Verwandte Artikel zu Blind Sight

9780307379160: Blind Sight
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0307379167 ISBN 13: 9780307379160
Verlag: PANTHEON, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

This spellbinding story introduces the unforgettable seventeen-year-old narrator, Luke Prescott, who has been brought up in a bohemian matriarchy by his divorced New Age mother, a religious grandmother, and two precocious half-sisters. Having spent a short lifetime swinging agreeably between the poles of Eastern mysticism and New England Puritanism, Luke is fascinated by the new fields of brain science and believes in having evidence for his beliefs. “Without evidence,” he declares, “you just have hope, which is nice, but not reliable.” Luke is writing his college applications when his father—a famous television star whom he never knew—calls and invites him to Los Angeles for the summer. Luke accepts and is plunged into a world of location shooting, celebrity interviews, glamorous parties, and premieres. As he begins to know the difference between his father’s public persona and his private one, Luke finds himself sorting through his own personal mythology.

By the end of the summer Luke thinks he has found the answers he’s been seeking, only to discover that the differences between truth and belief are not always easy to spot, and that evidence can be withheld: when Luke returns home, his mother reveals something she knows will change everything for him.

With Blind Sight, Meg Howrey gives us a smart, funny, and deeply moving story about truth versus belief, about what we do and don’t tell ourselves—with the result, as Luke says, that we don’t always know what we know.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Meg Howrey is a former dancer with Joffrey II. She toured nationally with the Broadway production of Contact, for which she won the Ovation Award in 2001 for best featured actress in a musical. She lives in Los Angeles.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

CHAPTER ONE
 
Names are just what we all agree to call things. They have noth­ing to do with the intrinsic reality of the objects they name.
 
I have been thinking about names, actually my name in particu­lar, for about fifteen minutes now. What I should be doing is work­ing on my college application essay. That’s one of three things I have to do this summer. The other two are running between seventy and seventy-five miles per week, and getting to know my father, whom I just met. I’ve made a training schedule for running, and the essay only needs to be between three and five hundred words, so those two shouldn’t be that hard.
 
My father flew me out here to Los Angeles five days ago. I wouldn’t say that I know him yet.
 
Anyway, before I get to the essay, I’ve got to fill out the personal information section on these forms: name, gender, ethnic affiliation. “Who are you? What are you?”
 
It’s a very American kind of question, “What are you?” People are always telling you how they are Sicilian, or Polish, one-sixteenth Cherokee. People might hear my last name, and say, “Oh, is that English? Your family is from England?” And I will say, “No, my fam­ily is from America.” Because when it was your great-to-the-eighth­ power grandparents who emigrated here from England I feel like, “Yeah, I’m not really English, okay?”
 
I guess this doesn’t happen so much in other countries, where they don’t have an Ellis Island to chop off two syllables and six letters from your last name. Imagine this kind of conversation going on in Tokyo:
 
Japanese Speaker One: Hello, my name is Fumio Watanabe.
 
Japanese Speaker Two: Water . . . NOB . . . hay? Am I saying that right? What is that? Russian?
 
Yesterday I visited my dad for the first time on the set of his TV show and there was a little confusion at the security booth. I gave my last name, “Prescott,” but the ID tag they had for me said “Franco.” I guess they assumed that I would have my father’s last name. It seems weird that he would have told them I do. Anyway, Mark Franco isn’t even my father’s real name.
 
My father’s real name is Anthony Boyle. He had to change it when he became an actor because when you do a movie or a televi­sion show you have to join the Screen Actors Guild and there was already an Anthony Boyle registered in the union. Two actors can’t have the same name, so my father had to change his. He didn’t make “Franco” up: it’s his mother’s maiden name. She is second-generation Mexican. (His father was “maybe Irish and something else.”) I forgot to ask where he got the “Mark” part.
 
My father told me that if people ask him what he is, he says he is Italian. His manager told him to do that because being Italian sounds sexy and being half Mexican and half maybe-partly Irish sounds “kind of random.”
 
If my father had kept his real name, then we—my family—would have made the connection that the guy on television and in movies was my dad. But since he and Sara—that’s my mom—didn’t really know each other that long, well, not  really at all really, and Sara didn’t have any pictures of him, and she never watches action movies anyway, and you don’t usually consider that famous people’s names aren’t actually their names, you can see how the whole thing got lost in translation.
 
Knowing this about my father’s background, I see that I could check off the “Hispanic” box right here on my applications, but that seems shady. I just met my father. It doesn’t seem ethical to try and cash in on his partial ethnicity, and furthermore out him as a not-so-sexy-as-Italian half Mexican. And like I said, I don’t even have his last name, either Boyle or Franco, since he and my mother were never married.
 
Sara was married once and that is how I have my two sisters, Aurora and Pearl, but after she got divorced she took back her maiden name. This was all before I was born. So all three of us kids have always been Prescotts and when we moved in with Sara’s mother—my Nana—that  really worked out because Nana is also a Prescott.
 
Nana is a Prescott by marriage, but her ancestors have been in America for a long time too. She has a special Bible from the seven­teenth century with her maternal family tree written down on the inside covers. I guess it was a good way to keep track of people. And the family Bible they wrote in often became a keepsake kind of thing, something to pass on to your children, especially if you were poor and the only other things you had to leave your children were, like, a calico blanket and a thimble.
 
I should say that Nana’s family Bible is not a collectible item. It’s held together with masking tape, and there is water damage and ripped pages and stuff. Nana has it stored now in a special acid-free box. Before that, she kept the Bible inside a ziplock bag at the bottom of her nightgown drawer.
 
One night when I was about nine, I guess, Nana said at dinner, “Well, I suppose after we clear the table, I might show the children the family Bible,” and maybe we all said, “Yay,” or whatever because we had all heard about it but never seen it. Nana brought it down from her room—at that point it was still in a ziplock baggy—and we all sat around and looked at the names of our ancestors.
 
Daniel Perkins (b. 1657, d. 1709)—Abigail Perkins (b. 1664, d. 1738)
 
That was the first line. The dates might be off by a year or two.
 
“Abigail Perkins,” Sara told us, “was one of the women who were accused of witchcraft in the Salem trials.”
 
My sisters Aurora and Pearl sort of oohed at that; so I oohed too even though I hadn’t gotten to the Salem witch trials in school yet.
 
“Did they hang her?” Aurora asked.
 
“Oh no,” Nana said. “She had to go to prison for a little while and then they let her go. She was just fine.”
 
“She must have been terrified,” Pearl said, liking the sound of that. “Absolutely terrified.”
 
“It’s nothing to worry about,” Nana said. “We don’t really know anything about it.”
 
“Aunt Nancy did some research on Abigail Perkins,” Sara said. “She thinks Abigail might have confessed and that’s why they let her go.”
 
“Not that she really was a witch, of course,” Nana said.
 
“Maybe she was,” Pearl suggested. “Maybe she was the one real witch and gave the one real confession.”
 
“That’s a very creative idea,” Sara said.
 
“They weren’t witches,” Aurora announced with authority. “They were probably midwives or healer women.”
 
“Anyway,” Nana said.
 
“Let’s read all the names out loud,” Sara suggested. “Everybody can do one line.” So we did that. They filled the front inside cover of the Bible and continued on the back, right down to the bottom of the page. The handwriting got much clearer, regular cursive mostly toward the end where we got to Nana and her two sisters, and Sara and her two sisters, and...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
PANTHEON
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307379167
ISBN 13 
9780307379160
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
289
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar