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The Mountain Lion (Faber Editions)

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
256 Seiten
Englisch
Faber & Fabererschienen am01.08.2023Main
'One of the strangest and angriest novels of the twentieth century.' Lauren Groff 'An extraordinary, savage novel.' Olivia Laing 'I love this novel.' Patricia Lockwood She would not feel safe until the beautiful animal was dead. Ralph and Molly are inseparable siblings: united against the stupidity of daily routines, their prim mother and prissy older sisters, the world of adult authority. One summer, they are sent from their childhood home in suburban Los Angeles to their uncle's Colorado mountain ranch.,Their time in this savage, untamed wilderness - hunting, roaming, writing - soon becomes tainted by the dark stirrings of sexual desire. And as the pressures of growing up drive an irrevocable rift between them, their innocent childhoods hurtle towards a devastating end . . . 'Beautiful, and sensitive, and quickening.' Eileen Myles 'A glimmer of genius.' Rumaan Alam 'Breathtakingly original.' Tessa Hadley 'A brilliant achievement [to] set beside Carson McCullers's masterwork The Member of the Wedding.' Joyce Carol Oates

Jean Stafford (1915-1979) was born in California but raised in Boulder, Colorado, where her family moved after losing their fortune on the stock exchange. Her college years at the University of Colorado were marked by poverty as well as by the suicide of her friend Lucy McKee, who shot herself in Stafford's presence. After graduation, Stafford studied at the University of Heidelberg, and on her return met the poet Robert Lowell, whom she married in New York in 1940 but divorced in 1948, later remarrying twice. In 1944 her debut novel, Boston Adventure, became a bestseller, followed in 1947 by The Mountain Lion. By 1948, the year in which Stafford received a Guggenheim fellowship, her acclaimed stories were regularly appearing in the New Yorker. In 1952 Stafford published a third novel, The Catherine Wheel, and in 1970 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her Collected Stories. She suffered a stroke in 1976 and died three years later in White Plains, New York, leaving her entire estate to her cleaning woman.mehr

Produkt

Klappentext'One of the strangest and angriest novels of the twentieth century.' Lauren Groff 'An extraordinary, savage novel.' Olivia Laing 'I love this novel.' Patricia Lockwood She would not feel safe until the beautiful animal was dead. Ralph and Molly are inseparable siblings: united against the stupidity of daily routines, their prim mother and prissy older sisters, the world of adult authority. One summer, they are sent from their childhood home in suburban Los Angeles to their uncle's Colorado mountain ranch.,Their time in this savage, untamed wilderness - hunting, roaming, writing - soon becomes tainted by the dark stirrings of sexual desire. And as the pressures of growing up drive an irrevocable rift between them, their innocent childhoods hurtle towards a devastating end . . . 'Beautiful, and sensitive, and quickening.' Eileen Myles 'A glimmer of genius.' Rumaan Alam 'Breathtakingly original.' Tessa Hadley 'A brilliant achievement [to] set beside Carson McCullers's masterwork The Member of the Wedding.' Joyce Carol Oates

Jean Stafford (1915-1979) was born in California but raised in Boulder, Colorado, where her family moved after losing their fortune on the stock exchange. Her college years at the University of Colorado were marked by poverty as well as by the suicide of her friend Lucy McKee, who shot herself in Stafford's presence. After graduation, Stafford studied at the University of Heidelberg, and on her return met the poet Robert Lowell, whom she married in New York in 1940 but divorced in 1948, later remarrying twice. In 1944 her debut novel, Boston Adventure, became a bestseller, followed in 1947 by The Mountain Lion. By 1948, the year in which Stafford received a Guggenheim fellowship, her acclaimed stories were regularly appearing in the New Yorker. In 1952 Stafford published a third novel, The Catherine Wheel, and in 1970 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her Collected Stories. She suffered a stroke in 1976 and died three years later in White Plains, New York, leaving her entire estate to her cleaning woman.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9780571368181
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2023
Erscheinungsdatum01.08.2023
AuflageMain
Seiten256 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse791 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.12203260
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe



Chapter One


Ralph was ten and Molly was eight when they had scarlet fever. It left them with some sort of glandular disorder which was not malignant, but which kept them half poisoned most of the time and caused them, frequently, to have such bad nosebleeds that they had to be sent home from school. It nearly always happened that their nosebleeds came at the same time. Ralph, bleeding profusely, would stumble into the corridor to find Molly coming out of the third-grade room, a handkerchief held in a sodden bunch at her nose. Their mother could not bear the sight of blood and her distress, on seeing them straggle up the driveway, never lessened even when these midday homecomings had become a habit. Each time, she implored them to telephone her so that she could send Miguel, the foreman, in the car. But they never did, for they liked the walk home, feeling all the way a pleasant superiority to their sisters, Leah and Rachel, who were still cooped up in school with nothing at all to do but chew paraffin on the sly.

In the September following their illness and on the day Grandpa Kenyon, their mother´s stepfather, was to arrive for his annual visit, they met with gushing noses outside the art supply room and seeing Miss Holihan through the open door at the paper cutter with a sheaf of manila paper, they walked on tiptoe, giggling silently until they reached the stairs and then they ran. Once outside in the empty schoolyard, they congratulated each other; Molly would not have to draw an apple on Miss Holihan´s paper and Ralph would miss both Palmer Method and singing. Actually, they would gain nothing by getting home some hours before the school bus since Grandpa´s train did not get into Los Angeles until the middle of the afternoon and then it was another hour before Miguel brought him up the driveway in the Willys Knight. So they dawdled more slowly than usual, not certain that they would find anything to absorb them at home, but certain, on the other hand, that their mother, fussing and chattering as she always did when they had company, would be as cross as sixty when she saw them.

It was a narrow, winding country road they walked along. On either side ran clear small ditches, making a mouth-like sound. Now and again they stopped and dipped their handkerchiefs and wiped the blood off their hands and arms. On their right was an orange grove from which, at all seasons of the year, came a heavy fragrance and where they sometimes saw flocks of such bright, unusual birds that they thought they must have flown up from the South Seas or westward from Japan. Some of the little pyramidal trees were always in bloom and some were always bearing fruit. There was a man on a ladder in the grove today and he turned when he heard them coming. He took off his hat and wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his black shirt and called, Hello, you kiddoes, but as he was a Mexican, they did not reply and scuttered on, terrified, until they no longer heard his derisive laugh.

Next they passed Mr. Vogelman´s huge clean dairy. Mr. Vogelman was a fat German who wore a white coverall and who had once been stoned by a group of second-graders when they learned what the Huns had done to the Belgians. Their mothers, fearing that he might take his revenge by treating the milk with tuberculosis germs, had written him an apology. But as the demonstration had taken place on Hallowe´en, Mr. Vogelman had misconstrued it and did not understand the letter at all. He had Guernseys whose hides gleamed in the sun like a metal, not so yellow as a banana and not so blue as milk, but something in between. Today there was a new calf near the fence, its fawn-like face wearing a look of melancholy surprise when it saw the human children staring. Its outraged mother bellowed at them, her great black nostrils hugely dilated, and they ran away for, although they would never have admitted it, they were afraid of cows. They knew a joke about a cow which they had read in The American Boy, and when they were safely beyond the pasture, they recited it as a dialogue:


Ralph: What are shoes made of?

Molly: Hide.

Ralph: Hide? Why should I hide?

Molly:  Hide! Hide! The cow´s outside!

Ralph: Oh, let the old cow come in. I´m not afraid.


They laughed so hard that they had to sit down in the road holding their stomachs and the laughter made their noses bleed twice as fast so that, convulsed and aching, they dabbed desperately with their handkerchiefs, screaming with pain, Oh! Oh! Finally, when they were sobered, Ralph said, I guess I´ll tell that joke to Grandpa, and Molly said, Me too. Of late, Ralph had had moments of irritation with her: often, when he had finished telling a joke or a fact, she would repeat exactly what he had said immediately afterward so that there was no time for people either to laugh or to marvel. And not only that, but she had countless times told his dreams, pretending that they were her own. He did not want the joke about the cow to fall flat and so, after a reluctant pause, he agreed to let her tell it with him as they had recited it just now. It was not as long as one of the darky pieces Leah and Rachel spoke together, but it was so much funnier that they were sure Grandpa could not fail to laugh in that big, roaring way of his, slapping his knee and saying, By George, that´s a good one.

They proceeded, thinking of Grandpa, joyfully scuffing the white dust of the road until their oxfords were all powdery, even the shoelaces. Next to the dairy was a deep, dry arroyo called the Wash. It had been hollowed out by a flood that had come in the spring of the year Leah was three, but they had so often heard the details of its devastation that they were certain their impressions came from memory and not from their mother´s and her friends´ talk when there was nothing new to discuss and they had to return to the thrills of the past. Mr. Fawcett had gone across a raging creek on a horse named Babe, long since dead, to rescue an aged woman whose house was later washed away. He brought her home flung over his saddle like a gunny sack of feed and gave her artificial respiration on the kitchen floor. Thousands and thousands of finches came out of the pouring rain to perch on the front porch; there were so many Father said it looked like a regular bird sanctuary; Fuschia was baking a cherry pie and Father asked her if she wanted four and twenty finches to put in it. A grapefruit tree came floating right down the driveway, roots and all, and Father planted it beside the solar tank. Every year it bore one grapefruit, which was smaller than a golf ball and almost as hard.

On the floor of the Wash, Ralph and Molly could find bright-colored stones, pink and green and yellow and blue. After a heavy rain, there was sometimes fool´s gold in the puddles. Strange harsh shallow-rooted flowers grew all over the steep slopes and clumps of mallow that yielded bitter milk. There was one place where the mud dried and cracked into wedges like pieces of pie and when Molly was very small, she thought that this was where the sandwiches lived. All mystery and evil came from the Wash. Those smooth colored stones they gathered were really stolen jewels and the thief was a coal-black Skalawag who slept in the daytime in Mr. Vogelman´s cornbin but kept watch at night. They did not venture down into the Wash when they had nosebleeds because the Skalawag could smell blood, no matter how far away he was, and he would get up and come legging it after them. So they passed it quickly with sidelong glances. Last autumn, when they had taken Grandpa Kenyon to see the Wash, he had said, Well, now, that´s something like it. There´s too damn much green in this here California. But that dried-up little old crick bed down there makes me think of a place that is a place. He swept his black eyes round the scene and breathed shallowly as if the sweetness of the orange blossoms offended him and he said, To think there ain´t any winter here! Why, I´d as lief go to hell in a handbasket as not to see the first snow fly. The children were a little angry and shy and sensing this he explained to them-though they did not understand what he meant-that Nature here offered a man no real challenge. You take that place of mine in the Panhandle. Nature ain´t any ornrier anywhere in the world than she is right there, but she´s a blooming belle of a fighter. When he had bought the land, there had not been a drop of water on the whole forty-five thousand acres of it, not a stream, not a pond. Everyone said he was a boob to buy it. But he turned in and bought it anyhow and then he took a little forked switch of holly and he chose a place on a rise just to the west of where he meant to build his house. He stood there with his holly wand, holding a fork of it in either hand. By and by, the rod bent down: where she showed him, there was a deep clear spring that had never yet gone dry.

The Wash, after that, had a new meaning for Ralph and Molly and they came to believe that the Skalawag was so watchful because he feared someone might come with a divining rod and once water was found, all his gems would be washed away. And now, too, whenever they went past, they thought of Grandpa´s ranch in the Panhandle and Ralph, sighing, would say, Golly Moses,...

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Autor

Jean Stafford (1915-1979) was born in California but raised in Boulder, Colorado, where her family moved after losing their fortune on the stock exchange. Her college years at the University of Colorado were marked by poverty as well as by the suicide of her friend Lucy McKee, who shot herself in Stafford's presence. After graduation, Stafford studied at the University of Heidelberg, and on her return met the poet Robert Lowell, whom she married in New York in 1940 but divorced in 1948, later remarrying twice. In 1944 her debut novel, Boston Adventure, became a bestseller, followed in 1947 by The Mountain Lion. By 1948, the year in which Stafford received a Guggenheim fellowship, her acclaimed stories were regularly appearing in the New Yorker. In 1952 Stafford published a third novel, The Catherine Wheel, and in 1970 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her Collected Stories. She suffered a stroke in 1976 and died three years later in White Plains, New York, leaving her entire estate to her cleaning woman.Hilton Als is an award-winning journalist, critic and curator. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1994 and a theatre critic since 2002. In 2017, he won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Als is the author of two books: The Women (1996) and White Girls (2014), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Lambda Literary Award. He is currently a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and associate professor of writing at Columbia University's School of the Arts. He lives in New York City.