A Night at the Majestic - Tapa blanda

Críticas

Davenport-Hines is one of out finest writers of non fiction, with a habit of landing on fascinating topics.A sheer pleasure to read. (Frances Spalding Daily Mail 2006-02-24)

For sheer, toe-curling, napkin-chewing, electrocution-level embarrassment, nothing can come close to the first and only meeting between James Joyce and Marcel Proust: the dinner-party pairing from hell. (Ben Macintyre The Times)

Davenport-Hines book is wholly engrossing. (Simon Callow The Guardian 2006-02-11)

Proust seems to cast a magic spell over those who write about him ... Richard Davenpost-Hines has now produced a rich and scintillating piece of literary history with Proust as its biographical centrepiece ... A Night at the Magestic is a veritable box of delights, a celebration of early 20th century Parisian high life, elegantly-written, full of lively anecdote and acute observation. (Independent on Sunday 2006-01-29)

Shrewd, perceptive, informed and informative. (John Banville Irish Times (Dublin) 2006-02-11)

Suppose you could have a dinner party and invite the ideal guests. It's an odd ides isn't it? The thing is, this isn't fantasy, or even fiction. There actually was a dinner party in a grand hotel in Paris in 1922 which was attended - if that's the right word - by Proust, Joyce, Picasso, Diaghilev and Stravinsky. The suitably grandly-named Davenport-Hines recreates the event bite by bite (Irish Times (Dublin) 2006-12-31)

Richard Davenport-Hines, in this imaginative, gracefully written book, helps Marcel Proust fulfil his wish to preserve beyond death ... Davenport-Hines devises a modernist structure with deference to classical unity: modernism has its roots in antiquity; its revolt was against Victorian repression, not Grecian liberty. Between them, he evaluates the issues that informed the Proust's life and work ... Davenport-Hines offers an illuminated window to both Proust and his work. (Diana Souhami The Independant 2006-01-27)

The new fashion in non-fiction publishing is for books that cross-cut normal biographical channels and to give a snapshot of several famous people gathered at one place at one time. There are many examples of this but the one not to miss is Richard Davenport-Hines's A Night at the Majestic. (Giles Foden Conde Nast Traveller (UK edition) 2006-12-01)

Richard Davenport-Hines reveals in his new book A Night at the Majestic, the gathering was much more than an "afterparty" - it came to represent the high point of European Modernism, and one of Paris's defining moments as a cultural capital ... He sums up the zeitgeist that bought these five artistic giants together. (Alice Jones The Independent 2006-01-25)

Here is a book that puports to be much less interesting than it is ... A Night at the Majestic isn't really about a dinner party, it isn't really about personalities at all; it's about class and homosexuality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries ... What he does is [sic?] distill themes from Proust's greatest novel A la Recherche de Temps Perdu, such as society, sex, and servants, and manipulate them with great skill and intelligence, to produce a most complete and sufficient sense of Proust, his world and his book than would seem possible from a work of this modest size ... Most novelists who attempt the future can only describe their own time; but Proust, remembering the past, forsaw the future ... Davenport-Hines's excellent study deserves to be read, even by non-Proustians, for the wit of his insights and the delicacy of his historical sense. It is a great thing to read a book entirely free, as this is, from the temporal parochialism that effects so many contemporary historians ... Davenport-Hines possesses a rare intellectual porosity that allows him to adopt this period as his element. (Nicola Shulman Seven (The Sunday Telegraph) 2006-02-05)

Reseña del editor

One May night in 1922, in a grand hotel in Paris, five of the greatest artists of the 20th century sat down to supper. It would be the only time that novelists Joyce and Proust, the young painter Picasso, choreographer Diaghilev and the composer Stravinsky were in a room together. Each of these exponents of early twentieth-century modernism was at the peak of his creative powers, and of all of them, Proust was enjoying the most spectacular success. Yet within six months he would be dead.

A Night at the Majestic evokes the luxury and glamour of early-twentieth century Paris, the intellectual achievement of the modernist movement and the gossip, intrigue and scandal of aristocratic France.