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The End of Getting Lost: A Novel - Softcover

Kirman, Robin

 
9781982159863: The End of Getting Lost: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1982159863 ISBN 13: 9781982159863
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Margaret Qualley and Paul Mescal!

A young woman and her husband travel around Europe to celebrate their first year of marriage—a year that the woman has no memory of—in this “wildly beautiful and darkly sinister” (Rosamund Lupton, New York Times bestselling author of Sister) novel of intimacy and deceit.

The year is 1996—a time before cell phones, status updates, and location tags—when you could still travel to a remote corner of the world and disappear. This is where we meet Gina and Duncan, a young couple madly in love, traveling around Europe on a romantic adventure. It’s a time both thrilling and dizzying for Gina, whose memories are hazy following a head injury—and the growing sense that the man at her side is keeping secrets from her.

Just what is Duncan hiding and how far will he go to keep their pasts at bay? As the pair hop borders across Europe, their former lives threatening to catch up with them while the truth grows more elusive, we witness how love can lead us astray, and what it means to lose oneself in love.

The End of Getting Lost is a tightrope act of deception and an elegant exploration of love and marriage—as well as our cherished illisions of both. With notes of Patricia Highsmith, Caroline Kepnes, and Lauren Groff, Robin Kirman has spun an “atmospheric, lyrical” (Susie Yang, New York Times bestselling author of White Ivy) tale of deceit, redemption, and the fight to keep love alive—no matter the costs.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robin Kirman studied philosophy at Yale before receiving her MFA in writing from Columbia, where she also taught for several years. Her curiosity about human psychology has led her to combine work in psychoanalysis with writing fiction. Her first novel, Bradstreet Gate, was published in 2015, and her television series The Love Wave is currently in development.

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Chapter One: Gina // Lake Walen One Gina // Lake Walen
June 1996

It was the end of getting lost—a moment when travel could still feel like taking leave of the familiar, before there were ten different means for a person to be reached in almost any corner of the world in which she might be standing, when letters and postcards would still follow slowly on the heels of a young couple moving across Europe, and two people in love could escape their old reality a little, experiencing the world before them like a shared dream.

The year was 1996, the month June, when Gina and Duncan arrived at the Walensee, a lake less than an hour’s drive from the clinic near Zurich where she had spent the past two weeks. She’d come there to recuperate from a head injury she’d suffered from a bad fall in Berlin. The injury hadn’t been a small one, rehabilitation was required, but now that Gina was well enough to do without doctors and nurses, she and Duncan had escaped to the Swiss countryside. The scenery around Lake Walen was possibly the loveliest and most peaceful that she had ever seen: small villages of white, red-roofed houses, lush fields of wildflowers and, across the still, blue water, green mountains topped with milky clouds. They’d spent three days there in a small guesthouse, hiking and biking among the villages, or boating on the lake. Duncan didn’t usually swim, and the lake water was cold, but Gina liked to jump in anyway in the hours when the sun was strongest. After she’d tired herself with laps, and as the light began to weaken, she’d leave the water to go inside and dress, and then they’d bring their chairs down to the grassy banks to take in the sky and lake, lit pink and gold by the setting sun.

During this quiet hour, Duncan, who was a classical composer, listened to music with headphones on his Discman, and, beside him, Gina read—Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, which Duncan had bought her that week as a gift. He’d been aware a Zurich clinic featured in the story, otherwise under the impression that it was a romance about a glamorous American couple traveling in Europe. The day after Duncan gave Gina the book, her doctor at the clinic had remarked on the Swiss sanatorium, and Gina had been forced to tell Duncan that it wasn’t a happy story, that the wife in the novel was mentally ill.

“Oh God, forget it, then,” Duncan had pleaded, but she’d made clear that reading it didn’t upset her. On the contrary, it soothed her to return to a novel that she’d read before and remembered—in better detail than she possessed regarding her own recent life.

In the last weeks, Gina had often felt like she was crazy—though the doctors in the hospital in West Berlin and at the Zurich clinic had made clear that what she’d experienced was entirely a physical trauma. She’d suffered a concussion and intracranial swelling, and no one could predict what sort of recovery she’d make. The consensus by the end was that she’d been lucky. Her sight and hearing were normal and she had no speech difficulties, no aphasia. Her mind was sharp, her reasoning was good, and her moods were stable. Her dizzy spells were now gone, her balance and motor coordination perfectly restored. In fact, only two weeks after her injury, she was taking runs through the Swiss woods.

The only significant loss in functioning involved her memory. She couldn’t recall anything of the accident or of the months leading up to her trip. Beyond that, there were stretches of experience that remained missing, which she didn’t know she missed—her dance performances that year, the departure from New York of their two close friends—until Duncan would refer to these and nothing would come to mind.

At the same time, there were also many things that she did remember that before she’d forgotten. It was as if her mind had been shaken during the impact, and material that had been buried cast up to the top again. Scenes from her childhood, for instance, a trip she’d taken with her parents to Italy when her mother was still healthy. Gina could see her mother quite clearly, as she’d looked on that visit—in a white dress walking barefoot on the beach, her dark curls to her shoulders, her smile wide and bright as the pale sand—looking, Gina realized with a pang, very much the way she herself looked now.

Her recent brush with death had brought her closer to her late mother, and closer too to Duncan, who had hardly left her side since the accident, except to see that she received the best possible care. Unimpressed with the medical standard in Berlin, where she’d been hospitalized first, he’d proposed moving her to the clinic just outside of Zurich, where the techniques for physical rehabilitation were more advanced. Gina was a dancer, he let the doctor know, and therefore required special treatment.

The Swiss clinic had been state of the art, and during her stay there, Gina often wondered how all this would be paid for. She had a hefty inheritance from her mother, but Duncan had always refused to touch it and insisted she keep it in an account separate from him. He preferred to live frugally from what they earned, though in this case he insisted on sparing no expense.

“I’d pay any amount to have you back as you were again.”

She’d grasped then how much the prospect of losing her had undone him. In some ways, her accident had been even more frightening for Duncan, as the only one who could recall it.

She’d asked him, once, to describe that day for her: They’d been in Berlin almost a week when Gina set off for a morning walk around the city. Duncan would have joined her, but that morning he’d been struck with musical inspiration he wanted to get down onto paper. As Duncan worked, morning turned to afternoon, and Gina still hadn’t returned. He was beginning to grow nervous when the phone rang in his room. A hotel receptionist was calling to relay a message from a local hospital. Gina had suffered an accident.

Duncan had rushed over to the address that he’d been given: the Charité Hospital on Luisenstrasse. There, the doctor presiding over Gina’s case told him what had happened, that Gina had been found at a construction site at Potsdamer Platz. It seemed she’d gone poking around one of the sections that was off-limits and that she’d slipped along the way and hit her head on a piece of exposed pipe. Tourists had discovered her, unconscious, and called an ambulance. Inside her pocket was a hotel key with her room number, and this was how she’d been identified and Duncan had been reached. Her prognosis was still uncertain then; the doctors didn’t know what state she’d be in when she awoke.

“I thought I’d lost you,” Duncan told her. “I lived it in that hospital that night, life without you. You were gone.”

In moments when she caught him looking at her, she could see that this was true—he seemed not to trust that she was real, as though at any instant she might disappear.

“Still here,” she’d tease him, smiling reassuringly, but hiding her private thoughts—she was mostly there, sure, but what parts of her were lost?

She’d asked Duncan to fill in any large events of the last year. He insisted her life had gone on much as before. She’d continued dancing with the same experimental company, and Duncan continued to play piano there to accompany rehearsals. They collaborated on their own work: Duncan composed music and she choreographed dances to go with it. The biggest change was that Duncan had landed his first...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1982159863
ISBN 13 
9781982159863
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

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Utrecht
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