A Box of Matches: A Novel - Hardcover

Baker, Nicholson

 
9780375502873: A Box of Matches: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375502874 ISBN 13: 9780375502873
Verlag: Random House Inc, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

During a month in the life of a forty-five-year-old editor of medical textbooks, Emmett--married with children, a cat, and a duck--ruminates about the meaning of life during his pre-dawn sojourns alone. By the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. 50,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 and attended the Eastman School of Music and Haverford College. He has published five previous novels—<i>The Mezzanine</i> (1988), <i>Room Temperature</i> (1990), <i>Vox</i> (1992), <i>The Fermata</i> (1994), and <i>The Everlasting Story of Nory</i> (1998)—and three works of nonfiction, <i>U and I </i>(1991), <i>The Size of Thoughts</i> (1996), and <i>Double Fold </i>(2001), which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1999 he founded the American Newspaper Repository, a collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century newspapers. He lives in Maine with his wife and two children.

Aus dem Klappentext

Emmett has a wife and two children, a cat, and a duck, and he wants to know what life is about. Every day he gets up before dawn, makes a cup of coffee in the dark, lights a fire with one wooden match, and thinks.<br><br>What Emmett thinks about is the subject of this wise and closely observed novel, which covers vast distances while moving no farther than Emmett’s hearth and home. Nicholson Baker’s extraordinary ability to describe and celebrate life in all its rich ordinariness has never been so beautifully achieved.<br><br>Baker won the National Book Critics Circle Award for <b>Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper</b>. He now returns to fiction with this lovely book, reminiscent of the early novels—<b>Room Temperature</b> and <b>The Mezzanine</b>—that established his reputation.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

Good morning, it’s January and it’s 4:17 a.m., and I’m going to sit here
in the dark. I’m in the living room in my blue bathrobe, with an
armchair pulled up to the fireplace. There isn’t much in the way of open
flame at the moment because the underlayer of balled-up newspaper and
paper-towel tubes has burned down and the wood hasn’t fully caught yet.
So what I’m looking at is an orangey ember-cavern that resembles a
monster’s sloppy mouth, filled with half-chewed, glowing bits of
fire-meat. When it’s very dark like this you lose your sense of scale.
Sometimes I think I’m steering a space-plane into a gigantic fissure in
a dark and remote planet. The planet’s crust is beginning to break up,
allowing an underground sea of lava to ooze out. Continents are tipping
and foundering like melting icebergs, and I must fly in on my highly
maneuverable rocket and save the colonists who are trapped there.

Last night my sleep was threatened by a toe-hole in my sock. I had known
of the hole when I put the sock on in the morning–it was a white tube
sock–but a hole seldom bothers me during the daytime. I can and do wear
socks all day that have a monstrous rear-tear through which the entire
heel projects like a dinner roll. But at night the edges of the hole
come alive. I was reading my book of Robert Service poems last night
around nine-thirty, when the hole’s edge began tickling and pestering
the skin of the two toes that projected through. I tried to retract the
toes and use them to catch some of the edge of the sock’s fabric,
pulling it over the opening like a too-small blanket that has slid off
the bed, but that didn’t work–it seldom does. I knew that later on,
after midnight, I would wake up and feel the coolness of the sheet on
those two exposed toes, which would trouble me, even though that same
coolness wouldn’t trouble me if the entire foot was exposed. I would
become wakeful as a result of the toe-hole, and I didn’t want that,
because I was starting a new regime of getting up at four in the
morning.

Fortunately last night I had an alternative. I’d brought a clean white
tube sock to bed with me to use as a mask over my eyes, in case Claire
was going to read late. I have to have darkness to go to sleep. I have
one of my grandfather’s eye masks, made of thick black silk probably in
the thirties, but it smells like my grandfather, or at least it smells
like the inside of his bedside table. The good thing about draping a
sock over your eyes is that it is temporary. The sock slips off your
head when you move, but by then you’ve gone to sleep and it has served
its purpose.

So when the hole in the sock on my foot became intolerable, I reached
down and pulled it off in a clean, strong motion and flipped it across
the room in the direction of the trash can–although I have to say there
is something almost painfully incongruous in the sight of an article of
underclothing that one has worn and warmed with one’s own body for many
days and years, lying bunched in the trash. And then onto my naked foot
I pulled the fresh sock that I’d had on my face. It felt so good: oh,
man, it felt good, really good. I moved my newly sheathed foot back into
the far region of the sheets and pulled the heavy blankets around me and
I took my hand and curved it and draped it over my eyes where the sock
had been, the way a cat does with its paw. Eventually Claire got into
bed. I heard her bedside light click on and I heard the pages of her
book shuffle, and then she twisted around so we could kiss good-night.
“You’ve got your hand over your eyes,” she said. I murmured. Then she
turned and shifted her warmly pajamaed bottom towards me and I steered
through the night with my hand on her hip, and the next thing I knew it
was four a.m. and time to get up and make a fire.

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Verlag
Random House Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375502874
ISBN 13 
9780375502873
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
2221
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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