Наконец я сделала это! Прочла первый немаленький роман на языке оригинала. Спасибо АДБ за интерес, который и сподвиг меня на это
Мои впечатления не только субъективны, они также могут быть искажены из-за недостаточного знания языка. Но одно можно сказать совершенно точно - АБД сделал самую большую ставку на то, что у него получается лучше всего - создание интересных и живых персонажей.
Само повествование действительно затянуло меня только на последней четверти, читать все-таки было очень трудно - уж очень сочные описания варпа в романе, а словарный запас у меня маленький. Хотя, "затянуло" - это все-таки мягко сказано - на некоторых моментах просто захватывало дух. То, о чем раньше можно было только догадываться, или то, о чем даже и мысли не возникало, раскрывается и начинает играть новыми красками. Это касается как сюжетной истории, так и характеров персонажей.
Вообще, я очень хотела написать более развернутый отзыв, но с изложением мыслей всегда возникают проблемы, так что пока только так.
Позже попытаюсь написать маленькое ревью на английском - внезапно сегодня получила такое задание .
А пока один из любимых отрывков со слов, которые заставили затаить дыхание...
читать дальше ‘You are beautiful.’
We all turned. Telemachon stood before the Anamnesis, his palm pressed to her containment tank. She drifted closer to him, no doubt drawn by his rare behaviour.
‘We are the Anamnesis,’ she told him.
‘I know. You are lovely. A being of unbelievable complexity, presented in this beautiful form. You remind me of the Nayad. Do you know of them?’
She tilted her head again. I felt her thoughts flashing back and forth in impossible flickers between her crown of cables and the hundreds of mind-engine pods across the chamber. The brains of prisoners, scholars, savants and slaves, all linked to her in a gestalt hive-mind.
‘No,’ she said at last.
‘They were a legend,’ Telemachon told her, ‘on Chemos, my home world.’ The silver face mask looked so apt in that moment, staring in serene admiration. He was a man gazing upon the visage of a heavenly afterlife. No wonder humanity had once buried its kings and queens in such masks. ‘Perhaps they have deeper roots on Old Earth. I can’t say for certain.Chemosian legend tells us that our world once had seas and oceans, in an age when Chemos’s sun burned bright enough to inspire a wealth of life. The Nayad were a species of water spirits charged with watching over the oceans. They sang to the beasts of the deepest waters, and their songs soothed our world’s soul. When their music finally came to an end, the oceans dried up and the sun grew darker in the dusty heavens. Chemos itself mourned the loss of their songs.’
The Anamnesis’s eyes were wide. ‘We do not understand.’
‘What don’t you understand?’ he asked in his storyteller’s voice.
‘We do not understand why the Nayad ceased their music. Their actions caused global flux of extinction-level severity for many species.’
‘It’s said that their song simply came to an end, as all songs do. The Nayad vanished from our world that day, their duty done and their lives lived in full. Never to return.’
I stood in stunned silence. Even Nefertari refrained from baiting the swordsman in that moment, though I could see her knife-like smile as she watched the warrior who had once hungered so fiercely for her death.
Lheor, however, cut the quiet with one of his gunshot laughs. ‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Little ocean goddesses singing to fish?’
The Anamnesis turned to Lheor as he shattered the spell of Telemachon’s story. I saw the embers of anger in her gaze. It heartened me to see her feel any emotion at all.
‘And Chemos has never had oceans,’ Lheor added. ‘So it can’t be true.’
Telemachon lowered his hand, evidently with some reluctance. I could feel his stunted thoughts, how they flailed and misfired, too coldly bland to link with any emotion.
Once more I was struck by what I had done to him. Ahriman had massacred our Legion by damning them to existence as Rubricae, but here was the very sin I laid at his feet, performed by my own hand. Even on the scale of a single soul rather than an entire Legion, the bitterness of hypocrisy was an unwelcome taste.А эта песня, как пишет сам АДБ, вдохновила его на создание характеров К(х)айона и Нефертари.