| 翻訳と辞書 |
| Mile High (novel) ： ウィキペディア英語版 |
Mile High (novel)
Mile High, first published by Dial Press in 1969, was the eighth book by the American satirist and political novelist Richard Condon. Internationally famous at the time of its publication, primarily because of his 1959 ''Manchurian Candidate'', Condon had begun to lose the respect of critics with the publication of his last few books and the one-time, so-called Condon Cult was mostly a thing of the past. Like his fifth book, ''An Infinity of Mirrors'', ''Mile High'' is a consciously ambitious work, primarily concerned with the establishment of Prohibition in the United States, and Condon researched it thoroughly. The first two-thirds of the book, in fact, reads as much like a lively history of New York City gangsterism from the mid-18th century through 1930 as it does a novel.
''Mile High'' is a three-generational story, beginning with Paddy West, a penniless, totally amoral immigrant from Ireland who through shrewdness and brutality makes himself into the most powerful political boss in New York City; with Paddy's death in 1911 as a Tammany Hall leader, his even shrewder and more brutal son, Edward Courance West, becomes the center of the story, as, at age 20, he conceives, full-blown, a scheme for imposing Prohibition on the United States—purely as a means of making himself an unsurpassed fortune; and finally, in 1958, with Eddie West now the richest man in the world, but also criminally insane, the story shifts to his second son, Walter, a non-criminal architect, and his beautiful new black wife—a woman that the murderous racist Eddie West intends to torture and kill. The book is divided into three parts: "The Minotaur" (the longest); "Theseus and Wife"; and "The Labyrinth".
Curiously enough, it was published within a few months of a somewhat similar novel about multi-generational New York gangsters, ''The Godfather'', by a relatively unknown author, Mario Puzo. Puzo and his book went on to worldwide renown, and while ''Mile High'' was received reasonably well, it did little to enhance Condon's reputation.
==Theme==
In ''Mile High'', the basic theme of all 26 of Condon's books is summed up in a single angry ''cri de coeur'':
"Prohibition fused the amateurism and catch-as-catch-can national tendencies of the early days of the republic with a more modern, highly organized lust for violence and the quick buck. It fused the need to massacre twelve hundred thousand American Indians and ten million American buffalo, the lynching bees, the draft riots, bread riots, gold riots and race riots, the constant wars, the largest rats in the biogest slums, boxing and football, the loudest music, the most strident and exploitative press with the entire wonderful promise of tomorrow and tomorrow, always dragging the great nation downward into greater violence and more unnecessary deaths, into newer and more positive celebration of nonlife, all so that the savage, simple-minded people might be educated into greater frenzies of understanding that power and money are the only desirable objects for this life."〔''Mile High'', Dial Press, New York, 1969, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-80497, page 156〕
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
■ウィキペディアで「Mile High (novel)」の詳細全文を読む
スポンサード リンク
| 翻訳と辞書 : 翻訳のためのインターネットリソース |
Copyright(C) kotoba.ne.jp 1997-2016. All Rights Reserved.
|
|