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The New Sweet Style: A Novel - Hardcover

Aksyonov, Vassily

 
9780679444015: The New Sweet Style: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0679444017 ISBN 13: 9780679444015
Verlag: Random House, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

Few writers enjoy the kind of international praise and prestige that Russian émigré novelist Vassily Aksyonov has earned for his previ-ous books. In his latest and most surprising novel, The New Sweet Style, Alexander Korbach--a singer/composer/playwright adored by the counterculture in Moscow and reviled by the Communist powers-that-were--comes to the United States to start over and to search for new ways of pursuing his art.
    
No one is at the airport to meet him. Oh, well. Sasha soon discovers that he's a distant cousin of a rich American retailer with an elegant flagship store in New York. But before he can "capitalize" on this connection, Sasha has to work as a garage attendant in Santa Monica, deal with his Russian ex-wife, face down the KGB, get in bed with the KGB, and drink a goodly  portion of vodka now and again (and again).
    
With his inimitably hilarious and melancholy sensibility, Vassily Aksyonov draws a sharp portrait of a flawed but resilient hero who wanders through his new homeland in search of happiness and an audience for his work. It's a  perfect, wise vision of a world that somehow manages to grow smaller and crazier with every passing day.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

A leading Soviet writer, Vassily Aksyonov was forced to emigrate from the Soviet Union in 1980 after frequent clashes with government authorities made it increasingly difficult for him to publish there. Aksyonov currently lives with his wife in Fairfax, Virginia, and is a professor at George Mason University.        

Aus dem Klappentext

enjoy the kind of international praise and prestige that Russian émigré novelist Vassily Aksyonov has earned for his previ-ous books. In his latest and most surprising novel, <b>The New Sweet Style</b>, Alexander Korbach--a singer/composer/playwright adored by the counterculture in Moscow and reviled by the Communist powers-that-were--comes to the United States to start over and to search for new ways of pursuing his art.<br>    <br>No one is at the airport to meet him. Oh, well. Sasha soon discovers that he's a distant cousin of a rich American retailer with an elegant flagship store in New York. But before he can "capitalize" on this connection, Sasha has to work as a garage attendant in Santa Monica, deal with his Russian ex-wife, face down the KGB, get in bed with the KGB, and drink a goodly  portion of vodka now and again (and again).<br>    <br>With his inimitably hilarious and melancholy sensibility, Vassily

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THREE STEPS

On August 10, 1982, Alexander Zakharovich Korbach set foot on American soil for the first time. As he was standing in the massive queue at passport control in the Pan Am terminal, the date kept buzzing in his head: there was some further meaning in it. It was only once he was past the checkpoint and alongside the baggage carousel that it came to him: it was his birthday! Every year on this date, he "turned" something, and just now again he had "turned" something: forty-two, was it? No, forty-three. If he had thought a year ago in the Crimea that in a year he would "celebrate" his birthday in a New York airport! August 10, 1982. Forty-three years old--head hurts from last night--an H-1 visa--fifteen hundred dollars and three thousand francs in my pocket, I don't feel anything but a "simoom of sensations."
His first encounter on American soil happened to be a pleasant, if not a liberating, one. Suddenly, his suitcase arrived, among the first ones--came leaping out of the netherworld, displaying a strange agility, not to say excessive familiarity. Looking at the suitcase, Alexander, a man with a penchant for inadequate reflections about insignificant things, thought: Why, here it is, this battered little suitcase, and it's somehow endearing. The heart of the matter, after all, as it turned out, was this: someone killed a large animal somewhere, they made a case out of the hide in Latvia, and now everything "beastly" about it has vanished, and the suitcase has been transformed into an object of nostalgia.

The case went by, collided with a Hindu bundle, and fell over on its side. The next time around Korbach snatched his belongings from among the other bags and took his place in the line for customs inspection.

Customs Officer Jim Corbett was eyeing him from atop a high stool. While it is impossible to examine all the junk coming into the USA, there does exist a system of selective checking, which the professionals have mastered. The customs specialist reads faces, gestures, any movement. The potential violator is always spotted from a long way off. For example, the balding, finely featured head. An individual difficult to put in a category. The shoulders were twitching strangely--too much, somehow. A drug smuggler doesn't give little jumps like that. Let the head and ears go by, or check him out? It's always a toss-up. "Please open your suitcase," he asked politely, and added: "sir." The individual thrusts a piece of paper at him: "Declaration! Declaration!" Doesn't even understand English! Jim Corbett makes a gesture: a sharp turn of the wrists followed by an elegantly proportioned raising of the palms. "If you don't mind, sir."

There is nothing attractive, but nothing particularly repulsive either, in the suitcase. Among perspiration-stained shirts is a book in an old binding, embossed with a large gold D. Obviously no false bottom. Corbett glances in the passport: you don't get many of them, these Soviets. "Got any vodka?" the officer jokes. "Only in here," the new arrival jokes in reply, tapping himself on the forehead. Great guy--Corbett laughs to himself--it'd be nice to sit with him at Tony's.

A Russian must carry a lot of interesting stuff around inside, Corbett went on thinking for several minutes, allowing potential violators to pass without a check. A country of exceptional order, everything under control, no homosexuality--how do they manage it?

Meanwhile, Alexander Korbach was making his way in a crowd toward the entrance to a yawning tunnel, at the other end of which, in fact, the land of freedom began. A body that has just flown across an ocean might not yet be at full strength. Maybe the astral threads, all of these chakras, idas, pingalas, kundalinis, had to reassemble themselves into their natural order after having been transported at a speed so unnatural to human creatures, he mused with a melancholy chuckle. The shuffling of feet doesn't mean anything yet--it's just the movement of indistinguishable mechanisms wanting to end up in America. It takes time for old passions to rekindle.

Beyond the crowd Alexander Zakharovich could make out three steps of varying shades: the first white and of marble; the second rough, of some scorched-looking stone, purple to the point of blackness; and the third of fiery scarlet porphyry. The crowd silently flowed into the tunnel.
A second crowd, this one quietly waiting to greet the arrivals, came into view at the end of the cavern. The lights for the television cameras were already jutting out over their heads. Keep your cool, Korbach said to himself. Speak only Russian. No humiliating attempts at the local lingo. I'm sorry, gentlemen, the situation is unclear. For the moment, the theater still exists. The question of my position as artistic director is up in the air. There are creative forces in the United States with whom I feel an intellectual and stylistic kinship, and the purpose of my visit is to establish contact with them.

Well, then, while our five-feet-four-inch-tall protagonist, a man of not unattractive appearance, in the mold of that nineteenth-century poet and novelist Mikhail Lermontov--though with the receding hairline of the twentieth-century poet and novelist Andrei Bely--approaches the television cameras, we can use the opportunities provided by the novel's wide open spaces to leaf through his curriculum vitae.

ONE HUNDRED DEGREES FAHRENHEIT

It was only as he approached the barrier that Korbach realized that the cameras, photographers, and TV people were not intended for him at all. The curly head of a famous tennis player protruded from a clutch of lights and recording devices.

The other people waiting were looking for their friends and relatives among the arrivals. It was at this threshold that the transatlantic phantoms of passengers materialized. A process somewhat akin to the retrieval of his luggage, only with joyful emotions expressed in a more demonstrative form. No one, however, was in a hurry to retrieve Korbach the director. He walked by the cardboard signs bearing the names of those the signs' bearers didn't know by sight: Vernet, Schwartzman, Zoya Betancour, Kwan Li Zhi--his name wasn't there.

Maybe journalists were meeting him at some other exit, and the little shits got things mixed up? He walked through a huge hall filled with a phantasmagoric babble, of which he could not understand a single word. From time to time he was almost deafened by the paging system, which he couldn't understand either. Porters were talking among themselves in an absolutely incomprehensible language. Well, it seems that I don't understand English at all, if that's English. "Information," he read. Now, that I understand. Must ask where they're meeting the director Korbach here. Three fresh-faced girls in Pan Am uniforms were sitting behind an open counter talking with one another. When he got closer, he realized that he couldn't make out a word of their chatter. One of them turned to him: "Sir?" He averted his eyes and walked on by. She watched him go with an understanding expression on her face. Probably an East European. Polish and Czech refugees are often ashamed of their English, unlike the Tamils, Senegalese, and Burmese, who aren't.

Korbach dragged his suitcase on its little trolley around the terminal for no less than an hour and drank water from a fountain so that he wouldn't have to order a Coke in English, until the staggering thought hit him: No one is meeting me here! Yet Mauriac told me that they would! That there had been loads of reports in the American press! Every American he met had exclaimed: "Alexander Korbach! It's a great name in the States!"

He emerged from the building and saw before him a giant...

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Verlag
Random House
Erscheinungsdatum
1999
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0679444017
ISBN 13 
9780679444015
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
496
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

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