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The art of wearing a trench coat : stories / Sergi Pàmies ; translated from the Catalan by Adrian Nathan West.

By: Contributor(s): Material type: TextTextLanguage: English Publication details: New York : Other Press, c2021.Description: 121 pISBN:
  • 9781635420784 (paperback)
  • 1635420784 (paperback)
Summary: "A baker's dozen of short stories that hinge on three types of love: between couples, and toward one's parents and one's children. This slim, intimate volume of thirteen stories explores paternal, filial, and spousal love (and disappointment, and nostalgia, and panic) through a narrator who bemoans his inability to wear a trench coat well, and who finally accuses himself of being "pusillanimous." Yet in these encounters and these endings, in these details and these feelings, a compassionate, small portrait of a life emerges. Terse, droll, sometimes absurd but always lucid, Pàmies casts his gaze on the urge to write as seen through his mother's final days; on his teenage fantasy that his father was actually Jorge Semprún; and on situations such as adopting a dog to staunch a failing marriage, or a father asked to play the part of a corpse in his son's short film. In this phantasmagoria of failure and loss, Pàmies confronts us-drawing us in with his use of the second person address-with the omnipresence of well-intentioned lies despite which it may be impossible to ever make anyone else happy"--
Item type: Books
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Books Books Punsarn Library General Stacks Fic .P185L37W47 2021 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Available PNLIB21062333
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Originally published in Catalan as L'art de portar gavardina in 2018.

"A baker's dozen of short stories that hinge on three types of love: between couples, and toward one's parents and one's children. This slim, intimate volume of thirteen stories explores paternal, filial, and spousal love (and disappointment, and nostalgia, and panic) through a narrator who bemoans his inability to wear a trench coat well, and who finally accuses himself of being "pusillanimous." Yet in these encounters and these endings, in these details and these feelings, a compassionate, small portrait of a life emerges. Terse, droll, sometimes absurd but always lucid, Pàmies casts his gaze on the urge to write as seen through his mother's final days; on his teenage fantasy that his father was actually Jorge Semprún; and on situations such as adopting a dog to staunch a failing marriage, or a father asked to play the part of a corpse in his son's short film. In this phantasmagoria of failure and loss, Pàmies confronts us-drawing us in with his use of the second person address-with the omnipresence of well-intentioned lies despite which it may be impossible to ever make anyone else happy"--

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