Quicksand

19.00

Title: Quick sand

Author: Steve Toltz

Translator: Mehrdad Yousefi

Publisher: Nik Farjam

Subject: Australian stories – 21st century

Age category: Adult

Cover: Paperback

Number of pages: 400

1- Introducing the book Ravan Ravan on YouTube

2- Introducing the book Ravan Ravan in Aparat

Language: Farsi

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Description

Quicksand is another work by Steve Toltz, author of The Book of the Whole. The book is about the fear of life, said Steve Toltz.

The story of the novel begins with Liam, and in fact Liam is the author of a book about the misfortunes and failures of his friend Aldo.

Liam and Aldo are two high school friends who have failed in life.

Liam is a police officer who loves writing whose writings have always failed and never succeeded, and even the reason I became a police officer to create one of his books, which he also failed, is a failed marriage, and his cold relationship with his wife. He says his complicated relationship with his daughter Sonia.

Aldo, who is in fact the real hero of the novel, is written in the center of attention and books and novels about him. Prison goes to the end…

Throughout the novel, Aldo tries to kill himself thousands of times, but always fails, leading him to believe that he is an eternal misery.

This novel examines the fear of life in a very humorous way, and examines this issue with angles and explanations from great writers.

Sentences from the text of the book Quicksand
Now that we have the internet, we can no longer say “you have not seen anything yet” because everyone, to see everything until the age of twelve.

Untapped talent puts pressure on the soul.

Most cops are beaten up by the oppressed seeking revenge or hypocritical scoundrels dreaming of deadly power.

Remembering the past is like watching a Hollywood movie, you can’t see the characters on the toilet.

The head of the donkey also becomes uniform after a while.

People immediately consider a suicide tragic, but they do not consider the decades of unbearable mental suffering that led to suicide.

Some memories are like water holes that never evaporate.

If there is a crack in a thousand kilometers walk, my foot will go away.

Listen Stella, every time I hear someone who has been single for forty years, I think of a man who laid an egg on his head and walked a thousand kilometers and his name is recorded in the Guinness Book of Records.

I say to myself, God bless you for your perseverance, but why did you make such a mistake?

My biggest fear is that when I am in the bathroom, someone comes and steals my house.

Excerpts from the text of the book Quicksand
I have swallowed bees many times. And I eat a bird at least twice a year. I always hit the ground when I yell at someone. When I play the piano, my fingers should not close the door.

It is not possible for me to cross the train tracks at night and Yahoo does not have a train honking its horn for me.

Every time I climbed a ladder, a step under it broke. I may not get sick on my birthday. Every time I travel, I arrive in the city one day after the celebration. Can you tell how many obese women you are pregnant with?

The blind have wonderful hearing and the deaf have a unique sense of smell. What do paralyzers get?

I feel closer to Sotomo Yamaguchi Yamaguchi than any other human being, the unfortunate one who went on a business trip to Hiroshima just when the atomic bomb exploded and then returned to Nagasaki and as soon as he arrived the second bomb fell.

The inviolable law has always been this, when it comes to your dream that it is too late
Running Sand is a comedy novel by Steve Toltz, first published in 2015.

Liam is a police officer who loves writing but can not succeed in either.

Aldo, his best friend, is an unlucky entrepreneur who never gives up on trouble.

Recurring Aldo’s misfortunes, Liam decides to dedicate his next book to the misfortunes of his best friend and Aldo’s fruitless attempt to win the only true love of his life, his ex-wife Stella.

As the story progresses, the story, which began as an attempt to explain the cause of Aldo’s misfortunes, becomes a profound and fascinating tale of belief and friendship.

The book Quicksand is an interesting and strange picture of a meaningful and ostentatious society in the 21st century.
Steve Toltz is one of the young foreign writers who has gained a good reputation among Iranian audiences over the past few years.

This recognition is also due to the publication of the translation of his first novel called “Part of the Whole”, which was published in 1994. The translation of this author’s second novel “Rig Ravan” was also published at the beginning of 1996.

The important point in reviewing this book is the success that “Part of the Whole” has brought to its author and allows us to have a comparative view between the two works on a regular basis.

“Part of the whole” was a successful work that won the Booker Prize due to its strength in structure and content, and it is regularly reprinted in Iran due to the audience.

The original version of “Part of the Whole” was released in 2008 and the original version of “Quick Sand” in 2015. Importantly, audiences and critics waited to see what Toltz would accomplish in his second writing.

In the first pages of the novel in question, one can see signs of a “part of the whole”, for example, the same dialogue that exists on page 12 and the same sociology of the “part of the whole” by Steve Toltz:

“You know people used to love rock stars, but now they just like rock stars to perform at their birthday parties?”
In addition to these dialogues, one can also see historical and literary references, which, of course, the reader can get the author’s meaning from by reading and scientific support:

“Do you know that we now think pornography is a form of freedom of expression?”

And this is a joke with Voltaire’s doctrine of democracy, which Toltz has already shown in other parts of the whole. But that part of prose by Kelly Steve Toltz that we know from his first book,

It starts from the second chapter and the first chapter and in fact the opening sequence of this work is very bitter and serious; As the whole is more bitter and serious than the “part of the whole.”

The language of “Quicksand” is different from the language used in “part of the whole”, and Toltz’s use of descriptive words and phrases is not similar to the approach he took in his first book.
Of course, the characters of the two novels are similar, but this similarity is due to the fact that they are crazy about their profession, and they are different from another point of view, and this difference is a fundamental difference.

Because the hero of the “part of the whole” was supposed to be afraid of death and the hero of the “Quicksand” of life, and naturally and in comparison, if a mad philosopher was to be afraid, the fear of not dying is more terrible than the fear of death. Fear of dying.

Thus, it seems that Steve Toltz, with “Part of the Whole” and his stunts in that book, provided a kind of platform for attracting the audience, and after attracting him, he shared his main character and horror with him in “Quicksand”. Is.

This view, both consciously and unconsciously, is rooted in Kafka’s view of life and death. The term “metamorphosis” is used several times throughout the novel. For example, “I watched myself being transformed every year …” or on page 321, “Morrell brings me Kafka’s metamorphosis.

“I have never in my life identified with any fictional character like Gregor.” The greatest example of this is a quote from Kafka that was written on the forehead before the text began: “Oh, what hope, the sea of ​​hope – but not for us.”
Among the things that can be seen among the author’s fears is the fear of not being loved; “Can anyone love an immortal, idle creature?”

This sentence is about the character of Aldo, the protagonist of this novel, but if we want to examine it with a psychological theory, one of the author’s own fears about the process of life and death is placed in the mouth of this character.

The type of events and incidents of “Quicksand” are not much different from the “part of the whole” except in two stages. The first stage is when the baby is born dead, and the other is the paralyzed Aldavi surfing.

From the beginning of the book to page 158, when the story of the birth of a dead baby is narrated, there is no shocking shock, but this part of the book, compared to other lines and pages, contains real tragedy and affects the audience as well.

The same blow can distract the audience from the routine of events and before the story, because if this bitter event – whose bitterness is quite powerful and recognizable between the grotesque bitterness of the story – had not taken shape, the repetition of the genre of events would have exhausted reading the book. And normalized. So the tragic blow of two cases

To say that “Quicksand” is not a step forward for its author is one because of its form and the other because of its content.
In terms of form and structure, the two novels are not much different from each other. In terms of content, if we leave aside the fear of death and the fear of life, there are characters in both books who are very similar in terms of performance and status.

In part, the character of the narrator is the son of a crazy and seemingly stupid father, who of course also has wise thoughts. Jasper’s father Marty (the narrator is a part of the whole) is a naughty man whose presence causes sabotage and trouble, but he has a philosopher inside him.

In Quick sand, the narrator has a friend named Aldo, who has the same situation, with the difference that Jasper’s father, as a whole, can not untie his mind about the fear of death, and Aldo can not untie the knots of his life for fear of life. Slowly

Both characters of the narrator, although they have their own life and perspective, look at the sabotages of Marty and Aldo from the outside and in fact narrate their lives.

Anyway, “Quicksand” is a good and readable novel. For the author, it may not be a step forward and a repetition of success for the part of the whole, but it is a good and successful novel that is worth studying and reviewing.
As mentioned above, the publication of Rig-e-Ravan in Iran is more to the benefit of its translator than to the benefit of its author, and shows the power of Peyman Khaksar to the audience.

Liam and Aldo are two friends. In one part of the book, we see Aldo’s fate through Liam, and in another part of the story, we see his fate through his own language.

A man who does not want to be alive and is always afraid that he is immortal and will not die. He has a lot of bad luck in his way. He has a creative mind, he goes to different jobs and always fails. Stella, the love of his life finally leaves him. The next person is in love with his imprisoned wife. And leads to unintentional murder and ….

This is Mr. Tolts’s new book. I loved the whole book and eagerly went for the new book, although almost all markets welcomed my book well based on my previous successful experience.

Beautiful parts of the book
Now that we have the internet, we can no longer say that you have not seen anything yet because you have seen everything until the age of twelve.

The good thing about being a beginner is that you know the true value of the effect (zero cents).

Everyone says that until you have a child, you never understand what it means to have a child. Is it not because they have no sympathy?

Every time I hear of a man who has been single for forty years, I think of a man who laid an egg on his head and walked a thousand kilometers, and his name is recorded in the Guinness Book of Records.

I say to myself, Barak, to your stamina, but why did you make such a mistake?

Men always just pretend to let go of their adolescent fantasies, but this is not true.

The sadness of the story was how easy it was to summarize a catastrophe.

In their youth, women fall in love for no reason. This will never happen again. After puberty, they look for a reason. Let’s be honest, their reasons are often material.

The philosophy of the book Ravan Ravan
This book, like Toltz’s previous work, is not just Toltz’s writings and ideas, but is replete with the writings of other great writers who were influenced by Toltz himself.

In this book, he also used the philosophy of people like Baudelaire, Camus, Freud, Kafka, Tolstoy and others.

This book is all about metaphysics. It is fully examining the existence of life, God, death and suicide.

The novel portrays Aldo, a failed villain who has failed even in his suicide attempt, and in the darkest possible way creates a transformed Kafkaesque character whose life is no darker than hers, which is the only solution for suicide.

The deep philosophical part of the novel begins in chapter two and occupies the largest volume of the novel, which during the first conversation he has with “Mimi” (when he first contacts him) he makes a completely camouflaged conversation, saying “Do not ask for a life of value Is he alive or not?

“Ask if my life is worth living or not.” Which refers to the book The Legend of Sisyphus Camus, to which Camus answers this question, saying, “The only philosophical subject is suicide.” ”
Of course, little by little, Aldo’s ideas change in the novel, his conversation with Morrell, who is told by the omniscient scientist that you are mortal and corrupt, the only problem is that you confuse the indefinite with the infinite.

When he feels that he needs God or a spiritual force, he talks to him and tells his fear. In the end, a completely metaphysical state arises in which Aldo converses with a spiritual force and asks all the questions about the cause of resentment, the existence of hell, the cause of consciousness, why. God does not show himself to be beautiful, which in my opinion is a belief with a twenty-first century vision, not a belief thousands of years old.

In his first book, Steve Toltz surprised all but one of his audiences around the world. In addition, it raised expectations of itself.

If you have read the whole book, you will undoubtedly be interested in this book as well.
In this book, too, Steve Toltz uses humor and philosophy beautifully.

The story of Quicksand goes from chapter to chapter and from future to past, and in my opinion, this prevents the audience from getting tired. And shows the art of the author.

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1- Introducing the book Quicksand on YouTube

2- Introducing the book Quicksand in Aparat

Additional information

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نویسنده

استیو تولتز

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