It never ceases to be surprising when any celebrity – a person we know for a specific ability, such as acting or singing – brings to light a hidden talent that has nothing to do with what has made him famous. This can range from a discreet hobby (Chris Evans giving us a piano concert in full pandemic) until discovering that Christopher Walken was a lion tamer or Pierce Brosnan worked as a swallow in a circus. And in the case of Colin Firthit turns out that the protagonist of the saga Bridget Jones He is an aspiring literary critic.
The actor born in Hampshire has displayed both the amplitude of his library and his knowledge about books in an interview for our journal partners Oprah. And we have to give ourselves to his ability to synthesize and his good taste. If on one occasion we already recommended a masterpiece of Italian literature, now you want to raise the level by proposing another classic, this time of a writer to which Jean-Paul Sartre described as “a God.”
A terrible and beautiful portrait of human nature
“It is not the pure art of literary experimentation what I admire,” says the actor when talking about Premio Nobel William Faulkner. “I am pursued by the heat it describes and the smells, which are almost always disgusting. August light.
Alfaguara Luz de Agosto – William Faulkner
This 1932 novel collects two stories located in the county of Yoknapatawpha, center of the Faulknerian universe, where your most representative characters appear. On the one hand, the search that the candid and intrepid young Blanca Lena Grove carries to find the father of his unborn son. On the other, the escape of Joe Christmas from his adoptive family to find, far from his influence, the roots that he, a white man, suspects that they go to black Africa.
Doesn’t he know that in this town it is true devotion what is for Faulkner?
“This novel is about sexual repulsion, racial repulsion, self -revulsion,” says our critic/actor. “Is A very uncomfortable reading For the modern public and for young people. The problem of racial identity is overwhelming for the protagonist, Joe Christmas. It is a world in which everything is marginalized and stifled, “adds Colin Firth before sentenced:” It’s curious, this is my favorite book and which I have the most difficult for me to talk. “
But he is not the protagonist of Love actually The only one who has fallen surrendered at the foot of the Nobel. “Reading and rereading Faulkner, it is forced to suspect that his gaze was different from ours, that of the common men, to the common writers,” said Juan Carlos Onetti about him. And Mario Vargas Llosa added that “when a novelist gets his novel to transmit to the reader that peremptory, unappealable feeling, that what counts could only happen like this – being counted like this – has triumphed in every line.”
Alliance Noise and Fury – William Faulkner
