Note to Self - Softcover

Simone, Alina

 
9780374534677: Note to Self
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0374534675 ISBN 13: 9780374534677
Verlag: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3PL, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

A witty, keenly observant look at our Internet-obsessed culture


Anna Krestler is adrift. The Internet has draped itself, kudzu-like, over her brain, which makes it even more difficult to confront the question of what to do when she is dismissed from her job as a cubicle serf at a midtown law firm. Despite the exhortations of Leslie, her friend and volunteer life coach, Anna seeks refuge in the back alleys of craigslist, where she connects with Taj, an adherent of a nebulous movement known as Nowism that occupies the most self-absorbed fringes of the art world.
Art, Anna decides, is what will provide the meaningful life she's been searching for and knows she deserves. She joins Taj's "crew" and is drawn into his grand experimental film project. But making art is hard and microwaving pouch foods is easy. Soon enough Anna finds herself distracted by myriad other quests: remembering to ask Leslie "How are you?," reducing her intake of caloric drinks, and parrying her mother's insistence that she attend hairdressing school. But when Anna's twenty-seven-year-old roommate-a perpetual intern named Brie-announces her pregnancy, it forces Anna to confront reality, setting off a chain of events that leads to a horrifying climax of betrayal.
Alina Simone's Note to Self is a shrewdly perceptive, hilarious, moving tale about friendship, art, and the search for a meaningful life in an era of rampant narcissism.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alina Simone

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Note to Self

A Novel

By Alina Simone

Faber & Faber

Copyright © 2014 Alina Simone
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-53467-7
Time theft. This was Anna’s first thought when she found out she was being let go. Everyone was doing it—Brandon was practically webcasting gay porn from his cube—but for some reason management had decided to unleash the mailbox scrubbers and digital hounds on her. Worse, she couldn’t deny it. The Internet had draped itself, kudzu-like, over her brain. There were disturbing signs. Or rather, signs that Leslie later pointed out were disturbing. Like the spam collection. “Spam’s not a collectible,” Leslie had said when Anna laid her confession on the table. “That’s not a thing, Anna.” And Anna had to explain because Leslie didn’t know what it was like out there—her floors were cleaned by tiny robots with cute names. Market brinksmanship had driven spammers to new poetic heights. Someone should be saving it, studying it, sorting it according to some matrix of desperation, even.

“‘Tiny bubbles of discontent surround me because I’m as lonely as a shark in the deep blue ocean.’” Anna quoted from a Ukrainian escort’s solicitation she’d rescued from the filters. “Don’t you think that’s kind of beautiful?”
 
“Don’t you have better things to do than read spam?” Leslie countered.
That assumption, Anna had to admit, was debatable.
 
Of course, when Anna was called into Mr. Brohaurt’s office, she felt ill at the thought he’d discovered her little Kunstkammer of spam. Only four years older, Chad Brohaurt made forty times her annual salary and could cleave the Earth with his jawline. There was some incredibly filthy stuff in there, things she’d felt obligated to include for the sake of completeness. Sitting on his couch of real leather, she had the urge to confess, explain that she always started off clicking on something perfectly reasonable. Then one thing led to another and before she knew it, whoops! down the rabbit hole. Only it wasn’t a “rabbit hole” was it? “Rabbit hole” implied someplace whimsical and fun, an enchanting place where you could enjoy weapons-grade cocktails with a well-dressed rodent. The Internet was more like an asshole. An asshole whispering of African fruits with miraculous weight-loss properties and discounted mani-pedis in some forlorn section of Queens.

It turned out her dismissal from Pinter, Chinski and Harms had nothing to do with time theft, though. Mr. Brohaurt had sat down by the window, put a sad hand on the knee of his expensive pants. “This has nothing to do with you, Anna,” he’d said. “Everyone’s getting a haircut.” And Anna had stupidly looked out at Madison Avenue, curious about the new haircut. Of course, he’d meant budget cuts and the other white-shoe law firms. The new austerity. The end of everything.

But that was five weeks ago, and now here was Leslie’s voice calling her back to their “sesh” like the gentle chime of a laptop rebooting.

“Thirty-seven is not the end,” she was saying. “It’s really just the middle.”

Anna had taken Leslie up on her offer reluctantly. In general, she felt pretty ambivalent about time spent offline. With other people she always ended up pretending to be someone else, someone more like them. Whereas alone with the Internet, she was totally herself. There were no vagaries. She clicked on exactly what she felt like clicking on and each click defined her. Even the spam. Especially the spam. Besides, what kind of person needed a life coach? Of course, Leslie wasn’t a real Life Coach, but she was a consultant at McKinsey, which trafficked in all the same theories, or so she had assured her. But to her surprise, Anna found herself looking forward to the ritual. They met on Sundays at Café Gowanus, which she liked even though it was built on a Superfund site. The café was as clean and bright as the Apple store it might well have been, full of ambitious people with hyphenated jobs and nice clothes, hunched over their MacBooks. It was as though the sugar packets had all been secretly filled with Adderall; just being in the room gave her a charge. Each week, Leslie armed Anna with a variety of motivational sayings—Reposition Your Disposition, Negativity Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy—cranks to power her way toward a new life. It hadn’t exactly worked out that way. For now, her weeks were still powered by Triscuits and the Web, but she enjoyed the security of Leslie’s firm hand on the rudder.

“Did you think about what we talked about last time?” Leslie said.

“Yes,” Anna said, remembering only that last time they had talked about what to talk about this time.
 
“I’m thinking of taking a class.”

She waited, but Leslie’s expression did not change. The pen stayed where it was, next to the half-eaten scone and the egg timer.

“You already have a master’s,” Leslie said.

“This is different.”

“Taking a class isn’t strategic, Anna. That’s operational.”
 
“It depends—” Anna began, because she already had a theory about this, but Leslie cut her off again.
“Remember: a goal without a plan is just a wish.”
 
“Yes, but—”
“And I’m sure you’ve already asked yourself this, so let’s pretend I’m not asking, but is this really what you need to be spending your severance on?” Leslie set her latte down inside Anna’s Core
Competencies as if it were nothing more than a cocktail napkin. Which, of course, it was. They were sitting by an open window, the air off the canal as fresh as a newborn fart, with Anna’s Life Map on the table between them. “Your Core Competencies still look thin,” Leslie said, prodding the moist napkin.
 
“Let’s go back to your experience at grad school, mine it for some strengths.”
 
“That was years ago,” Anna began. If anything, shouldn’t they be talking about Pinter, Chinski and Harms, where the wounds were still fresh, Google-searchable? “Why rehash that stuff now?”
“Because you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been,” Leslie said, possibly for the second time. “Start with the dissertation.”
 
Anna’s stomach plunged. Dissertation had the same effect on her as the word sarcoma.

How she had missed graduate student life at first! Her amorphous days tethered to an illusory sense of purpose. Setting off for a bright café like this one each morning to not write her thesis. How she missed lunches with Sveta and Evgeni (the Slavic Studies department was stuffed with Slavs perfecting their Slavism). Of course, a month after the department kicked her out the pendulum had swung hard the other way. Academia, she realized, was a sham. An intellectual sports club...

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Verlag
Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3PL
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0374534675
ISBN 13 
9780374534677
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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