ECO - FICTION : MEMOIRES D'UN ARBRE - GUIDO MINA DI SOSPIRO

Hugo New Life

2019 October

First Edition : Findhorn Press, 2001

240 pages

Foreign rights : Already sold to Spain,  Italy, Korea, UK, Australia, Greece, France, Turkey, Bulgaria, Germany, Nederlands

« Dans cette merveilleuse éco-fiction que nous pourrions placer entre Italo Calvino et Jean Giono, l'auteur Guido Mina di Sospiro a lancé une idée brillante et l'a transformée en un livre intemporel qui plaira à de nombreuses générations de lecteurs. » 

David Rothenberg, The Ecologist

Imaginez un arbre qui pourrait vous raconter sa vie, un if majestueux, âgé de deux mille ans. Un arbre dont l’histoire se mêle inévitablement à celle des hommes, depuis le premier homme sauvage de la forêt jusqu’au visiteur d’aujourd’hui, dans le parc d’un cloître franciscain à Killarney en Irlande. 

De son île verdoyante, l’if assiste aux cultes animistes des Celtes puis à l'invasion d'une nouvelle religion, le christianisme, qui abandonne le culte des plantes et des animaux. 

Au fil des siècles, l'histoire de l'humanité et de tous les êtres vivants, animaux et végétaux, se reflète dans celle de la forêt. 

L'if voit ainsi évoluer l'homme et son rapport à la nature ; chaque chapitre peut se lire comme une parabole.

Au final, après avoir été détruit puis ressuscité, cet arbre est aujourd’hui protégé et vénéré. Il est un symbole de résurrection et d’immortalité et il peut envoyer à tous les êtres vivants son message de sagesse, de paix et d’harmonie.

Voici l'histoire du monde à travers le regard d'un arbre. Un beau roman qui nous fait grandir et renforce nos racines émotionnelles.

Guido Mina di Sospiro vit aux États-Unis. Ce roman, publié d’abord au Royaume-Uni, est présenté en permanence dans l’Encyclopaedia Britannica comme une référence sur la vie des arbres. Il a été publié dans de nombreux pays : Angleterre, USA, Turquie, Corée, Bulgarie, Italie, Espagne et Grèce, et bientôt Allemagne et Pays-Bas.

Pour ce roman, Guido Mina di Sospiro a mené une enquête qui a duré plus de dix ans et l’a mené de Miami jusqu’en Écosse et en Irlande, dans les plus beaux jardins botaniques du monde. Il a correspondu et rencontré les botanistes et les naturalistes les plus renommés. 

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Imagine a tree who could tell you her life story. An ancient tree, the 2000 year-old matriarch of the forest, witness to a millenium of life before the first man came to her land. A tree whose history becomes inevitably entwined with the history of man, from the first wild man of the forest to today’s visitors to the Abbey Yew in Killarney National Park. The Story of Yew is the autobiography of an age-old Yew tree, living deep in the forest of a land we now call Ireland.

A tree that had seen a thousand winters before the Vikings came to America tells the stories of what she and her fellow trees have seen in their lives.

"Like the classic Watership Down it provokes the imagination as well as the emotions ... hard to resist." — The Sunday Tribune

The Story of Yew is just that–the story of a yew tree. A two-thousand-year-old specimen relates its memoirs for the benefit of the human race. The narrative is in the first person simply because the storyteller is the yew itself. Only by lending an unbiased ear can one appreciate the words spoken by the yew tree. It follows that the kind listeners should put aside their assumptions on the superiority of the human race. Legend has it that before the construction of the heavenreaching tower of Babel there was but one language.—Guido Mina di Sospiro

Guido Mina di Sospiro is an award-winning, internationally published novelist born in Argentina but raised in Italy who lives in the United States. He belongs to an ancient aristocratic Italian family, and was raised in Milan in a multilingual home. He trained as a classical guitarist and studied orchestration with the Swiss conductor Antoine-Pierre de Bavier, who had been Wilhelm Furtwängler’s favorite pupil. The Hungarian composer Miklós Rózsa, who wrote the soundtracks of "Ben-Hur," "El Cid," "Double Indemnity," etc., and won three Academy Awards, used to spend his summers across from the Mina di Sospiro's seaside home in Italy. Then in his seventies, he took young Guido under his wing and acquainted him with the University of Southern California, where he and Arnold Schönberg had taught composition.

At twenty, after attending the University of Pavia and making a feature film that premiered at the National Cinémathèque in Milan, Mina di Sospiro left Italy to attend USC School of Cinema-Television. Among his mentors were Ernest Lehman, Hitchcock's favorite screenwriter and, later on, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, the celebrated English editor and publisher, who launched among others William Boyd, Peter Ackroyd and Paul Theroux.

Mina di Sospiro's novel "The Story of Yew" (the memoirs of an age-old tree), published in the UK, is permanently featured on the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and has been translated into many languages, as has "From the River", the memoirs of a mighty river. Both books have met with critical acclaim.

Mina di Sospiro currently lives in the DC area with his wife and their three sons, and travels often to Europe and elsewhere so as to promote the various editions of his books.

Here you will find interviews and reviews: http://www.guido-mina-di-sospiro.com/pressforyew.html