Bookaholic

Probabil că poliția ar fi ultimul loc în care ai căuta un personaj dintr-o carte – dar de data asta, ai ajunge exact unde trebuie. Adică pe Composites, un blog unde o să găsești portrete robot ale unor eroi literari din cărți unde autorii au fost ceva mai darnici cu descrierile fizice.

Brian Joseph Davis este un artist care s-a folosit de tehnologia folosită de desenatorii care lucrează pentru poliție pentru a ne arăta cum arată personaje precum doamna Bovary, Tess d’Uberville sau domnul Rochester. Rezultatele le puteți vedea pe proaspăt lansatul blog Composites.

Softul de care s-a folosit este Faces ID, un program care combină, după descrierea autorilor, mai bine de zece mii de trăsături faciale diferite. Din păcate, mulți dintre ei sar destul de des peste descrierea fizică, iar atunci când n-o fac, insistă prea puțin pe urechi și pe nas.

Davis primește sugestii de la cititori, care aparent vor să-l vadă pe Holden Caulfield, dar și pe unele personaje ale lui Cormac McCarthy:

I made an honest effort to do a Cormac McCarthy character,” Davis says, ‘but you just can’t work with ‘Man. Medium. Two eyes.’ (de aici)

Mai jos găsiți câteva exemple de astfel de potrete:

Thess d’Uberville a lui Thomas Hardy:

She was a fine and handsome girl—not handsomer than some others, possibly—but her mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to colour and shape… The pouted-up deep red mouth to which this syllable was native had hardly as yet settled into its definite shape, and her lower lip had a way of thrusting the middle of her top one upward, when they closed together after a word…Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes…a thick cable of twisted dark hair hanging straight down her back to her waist.

Keith Talent, din London Fields de Martin Amis:

Keith didn’t look like a murderer. He looked like a murderer’s dog. (No disrespect to Keith’s dog Clive, who had signed on well before the fact, and whom Keith didn’t in the least resemble anyway.) Keith looked like a murderer’s dog, eager familiar of ripper or body snatcher or gravestalker. His eyes held a strange radiance -for a moment it reminded you of health, health hidden or sleeping or otherwise mysteriously absent. Though frequently bloodshot, the eyes seemed to pierce. In fact the light sprang off them. And it wasn’t at all pleasant or encouraging, this one-way splendour. His eyes were television. The face itself was leonine, puffy with hungers, and as dry as soft fur. Keith’s crowning glory, his hair, was thick and full-bodied; but it always had the look of being recently washed, imperfectly rinsed, and then, still slick with cheap shampoo, slow-dried in a huddled pub Ч the thermals of the booze, the sallowing fagsmoke. Those eyes, and their urban severity…Like the desolating gaiety of a fundless pediatric hospital (Welcome to the Peter Pan Ward), or like a criminal’s cream Rolls-Royce, parked at dusk between a tube station and a flower stall, the eyes of Keith Talent shone with tremendous accommodations made to money. And murder? The eyes – was there enough blood in them for that? Not now, not yet. He had the talent, somewhere, but he would need the murderee to bring it out.

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În fotografia de sus: Humbert Humbert din Lolita