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A Play for the End of the World: A novel - Softcover

Chakrabarti, Jai

 
9780593081808: A Play for the End of the World: A novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593081803 ISBN 13: 9780593081808
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A dazzling novel—set in early 1970's New York and rural India—the story of a turbulent, unlikely romance, a harrowing account of the lasting horrors of World War II, and a searing examination of one man's search for forgiveness and acceptance.

“Looks deeply at the echoes and overlaps among art, resistance, love, and history ... an impressive debut.” —Meg Wolitzer, best-selling author of The Female Persuasion

New York City, 1972. Jaryk Smith, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Lucy Gardner, a southerner, newly arrived in the city, are in the first bloom of love when they receive word that Jaryk's oldest friend has died under mysterious circumstances in a rural village in eastern India.
 
Travelling there alone to collect his friend's ashes, Jaryk soon finds himself enmeshed in the chaos of local politics and efforts to stage a play in protest against the government—the same play that he performed as a child in Warsaw as an act of resistance against the Nazis. Torn between the survivor's guilt he has carried for decades and his feelings for Lucy (who, unbeknownst to him, is pregnant with his child), Jaryk must decide how to honor both the past and the present, and how to accept a happiness he is not sure he deserves.
 
An unforgettable love story, a provocative exploration of the role of art in times of political upheaval, and a deeply moving reminder of the power of the past to shape the present, A Play for the End of the World is a remarkable debut from an exciting new voice in fiction.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JAI CHAKRABARTI's short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and awarded a Pushcart Prize. Chakrabarti was an Emerging Writer Fellow with A Public Space and received his MFA from Brooklyn College. He was born in Kolkata, India, and now splits his time between the Hudson Valley and Brooklyn, New York.
jaichakrabarti.com

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The Wanderer
Calcutta--June 1972
Morning in Calcutta. The Foreigners queue was filled with longhaired imitators of Ram Dass, a flock of missionaries, and young businessmen pursuing the promise of an urban India. The other line was crammed with locals carrying suitcases stuffed with a country in gifts. All were eager to move past the chain-smoking customs officer and be on their way.
Except Jaryk wasn’t in a hurry. A heaviness in his knees held him at the Wait Till Call circle until a mustachioed guard with a shoulder-slung rifle prodded him forward. Jaryk paused at the immigration booth with his green suitcase, a sturdy, ugly piece of luggage that was seeing its first taste of the East. It was Misha’s suitcase, so he carried it with no small amount of pride.
“Purpose of visit?” the immigration officer asked him.
He was here to retrieve and carry Misha’s remains back to Brooklyn, but no one would understand that. “Tourism,” he said. “Sights of the country.”
He was stamped and cleared and followed the herd out of the frosted doors of the airport. Outside, the air was a dense concentration of humidity and heat. As soon as his shoes touched the asphalt, he felt he’d come overdressed. Under the humid cover, the crowd swelled and dispersed, swelled to disperse. At first, it seemed like a single leviathan, colorful and noisy, but then he spotted a pattern. Lines of men and women waited to greet their loved ones while other lines queued to enter the airport. The family members shuffled nervously, checking each face, until the match was found; then, not a moment wasted: the whole group would absorb the arrived, and all together they’d head for the road.
He watched his fellow passengers make their way to the taxi stand. Their journey was first complicated by the ambush of men hawking marble statues and shawls, further complicated by the group of boys and girls who smiled, crooned, and cried their way to American dollars. Once the tourists made it through, they were swallowed by a row of taxi drivers, each crying out his own warring price.
When they’d last been together in New York, Misha had told him the first day would be difficult, but this was more. This was the madness brought on by too many people. He took off his shoes and socks and waited in the shade until all the passengers had left. There was no hurry; he was good at waiting.
It took an hour, but the arrivals crowd eventually thinned out. He was left with the hawkers, who sat on the opposite curb and passed a cigarette around. The panhandling children drew a square of hopscotch in the middle of the road, and the winners of each round ate candies they’d begged off a matronly passenger on her way to the taxi stand.
The hawkers noticed him and yelled something in his direction--a curse, most likely, guttural and foul--and laughed and enjoyed their cigarette and cards. It was still too hot for shoes, so he stayed barefoot, though as soon as he left the shade his soles felt like they were on fire. This too shall pass. The mantra came to him easy and free, and he held on to it as a group of children surrounded him. One prodded him in the belly and giggled. He tried to smile back, but he didn’t have it in him. Instead, he handed out the ballpoint pens he’d brought as alms and, when they wouldn’t leave, all of the American coins in his pocket.
When he saw a taxi pull up to the curb, he skipped toward it. This driver was better dressed than any of the other men he’d seen, and he wore an air of superiority, as if he didn’t need the business at all. “You are going to burn your feet,” the driver said in a crisp British English. He was middle-aged, with a protruding belly, thick glasses cut square, a dark corduroy jacket patched at the elbows, and white, nylon slacks. Why he wasn’t sweating through his clothes was a mystery. The driver cocked his head and asked, “Where can I take you?”
Jaryk took a strip of paper from his coat. It had become sweat stained to the point where he could barely make out the letters. “Sudder Street,” he said.
As they turned off the airport road and onto the bypass, a patch of cloud opened up. At first, it was only a bit of sweet rain. Through the half-open window, he let his fingers get wet in it, but at the next major intersection, with no warning, the adjacent clouds joined in to make a full monsoon. The stray dogs on the street hid under canopies; the traffic slowed in a single heartbeat; a line of coconut trees swayed in the same direction; five women on the sidewalk, all in red saris, took off their shoes and sprinted. This was the India of the flesh. His sweat proved it, the stink released by the rain proved it, that smell of rot and burning bamboo.
“Are you staying with family here?” The driver squinted and searched for the house number on Sudder Street.
“No, it’s just a guesthouse.”
They found a boarded-up building with a sign in English, New Guest Stay, hanging off the second-floor balcony like a loose tooth. “This was in the guidebook and I called,” Jaryk said. “Are you sure this is the right street?” The rain had persevered until the streets were ankle-deep with water. With a suitcase and a sore back, he didn’t like his odds. Jaryk flipped through his guidebook and pointed. “Okay, what about this place? The Park Hotel?”
“You can pay for Park Hotel?”
From the way the driver was looking at his clothes, Jaryk suspected the place would dig a hole in his budget, but he didn’t like the accusation of limited means.
“You know, sir,” the driver continued, “there is one place, more authentic, with cheaper and better living. Not so far.” The driver took off his glasses and smiled. Jaryk focused on the outline of the man’s face: it was a perfect oval, a shape that made him want to trust.
“Authentic,” he said, against his better judgment. “I like that.”
He had agreed, but after a while it seemed they were heading back toward the airport, toward the open stretches of land that had made the city seem not like a city, and several times Jaryk almost asked him where they were going, only to let jet lag hold his tongue.
They swerved off onto a narrow dirt road. The driver said, “We are almost arrived.”
Down the road a zigzag of mud huts. Bare-chested men under the shade of banana leaves. By the tube well, a row of women waiting to draw water, saris soaked, and by the trash dump, a hangout the driver identified as the suburb’s only phone station.
Children played in the mud, footballs bounced knee to knee. He recognized a weariness in these boys and girls, a lethargy in how they shuffled from the road to make room for the car. They looked like they were used to being hungry, and when hunger was present trouble was never far behind. Still, he was a head taller than any grown man he’d seen. If things got murky, he could hold his own.
The driver began whistling a tune, and as he moved from melody to melody, the rain eased up. Now it was the quiet sun above them again, boiling the roof of the cab. Jaryk thought about what he had left behind, which was Lucy. Lucy, and not much else. By now, she would have found his apartment empty, along with his letter. She would’ve called Rabbi Samuel and the rabbi would tell her what little he knew, or maybe she wouldn’t call anyone at all--that was the darker possibility: she’d come to loathe him without knowing the whole story.
The driver slowed to a stop. They had reached the end of the road.
“We are arrived,” said the driver. “P. K. Pal Guest House.”
The house before them had outgrown itself:...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593081803
ISBN 13 
9780593081808
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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20090
Italien

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