The Parting Gift: A Novel - Hardcover

Fallenberg, Evan

 
9781590519431: The Parting Gift: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1590519434 ISBN 13: 9781590519431
Verlag: Other Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

“An unabashed tale that does not pull punches and looks at love’s underside…This breathless story should only be read in one sitting. It hits hard and never lets up. Terse, brusque, etched on one’s inner thigh with an old serrated knife.” —André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name

This erotic tale of jealousy, obsession, and revenge is suffused with the rich flavors and intoxicating scents of Israel’s Mediterranean coast.

An unnamed narrator writes a letter to an old college friend, Adam, with whom he has been staying since his abrupt return to the States from Israel. Now that the narrator is moving on to a new location, he finally reveals the events that led him to Adam’s door, set in motion by a chance encounter with Uzi, a spice merchant whose wares had developed a cult following.

From his first meeting with Uzi, the narrator is overwhelmed by an animal attraction that will lead him to derail his life, withdraw from friends and extend his stay in a small town north of Tel Aviv. As he becomes increasingly entangled in Uzi’s life—and by extension the lives of Uzi’s ex-wife and children—his passion turns sinister, ultimately threatening all around him. 

Written in a circuitous style that keeps you guessing until the end, The Parting Gift is a page-turner and a shrewd exploration of the roles men assume, or are forced to assume, as lovers, as fathers, as Israelis, as Palestinians.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Evan Fallenberg is the author of three novels and a translator of Hebrew books, plays and films. His work has won or been short-listed for numerous awards, including the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Stonewall Award for Literature, the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and the PEN Translation Prize. He teaches at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv and is faculty co-director of the Vermont College of Fine Arts International MFA in Creative Writing & Literary Translation. Fallenberg is the recipient of residency fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, Banff Centre for the Arts, Fondation Ledig-Rowohlt and Sun Yat-sen University, and is the founder of Arabesque: An Arts and Residency Center in Old Akko, Israel.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Dear Adam,
We are sitting, as I write this, as we often do: me on the sofa and you at your desk, your back to me, hunched over your computer. Your hair needs cutting, this time preferably by someone—anyone—other than Beth. You will never see, as I can, the line, or lack of one, that runs from below your left ear to below your right, how jagged it is, how unendearing. Your nape—what a lovely, raw word, don’t you think? So Saxon and blunt—is impossibly white, sickly white, and the mole that is nearly equidistant between your scraggly hairline, such as it is, and the collar of your stretch-necked T-shirt, stands out like a nipple on a pale breast. A nipple on a pale breast: a beautiful metaphor, wouldn’t you agree? It retains the bodily imagery but swivels it around from front to back. I hope you don’t feel it emasculates you, though. Beth wouldn’t approve, she’s a fierce defender of your masculinity. Such as it is. The lady doth protest a little too much. Your nape, still bent to your work, still deathly white with a dark eruption that contains who knows what disease or tumor one day to awaken and poison you, invites kissing or strangling. I could do either, in fact. Now, though, I’m too distracted for either. I’m occupied, gainfully, with this letter, which is, or will be, my parting gift to you. In it I shall recount how it is that I washed up on your doorstep nearly four months ago, and what events brought me here. You have never asked me and I find that exceedingly nice of you—nice being a word that could have been coined specially for you had it not already been abused for centuries in describing the bland or the sweet or the cuddly or the mild—and at the same time exceedingly odd. Would I ever do the same for you, or anyone? Doubtful. But you, Adam, you are not me and I am not you, so it is a good thing that I was the one who did the washing up on the doorstep and you who did the welcoming. I should stand up from the sofa and pull your shoulders back to keep you from slouching so terribly. You do it all the time, and recently, even when you stand to your full medium height, you do it; you are slowly slipping into the form of a question mark, when at your age you should be an exclamation mark, erect and definitive. I have spoken to you about this, in a friendly way of course, and on one memorable occasion—I know you remember it, Adam, maybe more than you’d like?—I bent down to you from behind, lassoed one arm around your neck and straightened your head against my abs. Your fingers hovered over your keyboard. It was so awkward for you! You didn’t know whether you should just carry on tapping as if I weren’t holding you, as if we weren’t breathing in sync, or whether you should give in and let me move your body as it should be moved. Beth, I’d guess, doesn’t do that for you, does she? No, you’re the man and you do the moving, the placing, the laying on of hands. Of course you do. But I still haven’t properly explained why I’m writing this letter to you when you are a matter of two paces across the room from me and unable to keep from hearing any words I might let slip from between my lips. You are my captive audience, and too polite to ignore me no matter how much I am getting on your nerves after one hundred and eleven days on the sofa in your tiny apartment (I’ve counted). Oh, I know I’m getting on your nerves, testing your resolve to be generous and undemanding, to practice what you preach about a kinder, gentler world in which we look after one another instead of solely our selves. You loathe hoarding and selfishness and greed. How right you are that we are destroying all that is good around us, from natural resources to human relationships, and you are out there doing something about it, making a difference, making of yourself and your Project a shining example. And along I’ve come and plopped myself down in the middle of all that like some man-made eyesore—I’m thinking of a dam on a pristine river, strip-mining in a jungle; our old lit-theory prof would be proud of my “consistency of metaphor,” don’t you think?—which you are dealing with so admirably, so fairly, with such generosity of spirit. Beth has told you to get rid of me, I know it, I see it on her face daily; your mother has too, judging by a phone conversation I overheard last week. But you, Adam, you have stood your ground for one hundred and eleven days and I imagine you could hold out for one hundred and eleven more—a thousand and eleven, why not?!—but I will spare you that, I will save you the rift with your girlfriend and your mother and your conscience and in this case it will be me who does the decent thing, the selfless thing; and that is the purpose of this letter, my friend: I am leaving, in fact I shall be gone when you are reading this. It will be the long-overdue explanation of my mysterious appearance at your door these four months ago. The expression of my gratitude. I expect you will be tempted to share this letter with Beth, your beloved, from whom you have surely pledged to hide nothing. But my recommendation is that you read it through first in secret, alone; if nonetheless you decide to let her read it then at least it will be a decision made from knowledge and not from some promise you made about open communication, or from guilt. I detest guilt as a motivating factor for anything, and as for the promises made between lovers, well, they are a blueprint for calamity, a writ of divorce rendered point by point. You’ll think I’m being cynical here—you’ve used that word on me on five occasions in these four months already—but I have more experience in this than you do. Beth, you feel certain, would break no vows made or even implied between you, and you have had no true lover before Beth, so she is the entirety of your experience, and you two as a couple are untried. But take it from me, a man with a record in the crimes of love: Promises will be broken and vows will be trampled and feelings will be hurt—oh, far worse than that. Where love is concerned the rules are not written in books of statutes but they exist all the same, and they are unbending. But I don’t wish to turn you away—not from Beth, not from love, and not from me and the story I am about to reveal to you in these pages. So do not worry your sweet head about it, that head of unwashed, uncoiffed hair, or for that matter your gently sloping back or your hairless arms and legs or your hollow belly or sweet, bony ass. Carry on with your Project—you are typing now, furiously; it looks, from the sofa, to be yet another grant application, another long Statement of Purpose or Scope of Project essay—and do not let me distract you unduly. But do read my recounting, my accounting, and let it penetrate you at the margins of the day, when you lie in bed, your arm curled gently around a soporific Beth; let it infiltrate your pores, allow it to seep into your soul. You are too pure, my friend; perhaps this will be your chance for damnation. This story, like most stories, could begin in a number of different places. I could slip backward in time all the way to my grandparents in order to show you what kind of households my parents grew up in. I could start when you and I met, in grad school, so that the arc of this narrative would become our story, the story of our acquaintanceship. There are other options, and literary techniques we learned together and could both name, that would do the trick as well, but I’ll spare you the gimmickry and cut to the facts that hounded me all the way to this living room on 119 Maple Street in this wannabe bohemian neighborhood of this middling city of America. For the record, I will tell this...

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Verlag
Other Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1590519434
ISBN 13 
9781590519431
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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