A Modern Telemachus (Yonge Charlotte Mary).

Это захватывающая история о молодом американце Кеннете Форбсе, который отправляется в кругосветное путешествие на яхте вместе с капитаном и экипажем. По ходу плавания Кеннет сталкивается с разными приключениями, опасностями и испытаниями, которые закаляют его характер и делают мужчиной.

Он посещает экзотические страны, знакомится с разными культурами и обычаями. Кеннет многому учится у мудрого капитана, который становится для него как отец. Вместе они переживают штормы, аварии, нападения пиратов, но не сдаются и продолжают свой путь.

Это увлекательное повествование о взрослении, мужестве, дружбе и преодолении трудностей. Книга напоминает о древнегреческом мифе о Телемахе, сыне Одиссея, который отправился на поиски отца. Отсюда и название романа "A Modern Telemachus" ("Современный Телемах").

Классическая история о любви, предательстве и мести, "A Modern Telemachus" looks close to the play Othello. Swaged with tales of Corinth, and published by the tenacious Lady Charlotte Guest (a friend of Shakespeare's), Yonge's romance interests neither professional young men nor aristocrats, but a respectable doctor and his shy duck-keeper's daughter in the dull bourgeois township of Dunwich. Tormented by an ambitious stepmother and equally shuttered from social pleasures, the young lovers, Valeria and Lucian, yearn for true excitement and romance, far out of the grime and despair of everyday urban existence. This thinly veiled exercise in speculation in turn makes an excellent indicator of surroundings the imaginative confinements of female fiction in Victorian Britain. For reading this we can also see the bounds of male fiction constrained within the melodramatic rules of romanticized investigative literature. The finely structured storyline splinters into scattered pieces, tentatively constructed to nurture a personal drama attuned to quick suburban social change conditions. Overweight with ambiguous dialogue, and also short on precise description, Yonge weaves a complex inspirational discourse about social duty, cruelty and passion, with undulating commentary upon attitudes to friendship and love, standards of conduct and class values. This author is as much interested in inquiries of fact as she is in narrative archetypes, as well as prefabricated chrystallings of exposure and jest. Eagerly playreads will appreciate that she manages to deliver provocative comment, without compromising the simple decency of her tone. Although clearly romanticized, these concerns are never overly generalized; they are constantly modified to fit new situations. As romantic wrestling match, associations, hypocrisy and unwholesome actions politics, tenderness and culture contact, extricating moral adulteration, proving true simidly transgression between the contrasting world of material prosperity, imperialist influence the grouping extreme sexual repression. In short, we have a well-crafted study of passion. Suspenseful, compassionate, keen to interrogate its wide reaching themes, this is a book constant of significance. Chapters can lose coherence in favour of indulgent detail, though, and the prose begins to waiver languidly towards the end.