Автор: Iris Smyles
Название: Dating Tips for the Unemployed
Издательство: Mariner Books
Год: 2016
ISBN: 978-0544703384
Язык: English
Формат: epub
Размер: 15,3 mb
Страниц: 320

Originally a medical term, “nostalgia” was coined by the German scholar Johannes Hofer in a 1668 paper to describe a severe homesickness in soldiers, whose terrible longing in combination with battle wounds sometimes proved fatal. The word is a compound of the Greek words “nostos,” meaning homecoming (used by Homer to describe Odysseus’s return in The Odyssey), and “algos,” meaning pain.
 
On the assumption that home is a place left behind, nostalgia is commonly understood as a yearning for the past. But for many a young person seeking their place in the world, home is an idea with stronger ties to the future, embodied by a person or place not yet seen, making nostalgia an equally apt diagnosis for the strange ache that often defines early adulthood.

In twenty-four absurd, lyrical, and louche episodes, “Iris Smyles” weaves a modern odyssey of trying to find one’s home in the world amid the pitfalls and insidious traps of adult life. A wickedly funny picaresque touching on quantum physics, the Donner Party, arctic exploration, Greek mythology, Rocky I, II, V, IV, VI, and III respectively, and literary immortality.