Marilynn Richtarik Reads from Stewart Parker Novel 'Hopdance' (2017) скачать в хорошем качестве

Marilynn Richtarik Reads from Stewart Parker Novel 'Hopdance' (2017)

Dr Marilynn Richtarik, a Professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta and biographer of Stewart Parker, reads from the late playwright's autobiographical novel Hopdance (Lilliput, 2017) at the Crescent Arts Centre in Belfast. Marilynn is based in Northern Ireland this spring as a US Fulbright Scholar at Queen's University Belfast. In a great tradition of Irish autobiographical fiction that includes James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, Stewart Parker’s poignant novel depicts events surrounding the amputation of his left leg when he was a 19-year-old university student. Masterful vignettes present the callow protagonist’s life before, during and after this ordeal. Tosh, Parker’s alter-ego, is drifting through life before his cancer diagnosis, plagued by the twin ‘cankers’ of a puzzling pain in the leg and a crippling loneliness. The amputation forces him into a more authentic relationship with life, which ‘Starts with the wound. Ends with the kiss. For the lucky ones.’ This remarkable, posthumously edited work, largely written in the early 1970s, prefigures the skills Parker was to demonstrate in his plays. The writing is impressionistically vivid, the descriptions of pain and discomfort wholly authoritative. Hopdance is a beautiful testament by a true artist, a wondrous ‘lost treasure’ of literature now presented to the reading public.