can be called cardboard. And what about clay? Well, in the sense that we are all from the creation of the world of clay.