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Original Bliss - Hardcover

Kennedy, A. L.

 
9780375402722: Original Bliss
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375402721 ISBN 13: 9780375402722
Verlag: Random House USA Inc, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

Two very different and troubled people--an emotionally paralyzed woman and an exhibitionist addicted to pornography--embark on an unlikely, life-transforming courtship that allows both of them to find the courage to escape their individual isolation

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

A. L. Kennedy, the author of two previous novels and two short story collections, has received six awards for her writing, including the Somerset Maugham Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and the Encore Award. She lives in Glasgow.

Aus dem Klappentext

Scotland's most widely praised writers, named by Granta as one of the Twenty Best Young British Novelists: a beautiful and terrifying story of passion and pornography<br><br>Helen Brindle thinks she has lost God--but it is simply love that she's missing. She certainly can't find it at home, with the violent, deadly Mr. Brindle: trapped in an abusive marriage, tormented by existential and personal doubt, she suffers from insomnia, emotional paralysis, and pathological inhibition. Until she meets Edward E. Gluck.<br><br>Edward Gluck is a public personality, a renowned genius and group mental healer, guru to people like Helen through his famous self-help process; privately, he is painfully obsessed with masturbation and self-punishment, unable to employ his own fatuous self-help techniques to overcome his personal disgust and psychological anemia.<br><br>Original Bliss tells the story of an excruciatingly awkward courtship between two soul- sick people--the one brutally shy, the other a

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Mrs. Brindle lay on her living-room floor, watching her ceiling billow and blink with the cold, cold colours and the shadows of British Broadcast light. A presumably educative conversation washed across her and she was much too tired to sleep or listen, but that was okay, that was really quite all right.

       "What about the etiquette of masturbation? Because everything runs to rules, you know, even the bad old sin of Onan. So what are the rules in this case? About whom may we masturbate?"

       "Someone we have only ever seen and never met?"

       "Quite common, almost a norm--we feel we are offending no one, we superimpose a personality on a picture, in as far as our dreadful needs must when that particular devil drives, and that's that."

       Harold Wilson's baby, friend to the lonely, the Open University.

       "How about a casual acquaintance? Someone with whom we have never been intimate and with whom we never will? Someone our attentions would only ever shock?"

       "Actually, that's much more rare. We imagine their, shall we say disgust, and find it inhibits us. We steer our thoughts another way."

       Mrs. Brindle rolled onto her stomach, noticing vaguely how stiffened and tender her muscles had grown. Women of her age were not intended to rest on floors. Beside her head, the moving picture of a man with too much hair grinned clear across the screen. Video recorders were catching his every detail in who could tell how many homes where students and other interested parties were now sensibly unconscious in their beds, their learning postponed to coincide with convenience. Mrs. Brindle didn't care about education, she cared about company. She was here and almost watching, almost listening, because she could not be asleep. Other people studied at their leisure and worked towards degrees, Mrs. Brindle avoided the presence of night.

"On the other hand, we are highly likely to make imaginary use," the voice was soft, jovially clandestine, deep in the way that speech heard under water might be, "of someone with whom we intend to be
intimate."

       She tried to concentrate.

       "The closer the two of us get, the more acceptable our fantasies become, until they grow up into facts and instead of the dreams that kept us company, we have memories--to say nothing of a real live partner with whom we may have decided to be in love."

       "And here is where we reach my point, because this is all one huge demonstration of how the mind affects reality and reality affects the mind. I indulge in a spot of libidinous mental cartooning and what happens? A very demonstrable physical result. Not to mention a monumental slew of moral and emotional dilemmas, all of which may very well feed back to those realities I first drew upon to stimulate my mind, and around and around and around we go and where we'll stop, we do not know."

       "That around and around is what I mean by Cybernetics. Don't believe a soul who tells you different--particularly if they're engineers. This is Cybernetics--literally, it means nothing more than steering. The way I steer me, the way you steer you. From the inside. Our interior lives have seismic effects on our exterior world. We have to wake up and think about that if we want to be really alive."

       Something about the man was becoming persistent. Mrs. Brindle felt herself approach the slope of a black-out, the final acceleration into nowhere she needed to worry about, a well of extinguished responsibilities. It seemed not unlikely that his voice might follow her in.

       She counted herself down the list of things still undone through her own deliberate fault: breakfast not prepared for, low milk not replaced, her surrender to the pointlessness inherent in ironing socks.

Dawn was up before her, but still not entirely established, just a touch delicate. The television was dark and dumb in the corner. She must have remembered to turn it off. Her left hip throbbed alive, commemorating another night spent bearing her weight against a less than forgiving carpet. Not for the first time, she pushed herself up to her knees with thoughts of how much more convenient she might find a padded cell. The idea didn't crack a smile, not this morning.

       Furious, humid rain was banging at the windows. Its noise must have roused her. She relished downpours, their atmosphere of release. Stepping gently through to the kitchen, she knew this particular pleasure came mainly from the air pressure falls that could accompany lavish rain. The harmless impacts of water on glass were among the small, domesticated sounds that Mrs. Brindle loved. Like the first whispers from a kettle when it clears its throat before a boil, they made her feel at home and peaceful in ways that many other things did not.

       She steeped real coffee in the miniature cafetière that held exactly enough for one and tried not to remember the space in her morning routine. Mrs. Brindle tried not to think, "This is when you would have prayed. This is when you would have started your day by knowing the shape of your life."

       While she sat and waited for the time when she could set the bacon to the grill, Mrs. Brindle remembered the programme she'd slept with last night. It had been about steering. A long-boned man who spoke about steering and wanking. That didn't seem exactly likely, now she thought, but the man who'd spoken seemed too coherent and unfamiliar and just too tall to be someone her imagination had simply conjured up and slipped inside her sleep. She hadn't exactly dreamed about him, but something of him had been constantly there, like the ticking of a clock, leaked in from another room.

    Having completed her coffee, she worked her way through yesterday's paper and considered she might even try to find out his name.


"Edward E. Gluck. Edward E. Gluck. Edward E. Gluck. You hear that? I have a wonderfully rhythmical name. My mother gave it me. She played semi-professional oboe when she was young and I think this meant that she always approached things as if they were some kind of score: arguments, gas bills, christenings; anything. I could be wrong on this, but I like to believe it anyway, you know?"

       Radio Two, Mrs. Brindle's favourite; it didn't pretend to be better than it was. She was mixing a batter for Yorkshire pudding, properly in advance so that it would settle and mature and make something which would taste well and be sympathetic with gravy. She was nowhere near the time for gravy yet.

       As Edward E. Gluck repeated and repeated his own name, she recognised his voice. On the television, he had sounded just the same--he made very ordinary words seem dark and close. Now, beneath his enthusiasm, she could hear a harder type of consistent energy, unidentifiable, but engaging. She put the batter bowl into the fridge and sat to concentrate on Gluck.

       "She was a lady, my mother. A remarkable woman. On the night I'm referring to, I was maybe four years old and unable to sleep because freight trains ran close by the back of our...

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Verlag
Random House USA Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
1999
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375402721
ISBN 13 
9780375402722
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
213
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Verantwortliche Person
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