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Green Water, Green Sky

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
176 Seiten
Englisch
Daunt Bookserschienen am04.07.2024
An elegant, melancholic novella about memory, family and the meaning of home. This is the tale of the fractured family life of Bonnie McCarthy, a glamorous American divorcée, and her daughter, Flor. Uprooted and unmoored, mother and daughter lead an itinerant existence, with Venice, Cannes and Paris as their backdrop. When Flor attempts to flee this untidy life and the oppressive rule of her eccentric mother, she instead succumbs to a gradual decline into a breakdown. Green Water, Green Sky was Mavis Gallant's debut novel and is a quietly dazzling example of her masterful shifts in narrative perspective and her visceral exploration of displacement and exile.

Mavis Gallant was born in Montreal in 1922. In the early 1940s, she briefly worked for the National Film Board before becoming a reporter. She married a musician, John Gallant, but they were divorced before the end of the decade. Gallant moved to Paris and, apart from fleeting spells in London, Spain and back in Canada, lived there for the rest of her life - although she never renounced her Canadian citizenship. From 1951, the New Yorker published more than one hundred of her stories. Her body of prize-winning work includes a dozen collections of stories, two novels, a play and numerous essays and reviews. Green Water, Green Sky was her debut novel. She died in 2014.mehr
Verfügbare Formate
TaschenbuchKartoniert, Paperback
EUR13,00
E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
EUR9,60

Produkt

KlappentextAn elegant, melancholic novella about memory, family and the meaning of home. This is the tale of the fractured family life of Bonnie McCarthy, a glamorous American divorcée, and her daughter, Flor. Uprooted and unmoored, mother and daughter lead an itinerant existence, with Venice, Cannes and Paris as their backdrop. When Flor attempts to flee this untidy life and the oppressive rule of her eccentric mother, she instead succumbs to a gradual decline into a breakdown. Green Water, Green Sky was Mavis Gallant's debut novel and is a quietly dazzling example of her masterful shifts in narrative perspective and her visceral exploration of displacement and exile.

Mavis Gallant was born in Montreal in 1922. In the early 1940s, she briefly worked for the National Film Board before becoming a reporter. She married a musician, John Gallant, but they were divorced before the end of the decade. Gallant moved to Paris and, apart from fleeting spells in London, Spain and back in Canada, lived there for the rest of her life - although she never renounced her Canadian citizenship. From 1951, the New Yorker published more than one hundred of her stories. Her body of prize-winning work includes a dozen collections of stories, two novels, a play and numerous essays and reviews. Green Water, Green Sky was her debut novel. She died in 2014.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781914198915
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2024
Erscheinungsdatum04.07.2024
Seiten176 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse832 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.16439647
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe



1


They went off for the day and left him, in the slyest, sneakiest way you could imagine. Nothing of the betrayal to come showed on their faces that morning as they sat having breakfast with him, out on the hotel terrace, a few inches away from the Grand Canal. If he had been given something the right length, a broom, say, he could have stirred the hardly moving layer of morning muck, the orange halves, the pulpy melons, the rotting bits of lettuce, black under water, green above. Water lapped against the gondolas moored below the terrace. He remembered the sound, the soft, dull slapping, all his life. He heard them say at the table they would never come here in August again. They urged him to eat, and drew his attention to gondoliers. He refused everything they offered. It was all as usual, except that a few minutes after he was in an open boat, churning across to the Lido with Aunt Bonnie and Florence. Flor and Aunt Bonnie pushed along to the prow and sat down side by side on a bench, and Aunt Bonnie pulled George toward her, so he was half on her lap. You couldn´t sit properly: her lap held a beach bag full of towels. The wind picked up Flor´s long ponytail of hair and sent it across George´s face. His cousin´s hair smelled coppery and warm, like its color. He wouldn´t have called it unpleasant. All the same, it was an outrage, and he started to whine: Where are they?´ but the wind blew so that you couldn´t hear a thing.

He had been on the beach most of the morning before he planted himself in front of Aunt Bonnie in her deck chair and said, Where´ve they gone? Are they coming here?´

Aunt Bonnie lowered the book she was reading and regarded George with puckered, anxious face - in his memories, an old face, a frightened face. She sat under a series of disks, in dwindling perspective; first an enormous beach umbrella, all in stripes, then her own faded parasol, then a neutral-colored straw hat. She said, Well, you know, it´s like this, Georgie, they´ve gone off for the day. They wanted to have one little day on their own. You mustn´t be selfish. They´re only looking at old pictures. You´d rather be on the beach than looking at pictures ...´

I´d sooner be looking at pictures,´ George said.

... so we brought you over to the beach,´ said Aunt Bonnie, not even listening. You mustn´t be so selfish all the time. Your mother never has a minute. This trip is no fun for her at all.´

Oh, they had managed it beautifully. First they were out on the hot terrace, offering him gondoliers, then he was abandoned with Aunt Bonnie and Flor.

Even years later, when they talked about that day, and his parents wondered how they had found it in them to creep off that way, without warning or explanation; even when they were admitting it was quite the worst thing to do to a child; even then, there was an annoying taint of self-congratulation in their manner. He had been a willful, whiny, spoiled little boy, and some people, Aunt Bonnie for one, claimed that his parents were almost afraid of him. His Fairlie cousins had called him the Monster, while his mother´s relatives, more serious and concerned, often said he was being badly prepared for the blows and thumps of life, and wouldn´t thank his parents later on. As it happened, George had turned out well. At seventeen, he was a triumphant vindication for his parents of years of hell. Oh, Lord, what he had been at five, his mother liked to say, smiling, shaking her head. At seven! He had ruined their holiday in Venice that time, although they always took all the blame: they should never have gone off for the day, creeping away when his back was turned. It might have marked him for life. There was a frightening thought. Like any averted danger, they liked to bring it up. Do you remember, George, that time in Venice with Bonnie and Flor?´

Of course he remembered. He still had six little cockleshells picked up on the Lido. He remembered the brilliant parasols, askew in the hot wind, and Flor, his cousin, thin, sunburned, fourteen, sitting straight in the center of a round shadow; she sat and scooped sand with her fingers and looked out on the calm sea. George might have drowned for all she cared. He stumped about on the sand by himself, tomato-pink, fair-haired, deeply injured, rather fat. The sea was so flat, so still, so thick with warmth you might have walked on it. He gathered shells: black, brown, cream-and-pink, with minutely scalloped rims. Aunt Bonnie carried them back to Venice for him in her pockets, and now six were left. They were in a shoebox along with a hundred or so other things he would never throw away. He had another remnant of Venice, a glass bead. It came from a necklace belonging to Flor. She bought it that day, at an open stall, just in front of the place where the boat came in from the Lido. The clock on the Piazza began clanging noon, and the air filled with pigeons and with iron sound. They were filing off the boat in orderly fashion when suddenly Flor darted away and came back with the necklace in her hands. Aunt Bonnie hadn´t finished saying, Oh, do you like those glass beads, Flor? Because if you do, I´d rather get you something decent ...´ The string of the necklace broke an instant later, the first time Flor pulled it on over her head. The glass beads rolled and bounded all over the paving; pigeons fluttered after them, thinking they were grains of corn. The necklace breaking, the hotly blowing wind, excited Flor. She unstrung the beads still in her hands and flung them after the others, making a wild upward movement with her palms. Oh, stop it,´ her mother cried, for people were looking, and Flor did appear rather mad, with her hair flying and her dress blowing so that anybody could see the starched petticoat underneath, and the sunburned thighs. And poor little George, suddenly anxious about what strangers might think - this new, frantic little George ran here and there, picking up large lozenge-shaped beads from under people´s feet. When he straightened up, hands full of treasure, he saw that Florence was angry, and enjoying herself, all at once. Her hands were still out, as if she wanted to give just anyone a push. But perhaps he imagined that, for she walked quietly beside him, back to the hotel, and told him, kindly, that he could keep all the beads.

He still had one of those beads. He used to roll it about his palm before exams. There were other times, the many times he said, God, help me this once, and I´ll never bother you again,´ and it was the bead he held on to, and perhaps addressed. It was a powerful charm; a piece of a day; a reminder that someone had once wished him dead but that he was still alive.

Oh, there was no doubt that Florence had wished him dead. After lunch that day he and Flor had hung over rickety wooden railings and watched a small cargo loading what seemed in his memory to be telephone poles; although he must have been mistaken. Flor leaned forward, resting on her thin brown arms. Their faces were nearly level. She turned and looked at him, half smiling, eyes half closed, as people turn and look at each other sunbathing, on hot sand, and he was giving the smile timorously back when he met her eyes, green as water, bright with dislike, and she said, It would be easy to push someone in right here. I could push you in.´ He remembered the heavy green water closing out the sky and the weight of clouds. The clouds piled on the horizon moved forward and covered the lagoon. Once he had fallen in the pond at his grandmother´s house - the Fairlie grandmother he and Florence had in common. He was sailing a boat and took one false step. The water in this pond was kept dirty for the sake of some dirt-loving mosquito-eating Argentine fish his grandmother cherished - grown fish the size of baby minnows. These darting minnow fish came around him as he lay in the pond, unmoving, and he felt the soft tap of their heads against his cheeks. The most oppressive part of the memory was that he had lain there, passive, with the mossy water over his mouth. He must have been on his back; there was a memory of sky. The gardener heard the splash and fished him out and he was perfectly fine; not on his back at all, but on his face, splashing and floundering.

He didn´t think about this in Venice. It was much later when he placed the two memories one on the other, glass over glass. In Venice, he didn´t reply: there wasn´t time. There wasn´t even time for rage or fear. Aunt Bonnie was waiting for them after her afternoon sleep. They were to find her in the Piazza, and feed the pigeons, and listen to the band. He stamped along on fat legs behind Flor, through heat like water, head down. They stopped and weighed themselves on a public scale that told them their fortunes as well as what they weighed. Their fortunes came down on colored cardboard rectangles. George´s said, Do not refuse any invitations this evening´, and Flor´s said that she must take better care of her liver, and that she would soon be seeing someone off by train. Mama´s waiting,´ Flor said, throwing her fortune away. She grabbed his arm and made him walk faster. When they came up to Aunt Bonnie, sitting with tea and a plate of little cakes, they were both flushed with heat,...

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Autor

Mavis Gallant was born in Montreal in 1922. In the early 1940s, she briefly worked for the National Film Board before becoming a reporter. She married a musician, John Gallant, but they were divorced before the end of the decade. Gallant moved to Paris and, apart from fleeting spells in London, Spain and back in Canada, lived there for the rest of her life - although she never renounced her Canadian citizenship. From 1951, the New Yorker published more than one hundred of her stories. Her body of prize-winning work includes a dozen collections of stories, two novels, a play and numerous essays and reviews. Green Water, Green Sky was her debut novel. She died in 2014.