Verwandte Artikel zu You Know Who You Are (Vintage Contemporaries)

You Know Who You Are (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

Dolnick, Ben

 
9780307390875: You Know Who You Are (Vintage Contemporaries)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 030739087X ISBN 13: 9780307390875
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

A gorgeous novel of family life, You Know Who You Are is the story of the Vine family, Arthur, Alice, and their three children. The eldest, Will, is well-mannered and academically driven. The youngest, Cara, is a sweet little charmer. Jacob, the middle child, is less sure of who he is. He’s funny, he’s impulsive, and he is often held hostage by his urges to make chaos. But when their mother, Alice, falls ill, Jacob begins to experiment--guiltily, nervously--with the special freedoms conferred on the motherless.
 
Following the Vines as Jacob moves through high school, college, and beyond, You Know Who You Are is a wise, funny, elegiac novel of moving on, pulling together, and answering that most complicated of questions: who will you decide to become?

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

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ben Dolnick grew up outside of Washington, D.C., and currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife. He is the author of a novel, Zoology, and his work has appeared in various publications, including The New York Times and Five Chapters.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Intimate Letters

At ten years old best friendship is like marriage. Jacob’s first best friend, and the one he imagined, without enthusiasm, that he’d spend his life with, was Marek Bondarchuk, a boy with fine black hair and a complexion the color of chicken fat. Marek appeared at Waggoner in fourth grade, and for those first weeks, Alexandra Kohn or Sarah Gross, beaming with virtue, would invite him to pull over his desk at lunch and then he would sit there silently, not participating in or even seeming to understand the conversation, slurping the leftover juice from the tinfoil in which his food had been wrapped. Mrs. Sobolesky spoke to him in the same voice she would have used with a dog.

The class was learning to write letters. Date in the upper right, sender’s address in the upper left. A comma after the city. What are the initials for Maryland again? What about California? (This was Ira Maccary, whose father lived in LA and who wore Lakers colors every day.) When Mrs. Sobolesky told them to write invitations for imaginary parties, Jacob addressed his to Marek, because no else was certain to receive it without embarrassing him. Jacob understood his mistake as soon as he lay it on Marek’s desk.

Marek began to follow Jacob around at recess. He turned out to speak English well enough. “Let’s play four-square.” “Let’s race, on the count of three.” “Watch, I can jump over the fence with no hands. Can you?” On Halloween he invited himself to trick-or-treat in Waggoner—he said his parents had insisted on it—and after an evening spent following Jacob and Cara from porch to porch, he handed over all his KitKats and Snickers, his eyes huge with hopefulness. Jacob wasn’t such a hard catch. He had begun to fear that he was destined for nothing but conditional friendships, to lingering on the edges of other people’s happiness. He fought back his better sense and forged ahead. Suddenly he had a name to call when Mrs. Sobolesky asked for partners.

“This smells like Marek!” Alexandra Kohn shouted, holding up a clear bottle of vinegar during a science lab. This was near Thanksgiving break, after Marek had become something of a pariah.

“This looks like Alexandra!” Marek shouted back, holding up a picture in his textbook of a perfectly ordinary-looking woman using a hair dryer.

Their friendship consisted mostly of carrying out various of Jacob’s schemes. They turned the Bondarchuks’ living room into a fort. They recorded a radio show in which Jacob was a detective and Marek was a criminal, accused of having killed his neighbor. Jacob tended to lose interest in these ideas halfway through, and Marek would be left to clean up or to explain to his parents why their bedding was draped over the dining room table and covered in masking tape. Marek’s parents—his father was an engineer, his mother a day-care teacher—were so happy about Marek’s having a friend that they didn’t dare complain. Mrs. Bondarchuk told Jacob to invite his parents over for dinner, and asked him about his brother and sister, and sent him home with pockets full of the sticky, dented candies they kept in a heavy glass bowl on the key table.

On weekends, they’d lie in the dark in Jacob’s room, Marek in Will’s old bed, and Marek would say, “Who do you think is Mrs. Sobolesky’s favorite kid?”

“I don’t know. Vincent?”

“No. I think she likes you. She’s always joking with you. She hates me. She thinks I’m so annoying.”

Jacob agreed, but he said, “No. The only person she really doesn’t like is Isaac.”

“I know! Did you see when Isaac spilled glue? Mrs. Sobolesky said, ‘Damn it, Isaac.’ ”

Jacob hoped this was an acceptable place for their conversation to dock for the night, so he let himself not answer, let his eyes fall shut, let his cheek drift to the pillow . . .

“Are you awake?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I thought I heard you snoring. My mom snores so much my dad sleeps in the study.”

“Huh.”

“Does anyone in your family snore?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want me to shut up?”

That spring Marek joined Jacob’s soccer team, and he was prepared to bear it—to pair off with Marek for all the dribbling drills—until, entirely without meaning to, Jacob fell in love with someone else. He’d known Owen Polo ever since kindergarten and had always thought of him as a not particularly funny class clown, but one day Jacob happened to be standing nearby when Owen was impersonating their coach, a Brazilian man named Viktor. Viktor had a spongy head of white hair and teeth like raw corn kernels. None of the boys would have been surprised to learn that he was eighty. His body was spry, though, and he talked about having played against Pelé in a tone that wasn’t overly impressed. He regularly worked himself into a spitting rage.

Owen had turned his feet inward, beaten his hands together like claws, and said in a hoarse, accented voice, “Owen! You are a stupid shit! Go home and never disgust me like this again!” The laughter hit like a revelation. That afternoon Jacob began mooning around after Owen, asking him to do Viktor again and learning that he had many others just as good—Louis Armstrong singing “What a Wonderful World,” Mrs. Macomb asking weepily why no one had signed up for her dancing club. Eventually, with a shy smile, he did his Marek impression too—“Vy is everyone battering me? Go to hell! All of you go to hell!”—and Jacob found himself breathless. Owen was short and solid and had a gap between his front teeth that made him seem to be joking even when he wasn’t. He was the only boy Jacob knew who already had longish hair.

One day at recess, as Marek and Jacob tossed back and forth a Nerf football with a chunk bitten out, Marek said, “Why is Owen such a show-off?” Jacob murmured and shrugged. “He acts like he’s the only one who knows any jokes,” Marek said. “He looks like a girl.”

Marek realized before Jacob did that Jacob really would abandon him, that such a thing was possible. “Why do you act like that now?” he said. “You’re Owen’s little toy. I saw you following him after school. You look so stupid. You look like a dog.” It was true, but in Owen’s company Jacob was happy; it felt as if someone had thrown open the curtains. When they were together they talked easily, with delightful freedom, about which girls in the class they would kiss if they were forced, and about how far their siblings had gone, and about how ridiculous Ethan Blunck was, who cried whenever the Redskins lost, and Sharon Cross, who kept her patrol badge in a plastic bag so it would never get scratched. Playdate seemed much too meek a word for their afternoons—they snuck into neighbors’ backyards, spied on Owen’s brother, wrote other people’s initials in wet cement. One day Owen announced that Jacob could put anything he found in the kitchen into a tablespoon and he would eat it for fifty cents. Jacob held out a spoonful of peanut oil, anchovy paste, vinegar, and Marmite (Owen had English cousins), and Owen slurped it into his mouth, then squeezed his eyes shut while he choked it down. Afterward he ran around the house shouting and banging into walls, like a cartoon character with smoke pouring out of his ears, and Jacob thought he would burst from glee.

At the beginning of May,...

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

Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
030739087X
ISBN 13 
9780307390875
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
GPSR Kontakt
gpsr@libri.de

Europaallee 1
Bad Hersfeld
36244
Deutschland