A aldeia

by David Mamet, Luiz Augusto da Silveira (translator)

extremely rare,very good condition

Genres: Fiction

252 pages

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

David Alan Mamet is an American author, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and film director. His works are known for their clever, terse, sometimes vulgar dialogue and arcane stylized phrasing, as well as for his exploration of masculinity.

As a playwright, he received Tony nominations for Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and Speed-the-Plow (1988). As a screenwriter, he received Oscar nominations for The Verdict (1982) and Wag the Dog (1997).

Mamet's recent books include The Old Religion (1997), a novel about the lynching of Leo Frank; Five Cities of Refuge: Weekly Reflections on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy (2004), a Torah commentary, with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner; The Wicked Son (2006), a study of Jewish self-hatred and antisemitism; and Bambi vs. Godzilla, an acerbic commentary on the movie business.

Reviews

[Russell Bittner · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did something with this book I ordinarily never do if a story doesn’t grab me in the first fifty pages: I read clear through to the end (238 pages). Why? you might ask. Quite simply because I know and respect David Mamet as a scriptwriter. Anyone who can execute—never mind conceive of—the likes of Glengarry Glen Ross, The Postman Always Rings Twice, State and Main and The Verdict (just to name a few of his accomplishments) deserves, at the very least, my unquestioned attention to his novels.


The truth, however, is that I understood very little more than “Would you like a cup of tea?” (on p. 174).


For starters, Mamet’s use of what I take to be a Mainer dialect is at the very least difficult to read. If spoken (on the stage or the big screen), it works just fine. But therein, I suspect, lies the problem: we don’t “hear” this dialect to the accompaniment of gestures and action. Moreover, I have it on the best authority (viz., that of Erskine Caldwell) that a writer should endeavor to convey regionalism not through unwieldy orthography, but more through the rhythm of the locals’ speech.


The same is true of Mamet’s rendition of internal monologue. If the whole point of this exercise was to convey the primitiveness of his characters, I don’t know that a novel is the best form with which to convey it. But then, I had the same objection to Richard Russo’s Empire Falls —and dropped that Pulitzer Prize-winning work after only 71 pages.


If I’ve missed something in my reading of David Mamet’s The Village, then let me be the first and loudest to shout Mea culpa! Mea culpa! Mea maxima culpa!


RRB
07/18/16
Brooklyn, NY

[Carac Allison · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sometimes it's secretly nice when a favorite author fails. Because you learn that he or she is human.

That's how I feel about "The Village". David Mamet is a brilliant essayist, an unparalleled playwright and a hit or miss novelist. "The Village" is definitely a miss.

Everything apart from the dialogue is heavy and sluggish. The interior monologues are revealing but to little purpose. There's no real story and nothing and no one to care about.

Carac

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really good, but definitely very different.
3 stars for being different!

[Luciano Mariconda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Duré treinta páginas.

[Jennifer Becker · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have no idea what just happened... I read the whole thing. I was unable to decipher inner dialogue from actual conversation. None of the characters were developed nor was the setting ever made clear. Even the most basic elements of a story never evolved. I couldn’t connect with any part of this novel. Sorely disappointed. I couldn’t bring myself to give up because of my respect for Mamet but he is not a novelist.

[ErikaShmerika Wine · Rating 2 out of 5]

This could have been so much better. I’m a fan of Mamet in play/movie format and I feel like this story would have been better told in that genre. Mostly this is like listening to someone’s every asinine thought and being expected to think it’s meaningful. Half the time you don’t know who’s thinking or what they’re doing. The little actual dialog is so mutilated to simulate the NE dialect (which I felt didn’t ring true at all) that I often had to pause to translate it to something cohesive. Like much of Mamet, the plot is sort of a side note to the work, which is fine, but because of (what I view as) the failings of the writing, I came away with no sense of a cohesive tale. Overall I feel like he’s trying to ‘weave a tale of the darker sides’ of a society he’s wholly unfamiliar with, and he’s counting on his charming style and elitist following to make it work.

[Julia Romero]

DNF at 50%

I've never read a book where the author writes so beautifully, but the story is so tragically written.

Confusing monologues, hard to read dialogues, difficult to follow perspective, I'm not sure anymore whether it might just be me, or it is really this book.

[Dan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is not an enjoyable book.
Shame, because David Mamet is an amazing playwright and screenwriter.
Novels are not his forte.
Way too tedious and disorganized at the same time...

[Nick Sorrentino · Rating 2 out of 5]

Utterly forgettable

[Kellen Ferguson]

Maybe only read this book if you’ve read all your other books and you find this randomly in a laundromat, which is where I’ll be placing it momentarily.

Or just watch his films

[Travis · Rating 4 out of 5]

well written, smooth tale of a nondescript town and a few of its inhabitants- merchant, bastard, trollop, obsessive, the found and lost. A good bedtime read.

[Steve Petherbridge · Rating 2 out of 5]

I purchased this book at a sale, mostly going on the deserved and eminent reputation of David Mamet as a great playwright and screenplay writer. Wrong!

Admittedly, it is his first novel, but, on this evidence he is not a master of that form and reading the novel will give great encouragement to amateur writers everywhere! In my opinion, this is a rushed out novel that required a few rewrites and is obviously carelessly edited and not professionally proof read. Characterisation, plot and continuity of story-line are weak.

It is obvious that the writer of the blurb either didn't read the book or was under the influence of substances fed into his or her body. His or her closing comment that this is "Forceful, jarring and resonant. The Village is an astonishing work of fiction by a true American master" is an astonishing paragraph of fiction. Has this editor or publisher heard of mis-selling and sales of goods legislation?

To be fair to the writer, this novel should probably have been a screenplay, because, I believe that the visual aspect would cover up the descriptive defects in the novel. Too many gaps are in this work for the reader to visualise and join up.

I gave the book every chance, struggling after 50 pages, deciding to plod on till 100 pages and then, ah sure, rather than wash the car or give the wife a cause to faint and vacuum-clean the house, I may as well finish it! I notice many other Goodreads critics are in agreement with me in their critiques.

Reading between 70 and 100 books a year, I am bound to come across a dud or one to be left quietly on the park bench or given as a present to the mother-in-law. I hope that this is the dud for 2014! David Mamet is a giant, an artist whom I greatly admire and has provided me with great entertainment on stage and screen, but, this is one piece that he should quietly withdraw from reprinting and republication, or, alternatively, take more care in its production and rewrite it!

Not a buy. There's too many other great books to be read in this short life. Experience David Mamet in the theatre instead.

Other reviews:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-ent...

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's some really good stuff in here, but it is hard as hell to figure out who is being talked about so the reader can get to it. I think that's why there are so many angry reviews in here. There is some great language for the characters and some great description, but it still takes a really long time to figure out who is the focus at a given time, and it switches frequently. Without being able to tell that, the reader can't get a sense of who everyone is and how they individually progress across the story. If that was more possible to do, I think this would be a really good book. As it is, the good stuff is there, but it's really easy to get lost in a muddle and not find it. Maybe it just needs a reader who can figure that out. I was able to do some, but I don't think anywhere near enough.

[Aaron Martz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mamet, the king of dialogue, fashions a book of vignettes largely composed of interior monologues, one each seemingly for the entire population of a New England town. Only a few of them are interesting, the best coming near the end when a hunter gets lost in the woods and finally realizes he's not as smart as he thinks and has been walking in the wrong direction for hours. The only thing Mamet seems to explore with any depth is how to make the country bumpkin dialogue as unreadable as possible by abbreviating nearly every word and on top of that punctuating sentences with as many starts and stops and commas as they can hold. If you read this book out loud, you may come down with a stutter.

[Stephen Redwood · Rating 2 out of 5]

A series of interior monologues, patched together across exterior world actions and conversations. The protagonists live in the same village, but they might as well just be random characterizations, given the fairly weak connections built between them. There were some passages that drew me in and tripped me into a reflective state, but overall it never became a coherent whole and, as a result, I found myself struggling to remember characters, events and, therefore, their relevance as I struggled to get through the novel. Disappointing.

[Kit · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of Mamet's characters in The Village are a bunch of barely likable males. Being inside their heads, listening to their streams of consciousness, was more often than not, a barely tolerable place to be. I rather thought he might kill off a character of two, and it was fun for me to consider which misogynist I'd like to see go first, but then I realized it didn't matter, because I wouldn't miss any of them.

[Talia Roland-Kalb · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was mostly minutiae. It may have been the most boring book I’ve read in my adult life, and I’m as surprised as you are that I finished it. But I did and I’m glad for it. Sometimes it was so mundane I actually had to laugh, and sometimes it was so mundane I had to ask, why? Which can be a fun question to ask as a reader. I would not recommend this book to any of my friends, but I was pleased to make its acquaintance.

[Nancy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was our book group’s selection for November 1996. I think it was Mamet’s first book and hardly anyone in the group liked it. I’m a big fan of his screen plays and did enjoy the small vignettes, but it was difficult to keep track of who was doing what. Although I appreciate Mamet’s craft as a writer—this just didn’t work as a novel.

[Micahlibris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mamet's vivid description of the daily minutiae of the characters in this novel is compelling and engaging. It would have been nice if each chapter had a heading with the name of the character so that you could get into the mindset of that individual before you started reading. This is one of the best books I've read in the past year.

[Gary Britson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like much of Hemingway, this book was interesting, with good characters and credible situations and dialogue. Then, suddenly, as with much of Hemingway, everyone decides to go fishing. I will never know what writers find so fascinating about fishing, or, for that matter, about shooting deer. These things are the death sentence to what could have been a good novel.

[Sean-patrick Burke · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed moments of this book, but it was like a Malick film, drifting from event to nothingness at a whim, and endowing a greater intelligence to everyday folks than is realistic. I cannot recommend it, but as a Vermonter it was nice to read about people I recognized, even if their internal monologues felt like professorial musings of a very smart writer.

[Anna MacDonald · Rating 3 out of 5]

Four stars for occasional flashes of brilliance, beauty, and humour, especially with one character. Two stars for overall boringness, unfinished conversations, and female characters -- who consisted of the nagging wife, the teenage slut, the battered woman, and the gossips. Averages out to three.

[Amanda · Rating 1 out of 5]

The going was rough with this book. I had a very hard time reading through till the end...unfortunately I'm glad I'm finished. I was constantly waiting for it to pick up, and it never does. Wording is hard to follow, and there isn't really a story here. Sorry Mamet.

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretentious and boring. Mamet's dialogue is good, but his characters are no more than cliches. He should've done more research for this book than watching Fargo.

[Pabarrett]

The Village: A Novel by David Mamet (1994)

[Maryanne]

ok

[Carol Perreault · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't get into this book and didn't want to finish it