Eleutheria - Softcover

Hyde, Allegra

 
9780593315248: Eleutheria
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593315243 ISBN 13: 9780593315248
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

SHORTLISTED FOR THE VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE OHIOANA BOOK AWARD IN FICTION
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

“Allegra Hyde’s seductive first novel tackles the big stuff of climate change and the more intimate matter of heartbreak with grace. Indeed, Eleutheria bravely braids these together, the story of a lost soul moving through the world we’re rapidly losing.” —Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind

Willa Marks has spent her whole life choosing hope. She chooses hope over her parents’ paranoid conspiracy theories, over her dead-end job, over the rising ocean levels. And when she meets Sylvia Gill, renowned Harvard professor, she feels she’s found the justification of that hope. Sylvia is the woman-in-black: the only person smart and sharp enough to compel the world to action. But when Sylvia betrays her, Willa fears she has lost hope forever.

And then she finds a book in Sylvia's library: a guide to fighting climate change called Living the Solution. Inspired by its message and with nothing to lose, Willa flies to the island of Eleutheria in the Bahamas to join the author and his group of ecowarriors at Camp Hope. Upon arrival, things are not what she expected. The group’s leader, author Roy Adams, is missing, and the compound’s public launch is delayed. With time running out, Willa will stop at nothing to realize Camp Hope's mission—but at what cost?

A VINTAGE ORIGINAL

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Allegra Hyde’s debut story collection, Of This New World, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award through the Iowa Short Fiction Award Series. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, The Best Small Fictions, and The Best American Travel Writing. Originally from New Hampshire, she currently lives in Ohio and teaches at Oberlin College.
 

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1

My name, my full name, is Willa Marks. There’s nothing in the middle. My parents must have had their reasons for the omission, though I’ve always considered it a sign of honesty. A middle name can lurk in a person like a bomb: a secret identity poised to pop off. I’m simply me.

What I’m trying to say is that I’m going to tell you the truth. I don’t have time to tell you anything else. And it’s important for you to hear the truth because what has been said about Camp Hope, about me, is a shadow of what really happened.

Let me start with the easy parts.

I was twenty-­two when I boarded a plane and flew to Eleutheria.

I was drunk on ideas.

I was so drunk, in fact, that when the turboprop shuddered into a nosedive—­cabin lights flickering, pilot crackling over the intercom—­my limbs remained limp. While the other passengers hunched in their seats, prayers on their lips, I kept my eyes open, savoring the rush of arrival, the jarring smack of it reverberating through me.

The turboprop did not land elegantly, but it landed intact. Even so, had the plane crashed onto the island, I’d still have walked out of the wreckage, beatific. I’d been awake the length of a day, a night, and that had not yet become a problem. I was the kind of person who took exhaustion in stride, let it warp my surroundings into dreamscapes. And so far, everything had gone right.

Out the airplane window: palm trees, a heat-­seared tarmac, men in orange vests strolling from the steel maw of a rusted aircraft hangar. Around me, a dozen other passengers unbuckled their seat belts. Some smiled relievedly, others wiped away tears. A woman’s purse had spilled into the aisle and I helped her collect her things, though I curbed my impulse to ask if she was from Eleutheria. To get caught in conversation might break whatever spell had whisked me from Boston to the Bahamas, a spell meant to carry me on to Camp Hope. I wanted to arrive unimpeded, unburdened, slick as a fish released into the sea. If I could have, I would have traveled to the island naked. As it was, my backpack contained only a change of clothes, a passport, sixty-­five U.S. dollars, and my well-­thumbed copy of Living the Solution: The Official Camp Hope Guide to Transforming Ourselves and Saving the Planet.

I had the envelope as well—­the one from Sylvia—­but I tried not to think about it.

What I thought about was Camp Hope. Specifically, about arriving at Camp Hope and making my life mean something. Had you watched me exit the airplane, my preoccupation would have been obvious. You would have seen a young woman who tripped over her own boots—­a size too large—­as she entered the hangar. You might have noticed one of my overall cuffs was rolled up higher than the other, that my backpack zipper gaped partially open. Back in Boston, I would have been a person your eyes glazed over on the street: shiftless, among the masses of the newly unemployed. I had an oval face, brittle yellow hair that went dark at the roots, a stub of a nose. I was thin, but not jagged. Scrappy, though in an untested way: like a runaway who has only just left the house, or an actor playing a role. Familiar enough to forget.

In the echoing dimensions of the hangar, however, I stood out. I’d traveled to the island alone and there was no one there to meet me. I had little luggage. I was white and the only person queued in the International Arrivals line. A weary customs agent took my passport, studied it, shrugged. There were no biometric scanners here. Not in this makeshift terminal, arrivals separated from departures by a plastic partition. The original building, like so much else on the island, had been ravaged by hurricanes. Under different circumstances, I might have been made teary-­eyed by the scene of my fellow passengers embracing loved ones, opening luggage to reveal supplies from elsewhere—­bags of dried rice, baby clothes, phone chargers—­but I fixed my attention on the airport exit: a square of sunshine on the far side of the hangar.

I have what you could call a tendency toward fixation. This tendency has been described as childish by some. People have told me, in general, that I have a childlike demeanor. My short stature is partly to blame. Also, my smattering of freckles—­though these would multiply, day by day, colonizing my complexion the longer I remained on Eleutheria. I did not have any muscle tone, though that would change as well. I had little coordination. I have only ever been graceful in photos. Pinned under someone else’s gaze, I look best in stillness.

I was not still. Walking with rollicking, over-­long strides, I burst out of the hangar into dazzling sunshine. A parking lot shimmered, woozy with heat, its perimeter rimmed by a chain-­link fence. In the distance, a narrow highway disappeared into a low swath of scrubland.

My skin burned hot; I had Living the Solution churning inside me and with it the heat of my own ambition. I tended to flush in odd ways—­in my fingertips, mostly—­though if you’d been watching, this would have been invisible. You would have seen only a pale girl striking out across a parking lot. A lost girl, harmless—­or even in harm’s way—­easily manipulated. A rube. It was true, my official education extended only through high school, homeschooled at that. But I was not entirely inexperienced. At twenty-­two, I’d had my own unusual education. I considered myself intellectually advanced in one significant way: I was too wise for cynicism. I had outsmarted doubt.

No one at Camp Hope knew I was coming. No one would know who I was when I arrived. I maintained, nevertheless, a propulsive confidence. Reaching the edge of the parking lot, I started down the side of the highway, soaking in sunshine, electrifying my body, intending only to move closer to my destination—­a place in my head, rather than direct view—­so that, if you’d been watching, you might have seen my eyes go unfocused, my chin lift, my chest tugged forward by an invisible string.

Someone was watching. A pickup truck trailed me out of the parking lot and onto the highway. There were four men in the truck: two in the front and two in the back. The pair in the back wore sun-­faded T-shirts that billowed in the breeze, their arms stretched along the edges of the truck bed. The man in the passenger seat wore an orange vest, as if he’d just stepped off the airport tarmac. The driver was obscured.

I kept walking and the truck kept rolling, until the man in the orange vest called: You a surfer? Or—­

A fugitive? interrupted a man in the back.

There was laughter, but I didn’t care—­I didn’t even break stride. In my mind’s eye, my destination glittered: an eco­paradise, a pragmatic arcadia, an answer to the problem that had haunted me my whole life.

Are you lost? said the man in the orange vest.

Though I’d barely spoken for a day and a half, my answer burst forth, bell-­like and bright: I’m going to Camp Hope.

The truck stopped rolling. The men’s laughter ceased. I continued on, unperturbed, reciting lines from Living the Solution beneath my breath, swinging my arms as I walked the ragged edge of the highway.

Ten minutes later, the truck again rumbled alongside me. All the men had gotten out except the driver. He leaned across the passenger seat, his face visible for the first time. He was handsome in a plaintive way, his eyes half-­closed, his jawline shadowed by a beard, his dreadlocks pulled behind his head. He asked if I was really going to Camp...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593315243
ISBN 13 
9780593315248
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

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