reads like something out of a magic realist novel.
Illies is as astute a researcher as he is an observer of the zeitgeist. Illies makes the hundred years between 1913 and his readers disappear. Illies shapes his material not as a scholar, but as a wordsmith, as a story-teller with a strong sense for dramatic effect and composition.the most enjoyable book I've read in years Read more brilliant game of original quotations and tracings Show Less Product DetailsĪ hugely enjoyable idiosyncratic month by month narrative, in which the frenzy of artistic activity in London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and Trieste is conveyed with vigour and humourĪ vivid, richly textured book that chronicles a world crackling with talent, energy and forebodingĪ. In a Munich hotel lobby, Rilke and Freud discuss beauty and transience Proust sets out in search of lost time and while Stravinsky celebrates the Rite of Spring with industrial cacophony, an Austrian postcard painter by the name of Adolf Hitler sells his conventional cityscapes. Read more omnipresent, and in London, Paris and Vienna, artists take the omen and act as if there were no tomorrow. Yet everywhere there is the premonition of ruin - the number 13 is. Kafka falls in love Louis Armstrong learns to play the trumpet a young seamstress called Coco Chanel opens her first boutique Charlie Chaplin signs his first movie contract and new drugs like cocaine usher in an age of decadence.
The stuffy conventions of the nineteenth century are receding into the past, and 1913 heralds a new age of unlimited possibility. A witty yet moving narrative worked up from sketched biographical fragments, 1913 is an intimate vision of a world that is about to change forever.
Translator(s): Whiteside, Shaun Searle, Jamie. Description for 1913: The Year before the Storm Paperback.
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