The Sweet Remnants of Summer (Isabel Dalhousie, 14) - Hardcover

Buch 14 von 14: Isabel Dalhousie

McCall Smith, Alexander

 
9780593316948: The Sweet Remnants of Summer (Isabel Dalhousie, 14)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593316940 ISBN 13: 9780593316948
Verlag: Pantheon Books, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

The latest Isabel Dalhousie novel finds our favorite moral philosopher is caught up in a delicate dispute between members of a prominent family as her husband, Jamie, is dragged into his own internecine rivalry.

When Isabel is invited to serve on the advisory committee of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, her husband, Jamie, expresses concern about the demands on her time. Never one to duck an obligation, however, Isabel says she’d be happy to join. There she meets a woman named Laura, whose husband—a prominent wine merchant from an illustrious family—and son are at odds. Laura asks whether Isabel might arbitrate between them. Isabel is reluctant to intervene in a familial drama but, always one for practical and courteous solutions to theoretical problems, she feels obligated to help. Will the demands on her moral attention never cease?

Meanwhile, having criticized Isabel for getting involved in the affairs of others, Jamie does precisely that himself. He’s helping to select a new cellist for his ensemble but suspects that the conductor’s attention may be focused on something other than his favored candidate’s cello skills. Jamie feels it’s important that the most qualified applicant gets the job—but how to determine whether the conductor has the right qualifications in mind?

With so many complicated and fraught issues demanding their attention, Isabel and Jamie will have to tap deep into their reserves of tact and goodwill as they navigate the tricky and turbulent waters of these emotional matters.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH is the author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels and of a number of other series and stand-alone books. His works have been translated into more than forty languages and have been best sellers throughout the world. He lives in Scotland.

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chapter one

"Is it possible, do you think, to be too good?”

Isabel Dalhousie asked her husband, Jamie, this question while he was standing in the shower, washing his hair. It was typical of the unexpected questions that Isabel sometimes posed, without warning, and on any subject that happened to come to mind. “Was Wittgenstein ­really as brilliant as people thought him to be?” she had asked a few days earlier. “Or were people simply wrong-­footed by his insistence that all the questions that had pre­occupied them were, in fact, meaningless?” This question, addressed to nobody in particular, being more of an utterance, a soliloquy perhaps, than an actual question, was intercepted by her housekeeper, Grace, who had thought for no more than a few moments before replying, “Who knows? But don’t forget to buy butter, please—­we’ve almost run out.”

When this question about good was asked, Jamie was using a new shampoo Isabel had purchased on impulse, swayed by the sheer effrontery of its packaging. Hair care for the thinking man, the label announced, before claiming, The shampoo Einstein would have used. That made her laugh out loud, causing the assistant behind the counter, and a woman browsing the vitamin shelves, to look up with surprise. Isabel had become aware of their glances, and had felt obliged to explain. Those who erupt in sudden, private laughter often feel they must say why.

“It’s just that one is not always struck by what one reads on shampoo bottles,” she said, flourishing the bottle. And then added, “In fact, shampoo bottles make rather dull reading . . . usually.”

The woman behind her had a sense of humour. “This one,” she said, “is obviously a rather better read.”

Isabel laughed again, although this brief exchange was lost on the young assistant, who was busying herself with keying the details of a refund into the card reader. That was the problem with being nineteen, thought Isabel: Nineteen-­year-­olds take themselves—­and the world—­far too seriously, and have yet to discover how unintentionally funny both can be.

She had shown the bottle to the woman behind her and they had both shaken their heads over the hyperbolic language of the label. The manufacturers’ pitch was clear enough: This was a shampoo aimed at men rather than women, and was intended to imply that if you were intelligent—­as most people like to think they are—­then this was the shampoo for you. There might also have been an additional, subliminal promise: that the use of this particular shampoo was of some benefit to the brain; a message that could not be spelled out, of course, given truth in advertising considerations, but it could be implied. And so, in the same way as eating fish is said to improve brain function, using the right shampoo might have the effect of improving mental acuity. Perhaps this entirely meretricious marketing strategy actually had women in mind—­on the assumption that even a shampoo aimed at men would in most cases be bought by women, for their men. And there must be many women, perhaps the majority, who secretly—­or not so secretly in some cases—­wished that the man in their lives might be just a little bit brighter. “Not that I wish I’d married Einstein,” such a woman might say, “but sometimes . . .” And there would then follow a brief, wistful sigh; not enough to express real dissatisfaction, but sufficiently pointed to remind us that inequality of intelligence can be one of the rocks just below the surface of an otherwise untroubled relationship.

She had bought the shampoo and had meant to point out to Jamie its peculiar claims. He, though, had used it without comment, probably without reading the label. He was unfussy about these things: Soap was soap, toothpaste was toothpaste, and sham­poo, for all its braggadocio, was simply something you put on your hair, left there for a moment or two, and then rinsed off.

Now he was doing just that, standing under the shower in the bathroom just off the main bedroom in their Edinburgh house, while a speaker he had placed on the bathroom ­cabinet played the spring movement from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. She watched him fondly. He had few faults, but one of them, perhaps, was a propensity to spend far too long in the shower. This had prompted, on one occasion, a warning from Isabel that he could wash away all the natural oils that stand between the skin and its enemies—­harsh sunlight, unfriendly microbes, and the gradual wear and tear of the elements.

“Are you suggesting I might dissolve?” replied Jamie.

“You know what I mean,” Isabel retorted.

“It would be rather a pleasant way of leaving this world,” Jamie said. “To dissolve. It has a slightly Buddhist ring to it. You’d dissolve into the air about you. Your molecules would float off like . . . like Chinese lanterns. That, I think, is how Buddhists think about the way we end our lives. We dissolve.”

Isabel pictured one of those small paper lanterns, its little fire heating the trapped air, rising gracefully against a night sky. That would be the soul—­feather light at last, freed of its worldly burdens.

“Dissolve?” she mused. “Yes, possibly. But people think, rather, of ascending—­if they’re lucky . . .”

“Or descending, if they’re not quite so lucky.”

“Precisely.” She reminded herself, though, that the Greeks believed that everybody descended into the underworld, even if bound for the Elysian Fields. And then they must pay the ferryman: Would plastic be acceptable to Charon?

But now it was not issues of eschatology that concerned her, but a question of morality. She was, after all, a philosopher, the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, and Jamie was used to her asking questions of this sort at odd and unexpected times.

Now he repeated her question. “Is it possible to be too good?”

“Yes,” said Isabel.

“Why do you ask?” Jamie enquired from beneath the shower rose.

“I’ve been wondering why we dislike people who are just too good.”

“Do we?”

She was sure we did. “People like that make us feel uncomfortable.”

She paused. Jamie had turned off the shower and was reaching out for his towel. She passed it to him. Not an ounce of spare flesh, she thought. My Apollo. And, like Apollo, for a moment he seemed to glow in her eyes.

“Do you mean people who are a bit pi?” said Jamie, using the abbreviation of pious that Isabel found so expressive. Pi was a wonderful, almost onomatopoeic word, reflecting the sound that she imagined might be made by the pursing of the lips in moral self-­satisfaction.

Isabel nodded. “Yes, people who are annoyingly good. They can be so smug.”

Jamie towelled himself roughly. “That could be Annie in the orchestra,” he said. “She adopts a pained expression when anybody mentions having a good time. She plays the oboe. She’s pretty good—­musically, that is—­but, oh, her holier than thou attitude gets on our nerves. It ­really does.”

Isabel said that she, too, had known somebody like that in her student days. “He was such a pain,” she said. “Always disapproving of others—­telling them what to do. And then he was caught driving while intoxicated and had to appear in court. We all...

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Verlag
Pantheon Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593316940
ISBN 13 
9780593316948
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
227
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchpark GmbH
gpsr@buchpark.de

Krügerweg 1
Trebbin
Brandenburg
14959
Deutschland

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