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Longing (Ballantine Reader's Circle) - Softcover

Landis, J. D.

 
9780345447210: Longing (Ballantine Reader's Circle)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0345447212 ISBN 13: 9780345447210
Verlag: Ballantine Books, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck. These brilliant and complex people enrich this sweeping story of a love that could not be denied. Set amid an enthralling rich era with creative genius, Longing explores the nature and danger of passion with precision, sympathy, and wisdom. J. D. Landis has encompassed madness, genius, and passion that propelled characters, and he re-creates their lives with surpassing depth, wit, and intelligence. . . .

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

J. D. Landis lives in New Hampshire. His previous novel, Lying in Bed, received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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The Secret Listeners

Zwickau

June 8, 1810

Between end and beginning there will be chaos.

Metternich

On the day Robert Schumann was born in this formerly peaceful, formerly populous Saxon town on the left bank of the River Mulde, the loudest cries were not those of his mother, Christiane, being delivered of her sixth child. Her screams were eclipsed by those of her remaining neighbors, some of whom lined the streets and some of whom stood in their windows and all of whom screamed with even more passion and certainly less pain than Christiane Schumann. For who should be riding through town on his way across sweet Saxony, which hung like a plumped penis from the groin of Prussia, but the Emperor Napoleon (who could be heard gaily singing the aria “Gia il sol” from Paisiello’s Nina) and his brand-new, politically correct, lobster-and-sour-cream-ravening eighteen-year-old bride, Marie Louise of Austria, his second choice as a broodmare after he had been embarrassingly rejected by ripe Russian Anna, the fifteen-year-old sister of Czar Alexander. Napoleon had occupied Marie Louise’s country, as he was soon to remove his Léger-tailored suit to occupy Marie Louise herself (with—finally!—an heir, the future King of Rome), and had installed the cunning, ruthless, altogether magnificent Metternich as Chief Minister and Marriage Broker at the same time he disinstalled his own creamily Creole Empress Josephine, though he would never, nor would he want to, banish from his memory the rammish, faithless smell of her.

As is the case whenever famous people pass through a town, they seem to come and go in an instant, even when their procession has been slow and stately. So it was with Napoleon and Marie Louise. Scarcely had their green carriage entered town from the west behind six Limousin horses than it seemed to disappear into the east, so that many people came to doubt by the end of the day and certainly by the end of the war that the imperial couple had been in their town at all.

But what no one doubted ever was the passage of Napoleon’s army. Even those who hadn’t seen it remembered it. Through Zwickau that day, and for several days thereafter, marched nearly two hundred thousand men—and a mere several hundred women, all virtuous laundresses and seamstresses, absent Pauline Fourès, the no-longer-exigent mistress Napoleon had taken in revenge either for Josephine’s affair with Hippolyte Charles or for her having nearly ruined him by buying five hundred and twenty-four pairs of shoes in the previous year alone. With their ten-mile column of food supplies and their thirty-one million bottles of wine and cognac and their thousand big guns and four thousand ammunition wagons and several million lances, sabers, and smooth-bore muskets, and one hundred and fifty thousand horses and nearly as many cows and their massive bridging equipment and forges, they were on their way toward Silesia and Bohemia, to conquer and thereby bring freedom and the rights of man and Chambertin to eastern Europe. The apple cores and horse manure they left behind seemed to have been left behind for good—their clean and crapulous odors were said to mingle in the air for the next century at least, only to dissipate in 1914.

Robert’s father, August, was one of the few townspeople who did not stand at his window. This is not to say he stood by his wife either. Her labor was a long one, and while August would now and then look in upon her, hold her hand and with the back of his other attempt to wipe the sweat from her brow on this hot day in early June, he spent most of it in his study, smoking his pipe and working. He had worked, as he recalled, during the births of all his children, though when Laura had been stillborn just the year before he had stopped working instantly and had not gone back to work that day, though he felt quite guilty for wanting to go back to work.

His work was book publishing. At the time, however, he was better known as a bookseller and so allowed that designation to be entered on Robert Alexander Schumann’s baptism certificate in Zwickau’s Church of Mary, into which even heathens ventured to see the retable done by Michael Wohlgemuth, whose reputation was based not so much on this work as on his having been the teacher of Albrecht Dürer.

As anyone who has ever been a book publisher, or lived with one, knows, there is no end to the work. For every manuscript you publish, you read, to put it modestly, a hundred; the ninety-nine unhappy authors demand an explanation for your rejection, and so you must dream up something preposterous to tell them so they will not hang themselves on the truth; then you must take that one-in-a-hundred manuscript and read it again so when its author asks you your favorite part you can name ten of them, though it’s never enough; then you must correct the author’s spelling if nothing else and set the book in type and read the proofs and correct the proofs and read the corrected proofs and finally print it and try to figure out a way to sell it; and no matter how you have figured out a way to sell it you discover either that you have printed too many copies or too few, so that either you or your author is guaranteed to have reason to despair.

But August Schumann had invented a way out of this quagmire of expense, complaint, and time-consumingness. At the time of the birth of his fourth son and last child, he was just beginning his new venture: the publication of pocket editions of European classics, something no one had ever done before in any country in any language! Not only would he publish German writers, like Goethe and Lessing* and Schiller, and Continental writers like Cervantes and Alfieri and Calderón, but he would also publish his beloved English writers, in particular Sir Walter Scott and George Gordon Lord Byron, and he would translate them himself, for he was as proficient in English as he was, like any worthy burgher, in Latin, Greek, and French.

Indeed, at the time he believed his son came yelping no differently from most babies into the world, he was sitting in his study humming some Scottish tunes by François Boïeldieu as he put the finishing touches on his translation of Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel, which he trusted would right the wrong done by Scott himself when he so mangled his English translation of Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen. Hanging in those few spaces where the thousands of books opened their teeth to the walls were several of Alexander Tibrich’s bucolic Saxon landscapes and a small but uncharacteristically violent painting (some years later to be of conventional prurient interest to the young Robert Schumann) by Januarius Zick of the murder of the men of Lemnos by the wives with whom they had refused to mate because, the men said, the women smelled bad.

“Herr Schumann, Herr Schumann, come!” cried the doctor’s assistant.

He leapt from his seat and spilled tobacco embers on his pants, which he brushed off and crushed into the Turkish rug—the same country of origin as his splendid weed—with his shoes. “What is it?” he called.

“It’s Napoleon!” cried the doctor’s assistant.

“I meant, is it a boy or a girl?”

“Napoleon is male,” he was informed.

By the time Robert was actually born, The Lay of the Last Minstrel was completed and August Schumann had succeeded in burning a hole in the crotch of his gabardines.

There had once been ten thousand people living in Zwickau. But by the end of the Thirty Years’ War, which virtually coincided with the end of the thousand-year Holy Roman Empire,* there were half that number. A century later—the...

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Verlag
Ballantine Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345447212
ISBN 13 
9780345447210
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
480
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar