Verwandte Artikel zu I Am No One

I Am No One - Hardcover

Flanery, Patrick

 
9781101905852: I Am No One
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1101905859 ISBN 13: 9781101905852
Verlag: TIM DUGGAN BOOKS, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

A tense, mesmerizing novel about memory, privacy, fear, and what happens when our past catches up with us.

After a decade living in England, Jeremy O'Keefe returns to New York, where he has been hired as a professor of German history at New York University. Though comfortable in his new life, and happy to be near his daughter once again, Jeremy continues to feel the quiet pangs of loneliness. Walking through the city at night, it's as though he could disappear and no one would even notice.

But soon, Jeremy's life begins taking strange turns: boxes containing records of his online activity are delivered to his apartment, a young man seems to be following him, and his elderly mother receives anonymous phone calls slandering her son. Why, he wonders, would anyone want to watch him so closely, and, even more upsetting, why would they alert him to the fact that he was being watched? 

As Jeremy takes stock of the entanglements that marked his years abroad, he wonders if he has unwittingly committed a crime so serious as to make him an enemy of the state. Moving towards a shattering reassessment of what it means to be free in a time of ever more intrusive surveillance, Jeremy is forced to ask himself whether he is "no one," as he believes, or a traitor not just to his country but to everyone around him.

— Included in NPR's Best of 2016 Book Concierge  

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Patrick Flanery was born in California and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. After earning a B.F.A. in Film from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, he worked in the film industry before moving to the U.K., where he completed a doctorate in twentieth-century English Literature at the University of Oxford. He is the author of the novels Absolution, which was shortlisted for the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and Fallen Land. He has written for The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Times Literary Supplement, and is a professor of creative writing at the University of Reading.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

 One
 
By the time I returned to New York in 2013 I had been living in Oxford for more than a decade, though I had moved there in the first place imagining I might stay for a few years at most. Having failed to get tenure at Columbia I believed Britain might offer some kind of new beginning, a way perhaps to restart my career, but I always planned to move back to America. In the end it took twice or three times as long to get home as I expected it might, and in the interim America had changed so radically—by coincidence I left just after the 9/11 attacks—that I felt no less alienated on my return than I had during those long years in Britain.
Although I had acquired British citizenship and owned a house in East Oxford, on the rather optimistically named Divinity Road, which becomes gradually more affluent as it rises to the crest of a hill, Britain has no narrative of immigrant assimilation, so for my colleagues and friends and students and strangers, it mattered little that I was legally one of them. First and last, I was and would always be an American. Perhaps if one comes at a younger age total acculturation is possible, but as a man in his forties my habits were too firmly in place to undergo whatever changes might have allowed me to become British in anything other than law.
When I was fresh out of graduate school, New York University was not one of the places I would have chosen to work, but I was thrilled when they approached me to apply for a professorship and even happier when I was offered the position and knew at last that my years away from home were at an end. It is surprising how much displacement can alter the mind, and while I went to Britain entirely of my own accord, I became restive after the first few years and increasingly resentful that I was being denied—it seemed to me then—access to a fully American life. I blamed my former colleagues at Columbia and whatever machinations had led to my not being awarded tenure and having thus to begin afresh, as it were, as a rather lowly-sounding Fellow and University Lecturer at one of Oxford’s older Colleges, founded in the fifteenth century, though not one that attracted the brightest students or had the largest endowment. It was, I came to see, a comfortable place to be, despite the workload being substantially greater than at a comparable American institution since Oxford has continued to teach students individually or in small groups, and there is an ever-expandable duty of pastoral care unlike anything in the American academy. I became accustomed to the College chef sending me lunch in my rooms if he was not too busy, often including some tidbit (or as the British say, titbit), from the previous night’s High Table dinner. There were excellent wines in the College cellars and life ticked on as it had for centuries there, with few changes other than the admission of women, and for a few dons still circulating in my time that was regarded as an ill-thought-out modernization that had, they insisted, changed the face of Oxford irremediably.
I was lucky with the property market and in the spring of 2013 sold the house on Divinity Road for a staggering million dollars’ profit, which I invested in a house and some land overlooking the Hudson River a couple hours north of the city, while taking up NYU’s generously subsidized housing in the Silver Towers on Houston Street. Beautiful the apartment was not, but it was a five-minute walk to work and Bobst Library and I relished being back in a city that felt global in a way Oxford certainly had not despite the great number of international students and scholars hustling around its quadrangles and vomiting in its alleys.
Coming home, of course, meant knowing that I would see Meredith more than once or twice a year, as had been our custom since my move to Britain. Her mother had continued to provide her a home in the early years, and in fact the breakdown of my marriage to Susan had coincided with my loss of tenure, though the two were unrelated and no one, it seemed to us both, was really at fault. Nonetheless, it had felt at the time as if there were doubly good reason to seek new opportunities, not only because my career in American academia was finished so far as I could tell, but because my marriage was over as well.
It was last year, only a few months into my first semester back in New York, when I had a meeting scheduled with a doctoral student to whose committee I had been assigned. Life in Oxford had produced a kind of informality in my relations with students, graduate students in particular, and so I had proposed meeting Rachel at a café one Saturday afternoon, the Saturday before Thanksgiving 2013. It was one of a series of Italian-themed places on MacDougal Street that claimed a lineage longer than seemed likely, but I enjoyed its cheap coffees and the variety of authentic pastries they had for sale in their glass display case. If I’m completely honest, it helped soften some of the culture shock I was feeling on my return to America, allowing me to believe for a moment that those markers of European life of which I had grown fond over the years remained accessible to me even on this side of the Atlantic. Accordingly I made Café Paradiso a regular stop in my weekly life, as it provided the kind of quiet and spacious venue where friends and students could be met and conversation lingered over without the sense that a waiter or waitress was going to rush us out the door. It had more atmosphere and élan than one of the chain coffee shops and less hectic bustle than the faux-artisanal places so packed that one has to compete for a table and then feels the pressure of other guests helicoptering with eyes peeled for the first movements building to a departure. Café Paradiso was not chic or hip or hot but it had understated style and that, no doubt, is what has kept it in business for so many years—either that or it’s a front for money laundering, which is always a possibility in this town.
Rachel had been prompt in all our communications and we had met once before, in September, for what in Oxford I would have called a supervision but which now was perhaps better called just a meeting or, if that felt too businesslike, then, simply, coffee. In the intervening two months I had heard little from Rachel until she sent me a completed draft of a chapter I had promised to read. This work, on the organizational history of the Ministry for State Security in the German Democratic Republic, was very assured. I had only a few suggestions for how she might tweak her methodological framework and told her I thought it would be productive to meet again in person before the Thanksgiving weekend.
I had brought a book with me since I am always early wherever I go, this is one of the great irritations I have with my own character since it produces so much wasted time, but I did not expect Rachel to keep me waiting since she had given the impression in our first meeting two months earlier and in all our subsequent communications of being a young woman of exceptional precision and punctuality, even punctiliousness, for in the day leading up to our last meeting she had written to confirm the time and place before I had done so and when I arrived for that appointment, in the coffee shop near the southeast corner of Washington Square, she was waiting for me. In any case, on this second meeting, the Saturday before the week of Thanksgiving, I sat down at a table in the Italian café on MacDougal, ordered an Americano, and opened my book. I cannot now remember what the book was, it might have been Anthony Beevor’s history of 1945, or something of that sort, and I soon found that I had read ten pages. When I looked at my watch it was nearly a quarter past four, fifteen minutes after the...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
TIM DUGGAN BOOKS
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101905859
ISBN 13 
9781101905852
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar