TOM WOLFE, The Bonfire of Vanities

TOM WOLFE, The Bonfire of Vanities
Nakladnik HARPER COLLINS USA 1990
Tvrdi uvez s ovitkom. 659 stranica.
Knjiga je očuvana, kao nova.
Knjiga je na engleskom jeziku.

The title of Tom Wolfe’s Dickensian masterpiece is taken from an event that occurred in Florence in 1497, when supporters of the radical Dominican priest Girolamo Savonarola publicly burnt piles of books, cosmetics, and works of art — objects of luxury that might act as temptations to sin. The practice of burning books regarded as subversive found its chilling modern expression in the burning of works by Proust, Mann, Marx, and Einstein by Nazi stormtroopers in Berlin in the 1930s.

The Bonfire was published in 1987, one week before the Wall Street Crash. Previously serialised (in the style of Charles Dickens’s writings) in 27 parts in Rolling Stone, it is a big, high-octane satire on the wealth and apparent immunity from worldly cares enjoyed by the Wall Street bankers and bond traders — the Masters of the Universe — and on greed, social posturing, racism, corruption, newspaper publishing, and the political and legal world of Manhattan. It is as relevant in the early part of the 21st century as it was in those earlier days of excess, and the problems of class and race that it dissects remain salient.

Wolfe was, for many years, part of the ‘New Journalism’, which embraced other key American writers such as Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Hunter S Thompson. He didn’t write The Bonfire, his first novel, until he was in his mid-40s. It tells the story of the fall of Sherman McCoy, the star bond trader, a Master of the Universe, with the Yale chin, the Savile Row suits, the fancy apartment on Park Avenue, and the gorgeous mistress, Maria. And, just like you and I could so easily do, Sherman and Maria take a wrong turn — they’re in the wrong part of town at the wrong time, just on the wrong side of the tracks. Sherman completely loses his cool when the cops come to his apartment to question him about the accident in which he was involved, and things go rapidly downhill after that. Casualties on the way down include the political ambitions of the Bronx District Attorney, the amorous intentions of the assistant DA, who never gets the girl with the brown lipstick, the charity racket run by the Reverend Bacon, and Sherman’s own brilliant and complex scheme to float a new currency exchange entity known as the Giscard.

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