Bridge of Clay

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After 11 or 12 years of waiting, you’d think that the author will write the next big thing. Unfortunately he wrote the next big disappointment and I fell from this Bridge of Clay into a sea of disappointment! But there are also lots of fun times as you would expect in a household of five boys. I loved Achilles the mule who felt that he too should live in the house, and there is a wonderful neighbour who comes by to fix them up when they have been fighting. Which is often.

Markus Zusak is the bestselling author of six novels, including The Book Thief and The Messenger. His books have been translated into more than forty languages, to both popular and critical acclaim. He lives in Sydney with his wife and two children. I'm writing a book called Bridge of Clay—about a boy building a bridge and wanting it to be perfect. He wants to achieve greatness with this bridge, and the question is whether it will survive when the river floods. That's all I can say about it for now—not out of secrecy, but you just don't know what direction a book is going to take, no matter how well you've planned. This isn’t a novel driven by action. It moves slowly, but purposefully, as it untangles the web of grief that has so clearly ensnared the Dunbar family. While the chapters that detail Penelope’s drawn-out death from cancer are desperately emotive, it is the myriad ways in which the Dunbar boys have been clearly impacted by the loss that are the most emotionally evocative. From their collection of pets – all named after Greek heroes, as per Penelope’s love of The Iliad and The Odyssey– to Clay’s torturous and seemly meaningless physical training routine, the boys have been destroyed. As Matthew himself reflects on the night of his father’s abandonment: “There were five of us in that house then. We dreamed in our rooms and slept. We were boys but also miraculous; We lay there, living and breathing – For that was the night he’d killed us. He’d murdered us all in our beds.” Moments such as this are as frequent as they are beautiful. Zusak does not rely on elaborate or lengthy prose to generate moments of power. It is his unique ability to conjure the most emotionally intense moments from relatively short, declarative sentences that makes his narrative mastery all the more remarkable. His decision to tell the story through Matthew’s words – perhaps the most hardened of the brothers – really serves to extend the understated elegance of Zusak’s literary style. As I could notice, the narration was a problem for many. If you open an English grammar book on morphology and syntax you could use this story as an example. But I’m now convinced it was all part of the author’s evil plan. Years after the death of their mother, the fourth son in an Australian family of five boys reconnects with his estranged father.

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Clay’s decision to join his father is seen by the rest of the family as an unforgivable betrayal, while the building of the bridge is subject to delays, which along with digressions account for much of the book’s length: “What the hell was he waiting for? When would they start building? Was this bridge procrastination?” It seems clear, however, that the actual construction project is secondary to Zusak’s elaboration of an overarching metaphor; as the bridge not only reconnects a broken family, but also provides a link to the loss of the boys’ mother, Penelope, to cancer. Truth to be told, I wasn’t very interested in the synopsis but October was my Contemporary month and what is better to read than a novel by the highly acclaimed author of The Book Thief aka one of my favorite books! I love Markus Zusak’s characters, especially these boys. Like Tim Winton, he seems to capture that wonderful mix of innocence and hope with the life-changing reality of tragedy and despair they can’t escape. Things happen that would bring the best of us undone. OK, markus, this sounds amazing and all, and i understand that you wrote the book thief, but REALLY? 26 dollars? for a YA book? Both parents were readers, for their mother it was The Iliad and the Odyssey, for their father it was the Quarryman. The books are mentioned often and have great significance in the parents’ lives and that of the Dunbar boys. They were also great storytellers passing down to the boys not only their love of books but the stories of their own lives.

i feel like this could have been a really well written book if we were just given some structure but it just felt so disorganized and haphazard and i couldnt grasp at anything at all Zusak’s short sentences read like poetry and you often need to stop and take in the meaning behind the words. The narrative voice and framing is unusual, and often oblique. Many readers have found that confusing, but I found it beguiling — I trusted the author and so was both a willing audience and participant — eager to marvel in the colour, intensity and heart imbued in the commonplace and accepting of the challenge being presented. And one should not underestimate the challenge, patience is required. Poetic prose There's some Homerian aspects, too, the most obvious of which being the boys' mule Achilles, but there are allusions to Homer's work throughout. So there’s not much more I can say. There isn't a regular plot with things happening and people dying.

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This is the first time in a while that I've actually not finished a book. I should mention that I was one of the few people who liked but didn't love The Book Thief, but I find it hard to believe that Bridge of Clay will be as well-loved as that book. More power to you if you can actually finish and enjoy it.

En esta novela conocemos la historia de 'Clay Dunbar', el silencioso, el chico con demasiado corazón. Uno de cinco hermanos inadaptados, el corredor incansable, imparable, una inmovible fuerza de la naturaleza. Entrenando fuera de cualquier sentido, sin descanso, desconociendo, y de alguna manera consciente, de un fatídico día por llegar. El día de ajustar cuentas. Michael Dunbar – father of the Dunbar boys, often referred to as 'the murderer', his story is one of the main plot lines throughout the work. Then the official date was announced, and it seemed like all these MZ fanboys/girls went off the rails. The Book Thief was intricate, dense, superbly plotted, and required a great deal of patience - patience that was richly rewarded.All in all, Bridge Of Clay is a wonderful, riveting book, and I have no hesitation in recommending it. Bridge of Clay is a 2018 novel by Australian author Markus Zusak. It revolves around five brothers coming to terms with the disappearance of their father. [1] and so when i die and they open me up, and they see this story engraved on my heart, they will know how a boy named clay changed me, too. When Bridge of Clay was announced on Goodreads close to a decade ago, some users immediately rated it, assuming Zusak's novel would be as life-altering as his magnum opus, The Book Thief. Anticipation was riding high about Bridge of Clay. It was going to be epic!

Why Zusak chose to write in Heavy Metaphor That Ultimately Feels Empty is anyone's guess, but the frustrating pace is largely due to wordplay that's never quite as clever as it wants to be. Among thousands of other truly head-scratching moments: the mule is fed "a handful, a sandful of sugar" (whut?), Matthew muses, "He'd practice at the barren old desk; the box and his books beside him. The feather of T in his hand. 'Dad?'" (um, ok), and Zusak discovers colons, which I will imitate here: Early on, our father was called to the schools, and he was the perfect post-war charlatan: well-dressed, clean-shaven. In control. We’re coping, he’d said, and principals nodded, teachers were fooled; they could never quite see the abyss in him. It was hidden beneath his clothes. He wasn’t like so many men, who set themselves free with drink, or outbursts or abuse. No, for him it was easier to withdraw; he was there but never there. He sat in the empty garage, with a glass he never drank from. We called him in for dinner, and even Houdini would have been impressed. It was a slow and steady vanishing act. He left us like that, in increments.” The crisp imagery of the prose descriptions is undermined by the self-congratulatory end-rhyming of the final two sentences. Zusak’s rhyming, here, is emblematic of a more general tendency to break every narrative into small paragraphs or sections, and to end each of these with an apparently telling or teasing line: “Until now”; “We loved what you did next”; “In months ahead, she would push too soon.” This sense of trying to intrigue the reader, to draw them through the narrative, begins to feel like a prolonged delay of information, and risks losing us before the stories of Zusak’s novel begin to fall into place. I have a customer that comes into work every Thursday. His name is Doug and we bonded over Markus Zusak and over the last eight months we've become really great friends. I lent him copy of this book to read and he left little notes throughout it and it's a copy I will treasure forever. And soon we're going to go and meet Markus Zusak at a book event and we're so excited. These books have changed my life and they've also introduced wonderful people to me too. Clay Dunbar – the fourth Dunbar boy, and main protagonist of the book. Characterised as a quiet and sensitive boy, who always had a love for storytelling and Michelangelo, and bears the weight of their mother's death the hardest.

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The Book Thief 10 Years Later: Markus Zusak Reflects on His Iconic Novel 14 March 2016". Paste Magazine . Retrieved 28 March 2017. Henry Dunbar – the third Dunbar boy, who spends his days working and his evenings either drunkenly stealing mailboxes or living on a visual diet of films from the 1980s. strung through with beautiful words and soft-hued, rough and tumble - boys, by any other name, will find their hearts grieving. Plunging through the dirt with bleeding feet and stones piled high against the rushing tide. The right ideas are usually buried beneath several wrong ideas first – and those wrong ideas can take months, sometimes years to get through – but in that time you accrue what you need for when the right ideas come together. In this case, I stumbled over the thought of a boy building a bridge when I was nineteen or twenty years old – but I had a lot of growing up to do, both as a person and a writer – before I was able to write it. I tried, of course. I even finished a version of BRIDGE OF CLAY that I didn’t send off to attempt publication. I was a long way from having anything published at that stage – but I knew even then that the version I’d written wasn’t the right one…I didn’t know it would be another twenty three years before I’d get there. Markus Zusak is my all time favourite author and with Bridge of Clay he has just solidified that position further. I fell in love with his writing in The Book Thief and then The Messenger and now with Bridge of Clay. I always tell people that going into his book, don't expect them to be anything alike (except for extraordinary writing) because they are all so individual and different from each other, it's actually kind of amazing.