Verwandte Artikel zu The Other Language

9780307908360: The Other Language
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0307908364 ISBN 13: 9780307908360
Verlag: PANTHEON, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Hailed by The New York Times as “a natural-born storyteller,” the acclaimed author ofRules of the Wild gives us nine incandescently smart stories, funny, elegant, and poignant by turns, that explore the power of change—in relationships, in geographies, and across cultures—to reveal unexpected aspects of ourselves.

Taking us to Venice during film festival season, where a woman buys a Chanel dress she can barely afford; to a sun-drenched Greek village at the height of the summer holidays, where a teenager encounters the shocks of first love; and to a classical dance community in southern India, where a couple gives in to the urge to wander, these remarkable tales bring to life characters stepping outside their boundaries into new passions and destinies. Enlivened by Francesca Marciano’s wit, clear eye, and stunning evocations of people and places, The Other Language is an enthralling tour de force rich with many pleasures.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

FRANCESCA MARCIANO is the author of the novels Rules of the Wild, Casa Rossa, andThe End of Manners. She lives in Rome.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

from The Presence of Men
 
The bells woke Lara up at seven. When she opened her eyes under the tall vaulted ceiling, for a split second she felt as though she were inside a church. It had been her first night in the new house in the village and she’d slept beautifully.
 
She was emerging from the shower in her plum-colored, Moroccan-style bathroom when she heard a vigorous knock at the front door. Still dripping wet, she ran down in her robe, crossed the courtyard and opened the old wooden door, which had been painstakingly sandpapered and waxed. A small woman of indefinite age, with an old-fashioned perm, her body shaped like a box, was staring at her.
 
“You are the person who bought this house?” she asked, her voice loud as a trumpet. She was a local, as Lara could tell from her accent. She nodded.
 
“Ha ha! At last you are here in person!” the little woman said with a cruel smile and slid herself inside the courtyard like an eel.
 
“For months all I’ve been seeing are your builders. Very rude people. Where do they come from?”
 
“Martano, I think. Why?” Lara wondered if the small woman had come to give her some kind of fine, although she wore no uniform.
 
“I knew it. Martano people are all thieves.”
 
“I’m so sorry, signora. Was there a problem?”
 
The woman ignored her and proceeded to take a long, critical look at the potted plants that filled the courtyard, at the indigo blue table and matching chairs that Lara had spotted in a magazine and bought online. She closely examined the pale dusty mauve of the walls, a hue that had cost days of trial and error.
 
“I see you have changed everything in here.”
 
Lara wasn’t sure where this might be leading.
 
“Well, I have restored the place. It was a ruin.”
 
The woman ignored her and peered some more. “My great-aunt lived in this house,” she said.
 
She brushed the smooth surface of the wall, then moved swiftly toward the glass door of what used to be the barn and glanced inside.
 
“She used to keep her donkey in there,” she said, pointing at the space.
 
“Oh yes? Well, that’s the living room now.”
 
“She never married, she worked very hard all her life. She was a very clever woman.”
 
Lara tried a friendlier expression. All this might be pretty sweet, after all. “So you knew this place from the time she lived here? How nice. Would you like to see what it looks like now?”
 
Lara opened the glass door, which gave into the ex-barn-now-living-room, but the woman was already snooping inside the kitchen on the opposite side of the courtyard.
 
“I knew this place like the back of my hand. We used to play in here all the time when we were children.”
 
She stepped into the kitchen and Lara followed her. There were still unopened boxes on the floor; the stainless steel surfaces of the brand-new appliances glinted in the shady room. The woman gave a yelp.
 
“See! I had heard from people you had done this, but I wanted to see for myself.”
 
“Had done what?” Lara asked.
 
The woman was glaring at the opposite wall.
 
“This thing you have done in here, is a mortal sin.”
 
By now, had she been in Rome, Lara would have normally lost her patience and asked her to leave, but it was her first contact with any of her neighbors in the village and she sensed she’d reached a delicate intersection that required some caution.
 
“A mortal sin!” the little woman repeated in a thundering voice.
 
“Please have a seat. Can I offer you a cup of coffee?”
 
“No.”
 
“Okay. Then please, what is it that I did?”
 
“The forno. You tore it down.”
 
Lara crossed her arms.
 
“Yes I did, the architect . . . my friend,” she said, but immediately regretted bringing an architect into the conversation. “It was as big as a room. It took up too much space, it took half the courtyard.”
 
But the woman was right; when, a year earlier, Lara had bought the house in the heart of the village, she’d taken Silvana, her architect friend, to see it. She was a towering woman in her forties with flaming hennaed hair who on principle never came off her high heels, especially when marching through building sites (“height gains you respect, it’s Pavlovian”). Silvana had paced inside the old building not uttering a sound, with an air of concern. Maybe it was just her way, or maybe she didn’t approve of the house. Lara had begun to worry. Silvana had taken one look at the opening of the gigantic wood oven in the kitchen and before Lara could say anything she’d climbed inside it with the speed of a crab, holding her flashlight.
 
“It’s gigantic. And totally useless,” her voice had boomed from the dark interior, like Jonah’s from inside the whale.
 
She’d reappeared, her clothes coated in blackish dust, then effortlessly slid out of the oven mouth. She had a big grin on her face.
 
“Good. We can gain some space. I feel a lot better now.”
 
So the forno went down, and what was once a dark chamber was now a third of her courtyard.
 
The little woman waved her index finger at Lara like a mad evangelist.
 
“You tore down the last oven of this village to gain a little space for your plants. That forno was a public monument. It was part of our history!”
 
The woman shook her head with disdain.
 
“Yes, I was told this room was the village bakery. But as I told you the wood oven took half the space of the courtyard. I mean, it went from here all the way to . . .” Lara made a sweeping arc with her hand across the expanse of the courtyard.
 
“This was not a bakery. It was a communal oven. An oven where people could bring their own loaves of bread. Bread and pies, so that my aunt could bake for them. She only charged ten, twenty liras a piece. We all came here as children with our tins, everyone did, every Saturday . . .”
 
“Did you? How nice. So, what did . . .” Lara loved stories like this, it was part of what had drawn her to the village in the first place. But the woman was talking right over her question.
 
“ . . . And in winter, when it was really cold, this was the warmest room in the whole village, so we sat in that corner, see? My aunt used to have a wooden bench right there.”
 
The woman gestured to the wall where now sat the dishwasher still sheathed in its cardboard box.
 
“My aunt would give us sweets while we waited. In the summer we’d wait outside in the garden, and we’d play with the donkey. This is how things were in this village up until only forty, fifty years ago.”
 
The little woman grabbed a chair and slumped on it, hands entwined on her lap. Her feet barely touched the ground. Lara was beginning to feel it had been a mistake to let this creature in. Obviously this was only the beginning of something far more serious than Lara had envisaged.
 
The little woman went on. “But of course, what do you care? You people come from the outside and assume everything here is up for sale and you think you have a...

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Verlag
PANTHEON
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307908364
ISBN 13 
9780307908360
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
PANTHEON
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/PGN/pantheon-graphic-library/

Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1
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