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E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
320 Seiten
Englisch
Atlantic Bookserschienen am04.04.2024Main
'A brilliant, bleak moral maze of a novel' Guardian 'Dazzling... by turns comic, lyrical and heartbreaking' Monica Ali 'Profound and beautiful' Paul Murray, author of The Bee Sting 'A vital, haunting, devastating read' Sarah Waters A publisher, who is at war with his industry and himself, embarks on a radical experiment in his own life and the lives of those connected to him; an academic exchanges one story for another after an accident brings a stranger into her life; and a family in rural India have their lives destroyed by a gift. These three ingeniously linked but distinct narratives, each of which has devastating unintended consequences, form a breathtaking exploration of freedom, responsibility, and ethics. What happens when market values replace other notions of value and meaning? How do the choices we make affect our work, our relationships, and our place in the world? Neel Mukherjee's new novel exposes the myths of individual choice, and confronts our fundamental assumptions about economics, race, appropriation, and the tangled ethics of contemporary life. Choice is a scathing, compassionate quarrel with the world, a masterful inquiry into how we should live our lives, and how we should tell them. 'A magnificent achievement' Namwali Serpell 'A superb writer... his greatest work yet' Michelle de Kretser

Neel Mukherjee won the Writers Guild of Great Britain Award for best fiction in 2010 for his debut novel A Life Apart. His second novel, The Lives of Others, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Novel Award, and won the Encore Award. His most recent novel, A State of Freedom, was a New York Times '100 Notable Books of the Year' and heralded as 'Stunning ... a marvel of a book, shocking and beautiful, and it proves that Mukherjee is one of the most original and talented authors working today' (NPR).mehr
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Klappentext'A brilliant, bleak moral maze of a novel' Guardian 'Dazzling... by turns comic, lyrical and heartbreaking' Monica Ali 'Profound and beautiful' Paul Murray, author of The Bee Sting 'A vital, haunting, devastating read' Sarah Waters A publisher, who is at war with his industry and himself, embarks on a radical experiment in his own life and the lives of those connected to him; an academic exchanges one story for another after an accident brings a stranger into her life; and a family in rural India have their lives destroyed by a gift. These three ingeniously linked but distinct narratives, each of which has devastating unintended consequences, form a breathtaking exploration of freedom, responsibility, and ethics. What happens when market values replace other notions of value and meaning? How do the choices we make affect our work, our relationships, and our place in the world? Neel Mukherjee's new novel exposes the myths of individual choice, and confronts our fundamental assumptions about economics, race, appropriation, and the tangled ethics of contemporary life. Choice is a scathing, compassionate quarrel with the world, a masterful inquiry into how we should live our lives, and how we should tell them. 'A magnificent achievement' Namwali Serpell 'A superb writer... his greatest work yet' Michelle de Kretser

Neel Mukherjee won the Writers Guild of Great Britain Award for best fiction in 2010 for his debut novel A Life Apart. His second novel, The Lives of Others, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Novel Award, and won the Encore Award. His most recent novel, A State of Freedom, was a New York Times '100 Notable Books of the Year' and heralded as 'Stunning ... a marvel of a book, shocking and beautiful, and it proves that Mukherjee is one of the most original and talented authors working today' (NPR).
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781805460503
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2024
Erscheinungsdatum04.04.2024
AuflageMain
Seiten320 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse1161 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.14286964
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe

4.

It´s a Wednesday, so Luke´s turn to cook supper. Ayush always returns home early on Wednesdays to do the task of what he thinks of as pre-emptive damage control. He has had calculated by an amateur science blogger the difference in energy consumption between boiling water for pasta in a big pot on the hob and boiling several kettles for the same amount of water: kettle is greener. Ayush has measured out the pasta in a bowl and the exact amount of water to be boiled, the first of four batches, in the kettle. Left to his own devices, Luke would have set their biggest pot of water to boil, drained it all after the children´s pasta was cooked, then repeated the same actions for his and Ayush´s meal later - a scenario that keeps Ayush awake at night. Luke gives them sausages, diced into bite-size portions, and plain pasta with a curl of butter on top, and some petits pois (boiled in the same water after the pasta has been lifted out with a large-slotted spoon, not drained, since that water will be reused for the adults´ pasta). In Sasha´s case, the peas, sausages, and pasta are all served on separate plates since he does not like different foods to touch each other.

Spencer is under the table, as always, hoping for scraps. The children have refused to heed their parents´ repeated pleas and threats not to feed him. It´s a war that Ayush and Luke have lost, not with many misgivings.

Sasha pushes his plate of sausages away, taking great care not to make his fork touch the meat. I´m not hungry,´ he announces.

Masha chimes in, imitating her brother, as she does in all things. I don´t want this, I´m not hungry,´ she declares.

What´s up?´ Luke says. You love sausages. Do you want ketchup on it?´

They shake their heads in unison, toy with their pasta, then begin to exhibit the usual crankiness that comes with exhaustion. Later, Ayush will think that he was not paying any attention to what was really passing between them, so he is shocked, more by the speed at which the act is executed than by the act itself, when Sasha lifts the plate of diced sausages and tips it under the table. Spencer wolfs it down snufflingly before Luke and Ayush can react. When Ayush looks under the table, Spencer is looking up at the children´s feet, his tongue out, gratitude and greed melting his eyes.

Luke, who never gets angry with the children, is puzzled first, at the swiftness with which things have happened, then irritated with the way he´s been taken in. Why did you do that? Tell me, why?´ He´s trying to work himself up into a fury.

He is canny-vor-es, he eats meat because he doesn´t have a choice,´ Masha says, looking unblinkingly at Ayush´s face.

Ayush turns away, pours himself a glass of the mouthpuckeringly sour wine that Luke calls bone dry´ and seems to like so much, and returns to washing broccoli, chopping garlic and chillies.

Luke still doesn´t understand what´s going on - he is like an actor who has been thrust onto the stage without having been allowed to see the script. How many times have I told you that you´re not to feed Spencer? How many times? Do you understand that it´s bad for him? Would you like him to get heart disease and die? Would you like him to get fat and ill and suffer and die? Would you? Answer me.´

The children look as if they´re paying careful attention to each of his questions, which he delivers in a tone of calm reason, not anger.

Fine, you´ll go to bed without supper in that case,´ Luke says, failing to enter into anger and inhabiting, by his characteristic default, especially with the twins, a reasoned gentleness instead. Ayush marvels silently.

Bath time now,´ Luke says, and chivvies them up to the bathroom.

By the time Luke comes downstairs into the kitchen, his bath-time and bedtime-reading duties behind him, he looks like a cartoon depiction of bafflement, his brows furrowed, his normally clear blue eyes clouded. What did you do with them?´ he asks. They refuse to continue with Charlotte´s Web.´

What do you mean?´ Ayush grates generous amounts of pecorino onto their bowls of steaming pasta with white-hot attentiveness so that not a single wisp of cheese falls on to the table. Let there be a hundred more years of a better, a healing world, if the tabletop remains untouched by a single particle of cheese. He will go blind with concentrating.

They don´t want to hear a story about a pig who will be made into sausage. I couldn´t convince them that he is saved.´

Ayush makes some vague, non-committal tsks. He can tell that the children haven´t said anything of consequence to Luke, but he knows that it´s going to come in slow degrees. Now, Luke makes half a joke out of it: If the kids turn vegetarian, you are dealing with their meals.´

Ayush says nothing. In the space of that silence, Luke works something out. Wait,´ he says, are you behind all this?´

What do you mean?´ Ayush repeats.

Are you indoctrinating the kids?´

Ayush takes a deep breath; if it has to be done, why not begin now. I wouldn´t call it indoctrination. I think we should teach them about choices and their consequences. Certainly about things that don´t appear to be choices, things that are given to us as natural, things we fall into with such ease, such as what we eat, what we are trained to eat. I´d like them to question the so-called naturalness of that.´

Luke is silent for a while, assimilating. Then he says, Sure. But it can´t become costly for us.´

In their twenty-odd years of being together, Ayush knows costly´ is the econ-speak for not just the literal meaning of the word, but also for anything that is inconvenient. According to Luke, people simply won´t do things, or at least not in any sustained way that would make a difference, if you make it difficult or inconvenient, i.e. costly, for them.

There are more important things than convenience. If we all thought a little bit less about convenience, not a whole lot, god knows, I´m not asking for much, if we gave up just a tiny bit of our convenience, then maybe we wouldn´t be in the state that we´re in now.´

Whoa, whoa,´ begins Luke.

Thank god, he hadn´t said, What state are we in? Ayush thinks. Most of us can agree on something,´ he says, - the badness of eating meat or Facebook - but why are we unwilling to pay the private cost of giving those up? Why has the responsibility for action been shifted to the never-arriving public policy or, in your thinking, market solutions to make that large change? Where has the idea of individual agency gone?´

Because individual actions are low yield. Policing how much loo roll you use, going on marches, these things achieve nothing. The change needs to be on a different scale.´

You think American Civil Rights protests, for example, were low yield? Market solutions brought about the end of that discrimination, at least on paper?´

Luke hesitates. Ayush notices the gap and rushes to fill it in: We are all so willing to follow the no pain, no gain dictum when it comes to improving our bodies, looking good, about all things feeding our general narcissism. What about no pain, no gain for the weightier matters?´

You must change your life.

The end of that line of thinking is good old socialism - everyone should have enough; if you have more, we´ll take it away and give it to others who have less.´

You´ve made several leaps, but I cannot see a moral argument against that principle.´

But a scientific argument there certainly is - there is no evidence to support your system.´

Again, Ayush has learned, over time, that this is a gussied-up way of saying that the arc of human nature bends towards capitalism and its foundational principle of everybody wants to have more´. But human nature´ is a term that´s unsalvageable, and in any case too fuzzy, too humanities-inflected, for economists, so they hide behind the more sciencey-sounding evidence´. Evidence from where? What experiments or data or observation? How many people? How many experiments over time? In every country in the world or just the USA, the one country that has become the standard, especially in Luke´s discipline, from which everything about human nature is extrapolated? What is evidence? Isn´t it always already selective? They have clashed on these matters numberless times, and every single time Luke has pointed to socialism´s bloody history to clinch his argument, or rather, the argument he thinks Ayush will understand. It´s straying there again, the conflict of economic systems, the insistence that capitalism is science, not an ideology with its own very special, and unfolding, history of blood. Ayush, too tired to retread those paths, just says, But greed isn´t turning out to have such a great history, is it? Besides, resources are finite - how long are we going to sleepwalk through life like this? Where has all your tribe´s fetishization of growth got us? And anyway, who´s talking about socialism?´

Not...
mehr

Autor

Neel Mukherjee won the Writers Guild of Great Britain Award for best fiction in 2010 for his debut novel A Life Apart. His second novel, The Lives of Others, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Novel Award, and won the Encore Award. His most recent novel, A State of Freedom, was a New York Times '100 Notable Books of the Year' and heralded as 'Stunning ... a marvel of a book, shocking and beautiful, and it proves that Mukherjee is one of the most original and talented authors working today' (NPR).