1913: The Year before the Storm - Tapa dura

Críticas

The best possible holiday read (Irish Times 2013-07-20)

A 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 humour (Daily Telegraph 2013-06-08)

A vivid, richly textured book that chronicles a world crackling with talent, energy and foreboding (FT 2013-07-20)

A brilliant game of original quotations and tracings (Der Spiegel 2012-10-22)

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 (Die Welt 2012-10-26)

Illies makes the hundred years between 1913 and his readers disappear. A beautiful book. (Süddeutsche Zeitung 2012-10-25)

Illies is as astute a researcher as he is an observer of the zeitgeist ... reads like something out of a magic realist novel. (Philip Oltermann Guardian 2013-07-20)

I couldn't stop reading - Illies' stories are simply magnificent (Ferdinand von Schirach)

Thorough and fascinating (Time Out 2013-07-09)

An absolute gem of a book. His snapshot approach to the year, recorded month by month, is the most original historical account I've come across ... Illies's genius turn of phrase, beautifully retained by Shaun Whiteside and Jamie Lee Searle's elegant translation, can be found throughout ... The entries read like history's footnotes, but as anyone who's read Freud knows, the footnotes always tell the best story. (Lucy Scholes Observer 2013-07-21)

Reseña del editor

A witty yet moving narrative worked up from sketched documentary traces and biographical fragments, 1913 is an intimate cultural portrait of a world that is about to change forever.

The stuffy conventions of the nineteenth century are receding into the past, and 1913 heralds a new age of unlimited possibility. 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.

Yet everywhere there is the premonition of ruin - the number 13 is omnipresent, and in London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Trieste, artists take the omen and act as if there were no tomorrow, their brief coincidences of existence telling of a darker future. 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, in Munich an Austrian postcard painter by the name of Adolf Hitler sells his conventional cityscapes.

Told with Illies's characteristic mixture of poignant evocation and laconic irony, 1913 is the story of the year that shaped the last century.