De tijger|Lisa St Aubin de Terán Rynveld 9029058625

||boek: De tijger|Roman - vertaling: Anneke Goddijn|Meulenhoff

||door: Lisa St Aubin de Terán Rynveld

||taal: nl
||jaar: 1999
||druk: ?
||pag.: 350p
||opm.: softcover|zo goed als nieuw

||isbn: 90-290-5862-5
||code: 1:000188

--- Over het boek (foto 1): De tijger ---

Volgens de bedienden gehoorzaamde zelfs het water van de Orinoco aan Misia Schmutter, de oude vrouw met het witte haar die zo trots was op haar Pruisische afkomst en die de rest van de wereld als haar slaaf behandelde. Ze meent bij haar kleinzoon Lucien iets van haar eigen meedogenloze karakter te zien. Door hem afwisselend te aanbidden en te martelen, leert ze hem wat tirannie en macht in feite zijn. Maar ook brengt ze hem liefde bij voor schoonheid, voor wetenschap en leert ze hem roulette spelen.

Zelfs na haar dood zet 'de keizerin van de Orinoco' nog als een tijger haar klauwen in Luciens rug, als een boze geest die verborgen zit achter zijn vriendelijke karakter. Ze vergezelt hem op zijn buitengewone reizen, eerst naar Caracas, waar zijn vaardigheid in gokken hem extreme - en legendarische - weelde brengt.

Later reist Lucien als een pelgrim naar een heiligdom, naar het Duitse vaderland dat zijn grootmoeder hem zo gepassioneerd had beschreven. Daar treft hij het oplaaiend nazisme aan. Dan gaat hij via Rio naar zijn geliefde Venezuela, waar hij gevangengenomen wordt wegens hoogverraad, maar weet te ontsnappen. Hij wordt opnieuw gearresteerd, ironisch genoeg voor een moord die die hij niet heeft begaan, en wordt veroordeeld voor een opmerking die hij als grap had bedoeld.

In De tijger - een roman die bijna 70 jaar omspant - wordt een allesoverheersende obsessie met grote intensiteit geportretteerd. Het is één van Lisa St Aubin de Teráns allerbeste romans!

[bron: https--www.dekaft.be/boeken/de-tijger]

Een tyrannieke grootmoeder van Pruisische afkomst beheerst het leven op een Braziliaanse haciënda. Haar kleinzoon heeft zij uitgekozen als opvolger. Zij wijdt hem in in de fijne kneepjes van het roulettespel en de onderdrukking van personeel en familie. [bron:https--www.lekkerboek.nl]

Lucien groeit op bij zijn grootmoeder, Misia Schmutter, die van Duitse afkomst is. Ze bestuurt haar Venezolaanse bezit als een spin in het web, niet zozeer om te doden, maar voor de fascinatie die de macht haar geeft. Ze vormt Lucien zoals zij het wil en zelfs na haar dood blijft haar bovennatuurlijke verschijning hem lastig vallen zoals dat roofdier dat hij doodde toen hij nog een kind was. Grootmoeder heeft fascistoïde trekken met orde en tucht als kentekenen en Lucien is meer bezeten van alles wat met actie te maken heeft. Daarnaast geeft hij om architectuur en gokken.

[bron: https--www.boekmeter.nl]

--- Over (foto 2): Lisa St Aubin de Terán Rynveld ---

Lisa St Aubin de Terán (Londen, 2 oktober 1953) is een Engels schrijfster.

Lisa St Aubin de Terán werd in 1953 geboren als dochter van de Brits-Guyaanse schrijver Jan Carew en Joan Mary Murray. Ze groeide op in Londen. Haar werk is deels autobiografisch, deels fictie.

In De Hacienda beschrijft ze hoe ze op jonge leeftijd met haar eerste echtgenoot Jaime Téran op een afgelegen boerderij in de Andes (Venezuela) ging wonen.

Haar tweede echtgenoot was de Schotse dichter en romanschrijver George MacBeth. In 1982 publiceerde ze haar eerste roman Keepers of the House (Hoeders van het huis). In 1983 volgde The Slow Train to Milan (De stoptrein naar Milaan) In 1983 verhuisde ze naar Wiggenhall St. Mary Magdalen in Norfolk.

Haar derde echtgenoot was de schilder Robbie Duff Scott, met wie ze naar Umbrië (Italië) verhuisde. Ze beschreef haar leven met hem in A Valley in Italy (Een huis in Italië) (1995).

Ze heeft drie kinderen, onder wie dochter Iseult Teran, die ook schrijfster is. Ze leeft met haar vierde echtgenoot, de Nederlandse cameraman Mees van Deth in Mossuril, Nampula, Mozambique. Deze fase in haar leven is beschreven in Mozambique Mysteries (Mijn dorp in Mozambique) (2007).

In 2004 heeft ze de Terán Foundation opgezet. Deze stichting heeft diverse projecten opgezet in Mossuril, Mozambique.

Publicaties (Nederlandse vertalingen)

• Mijn dorp in Mozambique. Vert. door Anke ten Doeschate en René van Veen. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff 2007. ISBN 978-90-290-8064-4
• Mezzanotte. Een Italiaanse liefdesgeschiedenis. Vert. door Manon Smits. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 2005. ISBN 90-290-7663-1
• Otto. Roman. Vert. door Janneke van Horn. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 2004. ISBN 90-290-7486-8
• La festa. Verhalen. Vert. door Anneke Goddijn. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 2000. ISBN 90-290-6779-9
• De haciënda. Mijn jaren in Venezuela. Vert. door Anneke Goddijn. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1998. ISBN 90-290-6717-9
• De tijger. Roman. Vert. door Anneke Goddijn. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1999. ISBN 90-290-5862-5
• De aarde, de lucht, het water en het vuur van Italië. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1999. ISBN 90-290-5911-7
• Het paleis. Roman. Vert. door Anneke Goddijn. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1997. ISBN 90-290-5309-7
• Hoeders van het huis. Roman. Vert. door Anneke Goddijn. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1996. ISBN 90-290-5093-4
• Zee van verlangen Vert. door Anneke Goddijn. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1995. Geen ISBN
• Rosalind. Roman. Vert. door Ellen Beek en Aad Nuis. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1994. ISBN 90-290-4510-8
• Een huis in Italië. De vele seizoenen van een villa in Umbrië. Vert. door Anneke Goddijn. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1994. ISBN 90-290-4786-0
• De stoptrein naar Milaan. Roman. Vert. door Ellen Beek en Aad Nuis. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1993. ISBN 90-290-4063-7
• Op doorreis. Belevenissen van een treinverslaafde. Autobiografie in reisverhalen. Vert. door Ellen Beek en Aad Nuis. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1992. ISBN 90-290-2767-3
• Joanna (roman). Vert. door Ellen Beek en Aad Nuis. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1991. ISBN 90-290-9858-9
• Schaamteloze reizen. Verhalen van vrouwen onderweg. Samengest. door Lisa St Aubin de Terán. Utrecht, Veen, 1990. ISBN 90-204-2473-4

[bron: wikipedia]

Lisa St. Aubin de Terán was born Lisa Rynveld in South London. She attended the James Allen's Girls' School. She married a Venezuelan landowner, Jaime Terán in 1971, at the age of 17, and became a farmer of sugar cane, avocados, pears, and sheep from 1972-1978.

Her second husband was the Scottish poet and novelist George MacBeth. After the marriage failed, she married painter Robbie Duff Scott and moved to Umbria, Italy.

In 1982, St. Aubin de Terán published her first novel, Keepers of the House. This novel was the recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award. Her second novel, The Slow Train to Milan, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. She received the Eric Gregory for Poetry in 1983. Her work includes novels, memoirs, poetry, and short-story collections.

St. Aubin de Terán has three children, including a daughter by her first husband, Iseult Teran, who is also a novelist.

She currently lives in Amsterdam with her partner Mees Van Deth, where she runs a film company and has set up the Terán Foundation in Mozambique.

[source: https--www.goodreads.com]

Nationality: British.
Born: Lisa Rynveld, London, 1953.
Education: Attended school in London.
Career: Farmer of sugar cane, avocados, pears, and sheep, Venezuela, 1972-78. Since 1972, writer.
Awards: Somerset Maugham award, 1983, for The Long Way Home; John Llewellyn Rhys memorial prize, 1983, for Slow Train to Milan; Eric Gregory award, 1983, for poetry.
Agent: A.M. Heath, 79 St. Martins Lane, London WC2N 4AA, England.

PUBLICATIONS

Novels

• Keepers of the House. London, Cape, 1982; as The Long Way Home, New York, Harper and Row, and London, Cape, 1983.
• The Slow Train to Milan. London, Cape, and New York, Harper andRow, 1983.
• The Tiger. London, Cape, 1984.
• The Bay of Silence. London, Cape, 1986.
• Black Idol. London, Cape, 1987.
• Joanna. London, Virago, 1990; New York, Carroll and Graf, 1991.
• Nocturne. London, Hamilton, 1992; New York, St. Martin's Press, 1993.
• The Palace. London, Macmillan, 1997, Hopewell, New Jersey, EccoPress, 1999.

Short Stories

• The Marble Mountain and Other Stories. London, Cape, 1989.
• Southpaw: Short Stories. London, Virago Press, 1999.

Poetry

• The Streak. Knotting, Martin Booth, 1980.
• The High Place. London, Cape, 1985.

Other

• Off the Rails: Memoirs of a Train Addict. London, Bloomsbury, 1989.
• Landscape in Italy, with photographs by John Ferro Sims . London, Pavilion, 1989.
• Venice: The Four Seasons, with photographs by Mick Lindberg. London, Pavilion, and New York, Clarkson Potter, 1992.
• A Valley in Italy: Confessions of a House Addict. London, Hamilton, 1994; published as A Valley in Italy: The Many Seasons of a Villa in Umbria, New York, HarperCollins, 1994.
• The Hacienda: A Memoir. Boston, Little Brown, 1997.
• Editor, Indiscreet Journeys: Stories of Women on the Road. London, Virago, 1989; Boston, Faber, 1990.

Much of Lisa St. Aubin de Teran's early work was autobiographical, and chronologically the fictionalized events of Keepers of the House, although published first, followed her second novel, The Slow Train to Milan. St. Aubin de Teran is unusual for an English writer in setting her fiction abroad, often in Italy and South America. Her extraordinary sense of place, perhaps more obviously than her characterization, has made her work distinguished and memorable.

Little happens in Keepers of the House, which concerns the final decay of an old farmhouse, La Bebella, near Venezuela. The second last survivor of the Beltrán family, Diego, has married Lydia, an Englishwoman. They return to La Bebella, where years of drought and disease have gradually driven the servants away. Previously uncommunicative by nature, Diego slips into a deep depression and becomes a hermit-like recluse. Lydia has to manage the dilapidated farm and the uncertain avocado and sugar crops, despite being nearly defeated by the effect of the death of her newborn son. Lydia is sustained by Benito, an old retainer who relates to her two centuries of Beltrán family history. These exotic legends of this once powerful family are a rare imaginative achievement, and such writing has earned St. Aubin de Teran the accolade of the English Márquez. One learns little of Lydia or Diego, who is eventually paralyzed by a stroke; as in much of St. Aubin de Teran's writing, the past matters more than the present. The carefully detailed descriptive passages evoke a sympathy for the long-dead characters and their struggles. When the barren lands yield nothing more, Lydia abandons La Bebella when Benito dies, carrying her invalid husband to a jeep, to escape to a place of safety. Lydia, once again pregnant, has inherited a knowledge she can pass to her child. Only Diego's cousin, Christebal Beltrán, aged about 112, remains as a sentinel watching over the deserted valley.

The Slow Train to Milan has no plot, only a series of rather fantastic episodes about political exiles from South America on the run in Europe. The tone of the novel is casual, from the rapid marriage of Lisaveta, the sixteen-year-old narrator, to César, an amiable if self-centered eccentric. He and his exiled friends, Otto and Elias, are mysterious figures who shuffle aimlessly with Lisaveta between cities living in borrowed accommodations, pawning valuables for survival when their money runs outs, and fluctuating between the extremes of poverty and luxury. The uncomplaining, adventurous Lisaveta, though curious about her husband's past and his friends, rarely questions them and is content to be part of their unsettled existence, much of it spent on "the slow train to Milan." The novel depends on the atmosphere of the innumerable contrasting places the travelers visit and people they encounter and the tension created by the constant fear that these exiles will be caught. The narrator identifies herself at least partly with St. Aubin de Teran and Lydia, remarking that she later grew avocados with her husband in the Andes.

The autobiographical element is less marked in Tiger, where the dominating character is Misia Schmutter, a murderous despot and head of her family, and her grandson, Lucien, whose course of life she influences even from beyond the grave. Nocturne is, perhaps, more plausible; it is a triumph of characterization and evocation of place. The setting is mainly in San Severino, a peasant village in Italy in the first decade of this century; this is where Alessandro Mezzanotte is born and lives until he dies. From the age of fifteen, Mezzanotte is obsessively in love with Valentina, a young gypsy who is part of a traveling fair. For some years he is compelled to travel from San Severino to be wherever the fair is, although his love is scorned by both families. Forced to be in Mussolini's army, Mezzanotte, previously handsome, is blinded and facially scarred and loses an arm when hit by a shell; he is pensioned off. His name, translating as "Midnight," suggests his fate is preordained. However, his solitary life for the next fifty years is endurable because of his unshakable belief that Valentina will come to him, even in old age. Near the end of his life, Mezzanotte is looked after by a young army conscript, Stefano, whose own troubled life and character are deeply affected by the old man, who unburdens his secrets on the soldier. When Mezzanotte dies, Stefano finds Valentina's last letters, which the blind man could not read. To save his sanity, Mezzanotte had been told the reverse of Valentina's intentions. Unable to cope with his appearance, she had, in fact, finally written to say she had discarded Mezzanotte for someone else. Nocturne is poignant and haunting and is a further indication that St. Aubin de Teran has still much to say as a distinctive writer.

Geoffrey Elborn [source: https--biography.jrank.org/pages/4708/St-Aubin-de-Teran-Lisa.html]

Finding an emotional home in other people's roots [1999-07-24]

Lisa St. Aubin de Teran left her home in a south London suburb aged sixteen to marry an exiled Venezuelan and travel around Italy with him and his friends. For seven years subsequently she lived on his remote sugar-cane hacienda in the Venezuelan Andes. Both experiences provided material for novels, published in the early 80s, and more recently for The Hacienda, a memoir. Her penchant for posing languidly in Edwardian dress (see the cover of The Hacienda) gives the impression that St. Aubin de Teran is a less-than-serious writer, which is a pity.

Southpaw, her latest collection of stories, has no author portrait, and by the end of the second paragraph of the very first story even the most sceptical should be convinced that she is a talented, observant and accomplished writer.

For the past ten years St. Aubin de Teran has lived in a small village in Umbria. The stories here all evolve around the two rural communities which she has come to know, in Venezuela and in Italy. As she says in the introduction: "in the absence of anywhere else to specifically claim as home, I have found an emotional home in other peoples roots."

The two communities, Venezuelan and Italian, are united by the theme expressed in her title. The stories are about outsiders, whose survival is as much due to their ability to absorb blows as to deliver them. St. Aubin de Teran responds wholeheartedly to both place and people, and is obviously a patient listener. The hours she has spent absorbing other people's lives give her stories an unusual veracity, both physical and mental. She is a magnificent story-teller, and has the unusual ability to retell the lives of an illiterate peasantry in such a way as to give their hopes and beliefs dignity and integrity. The best of these stories carry the weight of fable or folklore. "Eladio and the Boy" reveals the deep logic behind the apparently irrational obsession with an eagle that dominates the lives of a brain-damaged man and his dumb son. "Antonio Mezzanotte" portrays the life of an Umbrian village by following a blind man and recounting his past.

Those familiar with her novels and memoirs will occasionally recognise characters they know, but nothing is lost by encountering St Aubin de Teran's work for the first time in this form. In fact, her stories are a perfect introduction to the unusually wide range, both geographic and emotional, that she covers.

ALANNAH HOPKIN, Alannah Hopkin is a writer and critic [source: https--www.irishtimes.com/news/finding-an-emotional-home-in-other-people-s-roots-1.210223]