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«Mes croyances sont limitées, mais elles sont violentes. Je crois à la possibilité du royaume restreint. Je crois à l’amour» écrivait récemment Michel Houellebecq.
Le narrateur de Sérotonine approuverait sans réserve. Son récit traverse une France qui piétine ses traditions, banalise ses villes, détruit ses campagnes au bord de la révolte. Il raconte sa vie d’ingénieur agronome, son amitié pour un aristocrate agriculteur (un inoubliable personnage de roman – son double inversé), l’échec des idéaux de leur jeunesse, l’espoir peut-être insensé de retrouver une femme perdue.
Ce roman sur les ravages d’un monde sans bonté, sans solidarité, aux mutations devenues incontrôlables, est aussi un roman sur le remords et le regret.
Michel Houellebecq
Sérotonine
Littérature française
Flammarion
À paraître le 04/01/2019
352 pages
139 x 210 mm
Broché
EAN : 9782081471757
ISBN : 9782081471757
€ 22,00
# Nouveau roman
Michel Houellebecq
Sérotonine
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The Blind Spot
“You’ve just come back from Adelaide’s funeral, haven’t you?” said Sir Lulworth to his nephew; “I suppose it was very like most other funerals?”
“I’ll tell you all about it at lunch,” said Egbert.
“You’ll do nothing of the sort. It wouldn’t be respectful either to your great-aunt’s memory or to the lunch. We begin with Spanish olives, then a borshch, then more olives and a bird of some kind, and a rather enticing Rhenish wine, not at all expensive as wines go in this country, but still quite laudable in its way. Now there’s absolutely nothing in that menu that harmonises in the least with the subject of your great-aunt Adelaide or her funeral. She was a charming woman, and quite as intelligent as she had any need to be, but somehow she always reminded me of an English cook’s idea of a Madras curry.”
“She used to say you were frivolous,” said Egbert. Something in his tone suggested that he rather endorsed the verdict.
“I believe I once considerably scandalised her by declaring that clear soup was a more important factor in life than a clear conscience. She had very little sense of proportion. By the way, she made you her principal heir, didn’t she?”
“Yes,” said Egbert, “and executor as well. It’s in that connection that I particularly want to speak to you.”
“Business is not my strong point at any time,” said Sir Lulworth, “and certainly not when we’re on the immediate threshold of lunch.”
“It isn’t exactly business,” explained Egbert, as he followed his uncle into the dining-room.
“It’s something rather serious. Very serious.”
“Then we can’t possibly speak about it now,” said Sir Lulworth; “no one could talk seriously during a borshch. A beautifully constructed borshch, such as you are going to experience presently, ought not only to banish conversation but almost to annihilate thought. Later on, when we arrive at the second stage of olives, I shall be quite ready to discuss that new book on Borrow, or, if you prefer it, the present situation in the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg. But I absolutely decline to talk anything approaching business till we have finished with the bird.”
For the greater part of the meal Egbert sat in an abstracted silence, the silence of a man whose mind is focussed on one topic. When the coffee stage had been reached he launched himself suddenly athwart his uncle’s reminiscences of the Court of Luxemburg.
“I think I told you that great-aunt Adelaide had made me her executor. There wasn’t very much to be done in the way of legal matters, but I had to go through her papers.”
“That would be a fairly heavy task in itself. I should imagine there were reams of family letters.”
“Stacks of them, and most of them highly uninteresting. There was one packet, however, which I thought might repay a careful perusal. It was a bundle of correspondence from her brother Peter.”
“The Canon of tragic memory,” said Lulworth.
“Exactly, of tragic memory, as you say; a tragedy that has never been fathomed.”
“Probably the simplest explanation was the correct one,” said Sir Lulworth; “he slipped on the stone staircase and fractured his skull in falling.”
Egbert shook his head. “The medical evidence all went to prove that the blow on the head was struck by some one coming up behind him. A wound caused by violent contact with the steps could not possibly have been inflicted at that angle of the skull. They experimented with a dummy figure falling in every conceivable position.”
“But the motive?” exclaimed Sir Lulworth; “no one had any interest in doing away with him, and the number of people who destroy Canons of the Established Church for the mere fun of killing must be extremely limited. Of course there are individuals of weak mental balance who do that sort of thing, but they seldom conceal their handiwork; they are more generally inclined to parade it.”
“His cook was under suspicion,” said Egbert shortly.
“I know he was,” said Sir Lulworth, “simply because he was about the only person on the premises at the time of the tragedy. But could anything be sillier than trying to fasten a charge of murder on to Sebastien? He had nothing to gain, in fact, a good deal to lose, from the death of his employer. The Canon was paying him quite as good wages as I was able to offer him when I took him over into my service. I have since raised them to something a little more in accordance with his real worth, but at the time he was glad to find a new place without troubling about an increase of wages. People were fighting rather shy of him, and he had no friends in this country. No; if anyone in the world was interested in the prolonged life and unimpaired digestion of the Canon it would certainly be Sebastien.”
“People don’t always weigh the consequences of their rash acts,” said Egbert, “otherwise there would be very few murders committed. Sebastien is a man of hot temper.”
“He is a southerner,” admitted Sir Lulworth; “to be geographically exact I believe he hails from the French slopes of the Pyrenees. I took that into consideration when he nearly killed the gardener’s boy the other day for bringing him a spurious substitute for sorrel. One must always make allowances for origin and locality and early environment; ‘Tell me your longitude and I’ll know what latitude to allow you,’ is my motto.”
“There, you see,” said Egbert, “he nearly killed the gardener’s boy.”
“My dear Egbert, between nearly killing a gardener’s boy and altogether killing a Canon there is a wide difference. No doubt you have often felt a temporary desire to kill a gardener’s boy; you have never given way to it, and I respect you for your self-control. But I don’t suppose you have ever wanted to kill an octogenarian Canon. Besides, as far as we know, there had never been any quarrel or disagreement between the two men. The evidence at the inquest brought that out very clearly.”
“Ah!” said Egbert, with the air of a man coming at last into a deferred inheritance of conversational importance, “that is precisely what I want to speak to you about.”
He pushed away his coffee cup and drew a pocket-book from his inner breast-pocket. From the depths of the pocket-book he produced an envelope, and from the envelope he extracted a letter, closely written in a small, neat handwriting.
“One of the Canon’s numerous letters to Aunt Adelaide,” he explained, “written a few days before his death. Her memory was already failing when she received it, and I daresay she forgot the contents as soon as she had read it; otherwise, in the light of what subsequently happened, we should have heard something of this letter before now. If it had been produced at the inquest I fancy it would have made some difference in the course of affairs. The evidence, as you remarked just now, choked off suspicion against Sebastien by disclosing an utter absence of anything that could be considered a motive or provocation for the crime, if crime there was.”
“Oh, read the letter,” said Sir Lulworth impatiently.
“It’s a long rambling affair, like most of his letters in his later years,” said Egbert. “I’ll read the part that bears immediately on the mystery.
“‘I very much fear I shall have to get rid of Sebastien. He cooks divinely, but he has the temper of a fiend or an anthropoid ape, and I am really in bodily fear of him. We had a dispute the other day as to the correct sort of lunch to be served on Ash Wednesday, and I got so irritated and annoyed at his conceit and obstinacy that at last I threw a cupful of coffee in his face and called him at the same time an impudent jackanapes. Very little of the coffee went actually in his face, but I have never seen a human being show such deplorable lack of self-control. I laughed at the threat of killing me that he spluttered out in his rage, and thought the whole thing would blow over, but I have several times since caught him scowling and muttering in a highly unpleasant fashion, and lately I have fancied that he was dogging my footsteps about the grounds, particularly when I walk of an evening in the Italian Garden.’
“It was on the steps in the Italian Garden that the body was found,” commented Egbert, and resumed reading.
“‘I daresay the danger is imaginary; but I shall feel more at ease when he has quitted my service.’”
Egbert paused for a moment at the conclusion of the extract; then, as his uncle made no remark, he added: “If lack of motive was the only factor that saved Sebastien from prosecution I fancy this letter will put a different complexion on matters.”
“Have you shown it to anyone else?” asked Sir Lulworth, reaching out his hand for the incriminating piece of paper.
“No,” said Egbert, handing it across the table, “I thought I would tell you about it first. Heavens, what are you doing?”
Egbert’s voice rose almost to a scream. Sir Lulworth had flung the paper well and truly into the glowing centre of the grate. The small, neat handwriting shrivelled into black flaky nothingness.
“What on earth did you do that for?” gasped Egbert. “That letter was our one piece of evidence to connect Sebastien with the crime.”
“That is why I destroyed it,” said Sir Lulworth.
“But why should you want to shield him?” cried Egbert; “the man is a common murderer.”
“A common murderer, possibly, but a very uncommon cook.”
The Blind Spot
From ‘Beasts and Super-Beasts’
by Saki (H. H. Munro)
(1870 – 1916)
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`Als we China hebben gezien, zullen we pas begrijpen hoe nietig het hier allemaal is’, zegt Tijger.
`Hoe klein het dorp is, hoe smal de beek, hoe de fabriek stinkt.’
`Jij hoeft helemaal niet op reis te gaan om dat te ontdekken’, zegt Thija. `Jij weet het nu al.’
`Na de zomervakantie gaan we ieder naar een andere school’, zegt Tijger.
`Het is ellendig’, zegt Mels. `Ik wil helemaal niet naar een andere school. We moeten bij elkaar blijven.’
`We hebben er niets over te zeggen’, zegt Tijger. `Het is allemaal al beslist.’
`Stom’, zegt Thija. `Ik zal jullie maanden niet zien.’
`Dat is het ergst van alles,’ zegt Mels, `dat jij naar kostschool moet.’
`Ik wil het niet. Mijn váder wil het.’
`Ons vragen ze niets’, zegt Mels.
Ton van Reen: Het diepste blauw (085)
wordt vervolgd
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Qui suis-je ?
Qui suis-je ?
D’où je viens ?
Je suis Antonin Artaud
et que je le dise
comme je sais le dire
immédiatement
vous verrez mon corps actuel
voler en éclats
et se ramasser
sous dix mille aspects
notoires
un corps neuf
où vous ne pourrez
plus jamais
m’oublier.
Antonin Artaud
Poème
Qui suis-je ?
(1896 – 1948)
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Deathwatch, Jean Genet‘s earliest, shortest and most formally straightforward play, was first performed in Paris in 1949.
It retains an intense power and makes an excellent introduction to his later dramas – The Maids, The Balcony, The Blacks, The Screens. The French text of Deathwatch, published by Gallimard, was extensively altered by Genet during rehearsal; and Bernard Frechtman’s translation is of the final ‘performance’ version, which supersedes the original published text.Three convicts share a cramped prison cell.
There is no question as to which of them is the dominant dog in the pack: Green Eyes (Yeux-Verts) has brutally murdered a woman and is to be executed.
Lefranc and the younger novice-like Maurice are inside for less grave crimes. But both of them covet Green Eyes’ attention, baiting each other in the process, a duel that drives inexorably toward violence
Three young convicts share a cell. Locked into a world of dangerous rivalries, criminals Lefranc and Maurice compete for the attention of the charismatic condemned man, Green-Eyes.
Informed by his own experience in French prisons, Jean Genet’s first play, Deathwatch is an explosive exploration of the inversion of moral order.
Genet was one of the most prominent and provocative writers of the twentieth century.
Jean Genet’s Deathwatch premiered in this translation by David Rudkin with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987 and was revived at the Print Room, London, in April 2016.
Jean Genet was born in Paris in 1910. An illegitimate child who never knew his parents, he was abandoned to the Public Assistance Authorities. He was ten when he was sent to a reformatory for stealing; thereafter he spent time in the prisons of nearly every country he visited in thirty years of prowling through the European underworld. With ten convictions for theft in France to his credit he was, the eleventh time, condemned to life imprisonment. Eventually he was granted a pardon by President Auriol as a result of appeals from France’s leading artists and writers led by Jean Cocteau. His first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, was written while he was in prison, followed by Miracle of the Rose, the autobiographical The Thief’s Journal, Querelle of Brest and Funeral Rites. He wrote six plays: The Balcony, The Blacks, The Screens, The Maids, Deathwatch and Splendid’s (the manuscript of which was rediscovered only in 1993). Jean Genet died in 1986.
Deathwatch
by Jean Genet
English
Translated by David Rudkin
Play
Faber & Faber
Paperback
64 pages
2016
ISBN 9780571332618
£9.99
# more books
Deathwatch by Jean Genet
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The Balkans, in particular the turbulent ex-Yugoslav territory, have been among the most important world regions in Noam Chomsky’s political reflections and activism for decades.
His articles, public talks, and correspondence have provided a critical voice on political and social issues crucial not only to the region but the entire international community, including “humanitarian intervention,” the relevance of international law in today’s politics, media manipulations, and economic crisis as a means of political control.
This volume provides a comprehensive survey of virtually all of Chomsky’s texts and public talks that focus on the region of the former Yugoslavia, from the 1970s to the present. With numerous articles and interviews, this collection presents a wealth of materials appearing in book form for the first time along with reflections on events twenty-five years after the official end of communist Yugoslavia and the beginning of the war in Bosnia.
The book opens with a personal and wide-ranging preface by Andrej Grubačić that affirms the ongoing importance of Yugoslav history and identity, providing a context for understanding Yugoslavia as an experiment in self-management, antifascism, and mutlethnic coexistence.
Noam Chomsky (1928) is Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston. A member of the American Academy of Science, he has published widely in both linguistics and current affairs. His books include At War with Asia, Towards a New Cold War, Fateful Triangle: The U. S., Israel and the Palestinians, Necessary Illusions, Hegemony or Survival, Deterring Democracy, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy and Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.
Title: Yugoslavia: Peace, War, and Dissolution
Author: Noam Chomsky
Edited by Davor Džalto
Preface by Andrej Grubačić
Subjects: Politics / History-Europe
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 978-1-62963-442-5
Published: 04/2018
Language: English
Format: Paperback
Size: 6×9
240 pages
$15.63
# new books
Noam Chomsky
Yugoslavia: Peace, War, and Dissolution
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Vanaf 30 november 2018 tot 28 april 2019 presenteert het Bonnefantenmuseum het omvangrijke retrospectief Someone is in my House van de Amerikaanse kunstenaar David Lynch.
Hoewel David Lynch onmiskenbaar een spilfiguur is in de internationale film- en tv-wereld, is zijn werk als beeldend kunstenaar veel minder bekend. Dat is op zijn minst vreemd, aangezien Lynch zelf altijd heeft benadrukt dat hij zichzelf vóór alles ziet als beeldend kunstenaar.
Een beeldend kunstenaar die tijdens zijn studie aan de kunstacademie toevallig in aanraking kwam met het medium film, waarmee de basis gelegd werd voor zijn carrière als filmregisseur.
Naast zijn werk als regisseur is Lynch altijd actief gebleven als beeldend kunstenaar en heeft hij in de afgelopen decennia een grenzeloos oeuvre gecreëerd van onder andere schilderijen, tekeningen, litho’s, foto’s, lampsculpturen, muziek en installaties.
Een oeuvre dat tot nu toe nog maar zelden is belicht en in musea werd getoond. Met ruim 500 werken brengt het Bonnefantenmuseum niet alleen de eerste Nederlandse museumpresentatie van Lynch’ beeldend oeuvre, maar ook de grootste overzichtstentoonstelling ooit.
David Lynch: Someone is in my House
30.11.2018 – 28.04.2019
David Lynch, beeldend kunstenaar
Anders dan het werk van Lynch (1946, Missoula, Montana, VS), vol duister geweld en seksualiteit, doet vermoeden, is de kindertijd van de kunstenaar en filmmaker gelukkig en liefdevol.
Lynch groeit op met reislustige ouders en leidt op jonge leeftijd een nomadenbestaan, een voor hem idyllische en veilige omgeving. Van jongs af aan aangemoedigd om zich creatief te ontplooien – kleurboeken waren uit den boze, eigen verbeelding gebruiken was het credo – komt hij uiteindelijk op de Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia terecht om schilderkunst te studeren.
Hier ontwikkelt Lynch zijn artistieke vocabulaire en thema’s die blijvend aanwezig zullen zijn in zijn werk. En hier ligt de voedingsbodem voor zijn eerste mixed-media installatie met stop-motion film Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1967), die een opmaat vormde naar zijn eerste speelfilm, Eraserhead (1977). De rest is (film)geschiedenis en inmiddels zijn Lynch’ films moderne klassiekers.
Lynch’ kunstenaarschap loopt als een rode draad door zijn leven en films. Hij is gedurende zijn vijftigjarige carrière altijd blijven tekenen en schilderen, ook als er vanwege zijn werk als filmregisseur weinig tijd was om in het atelier door te brengen.
“I miss painting when I’m not painting”, zegt Lynch zelf in de recente biografie Room to Dream. * David Lynch en Kristine McKenna. Room to Dream. Edinburgh, Canongate Books, 2018, p. 301
In samenwerking met David Lynch toont het Bonnefanten een indrukwekkend artistiek overzicht van het veelzijdige kunstenaarschap van Lynch.
De tentoonstelling omvat schilderijen, foto’s, tekeningen, litho’s en aquarellen uit de jaren 60 tot heden, unieke tekeningen op luciferboekjes uit de jaren 70, schetsboektekeningen uit de jaren 60/70/80, zwart-wit foto’s uit verschillende periodes, waaronder de befaamde Snow Men-fotoserie (1993), cartoons uit de serie The Angriest Dog in the World (1982-1993), audiowerken én een aantal kortfilms uit 1968-2015.
Voor het eerst sinds het ontstaan in 1967, zal ook het allesbepalende academiewerk Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) in een museumtentoonstelling te zien zijn.
Publicatie
Bij de tentoonstelling verschijnt een rijk geïllustreerde monografie met tekstbijdragen van curator Stijn Huijts (artistiek directeur Bonnefantenmuseum), Kristine McKenna (journalist en curator, Verenigde Staten), Petra Giloy-Hirtz (schrijver en curator, Duitsland) en Michael Chabon (schrijver, Verenigde Staten). De publicatie is verkrijgbaar in het Nederlands, Engels en Frans en wordt uitgegeven door Uitgeverij Hannibal in samenwerking met Prestel.
Tentoonstellingsteaser
In aanloop naar zijn omvangrijke retrospectief Someone is in my House, maakte Lynch speciaal voor het Bonnefanten een unieke tentoonstellingsteaser. In deze typisch Lynchiaanse kortfilm, met in de hoofdrol naast Lynch zelf de ‘White Monkey’ – een personage dat eerder opdook in Lynch’ Weird daily weather report – nodigt hij de kijker uit om naar het Bonnefanten te komen.
Flankerend programma
Parallel aan de tentoonstelling is er in samenwerking met Lumière Cinema in Maastricht een compleet filmretrospectief gewijd aan de films en het leven van David Lynch met filmvertoningen, documentaires en lezingen over de filmmaker.
Daarnaast brengt EYE filmmuseum drie digitaal gerestaureerde films opnieuw uit in de filmtheaters in heel het land. Voor meer informatie: https://www.eyefilm.nl/themas/gerestaureerde-david-lynch-klassiekers
De philharmonie zuidnederland werkte met de Poolse componist Marek Zebrowski aan een compositie en uitvoering van Music for David, een strijkkwartet dat Zebrowski in 2015 componeerde als een hommage aan Lynch, die op zijn beurt de korte animatie film Pożar (Fire) maakte bij Zebrowski’s compositie. Het muziekstuk zal een aantal keren live (op zaal) bij de film ten gehore worden gebracht.
# meer informatie op website Bonnefantenmuseum
# Expositie & publicatie
David Lynch: Someone is in my House
30.11.2018 – 28.04.2019
• photos: jef van kempen
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Undeterred by the embarrassing success of his ridiculous four-volume verse epic The Limerickiad, award-winning cartoonist Martin Rowson continues to lower the tone with a series of metrical rants and cautionary tales about contemporary political and literary life.
Accompanied by the ghosts of Chesterton, Shelley, Burns and Browning, Rowson casts his gaze across the satirical spectrum from governments, gammon-faced racists, class war, nationalism and the harsh realities of child rearing to the world of literary festivals, international book fairs, best-sellers, book-launches, holiday reading lists, bottom lines, liggers, bloggers, blaggers, book-signings and book-burnings.
Martin Rowson is an award-winning cartoonist whose work appears regularly in The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday, The Daily Mirror, The Morning Star and many other publications.
His books include graphic adaptations of The Waste Land, Tristram Shandy and Gulliver’s Travels. Among his other books are Snatches, The Dog Allusion, Fuck, Stuff (long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize) and four volumes of The Limerickiad. His most recent book is The Communist Manifesto: A Graphic Novel.
Martin Rowson
Pastrami Faced Racist
Published by Smokestack Books
Release date: 01 Nov. 2018
Language: English
Paperback
84 pages
ISBN-10: 1999827686
ISBN-13: 978-1999827687
£8.99
# new books
Martin Rowson
Pastrami Faced Racist
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“And I? May I say nothing, my lord?” With these words, Oscar Wilde’s courtroom trials came to a close. The lord in question, High Court justice Sir Alfred Wills, sent Wilde to the cells, sentenced to two years in prison with hard labor for the crime of “gross indecency” with other men.
As cries of “shame” emanated from the gallery, the convicted aesthete was roundly silenced.
But he did not remain so. Behind bars and in the period immediately after his release, Wilde wrote two of his most powerful works—the long autobiographical letter De Profundis and an expansive best-selling poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
In The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde, Nicholas Frankel collects these and other prison writings, accompanied by historical illustrations and his rich facing-page annotations. As Frankel shows, Wilde experienced prison conditions designed to break even the toughest spirit, and yet his writings from this period display an imaginative and verbal brilliance left largely intact.
Wilde also remained politically steadfast, determined that his writings should inspire improvements to Victorian England’s grotesque regimes of punishment. But while his reformist impulse spoke to his moment, Wilde also wrote for eternity.
At once a savage indictment of the society that jailed him and a moving testimony to private sufferings, Wilde’s prison writings—illuminated by Frankel’s extensive notes—reveal a very different man from the famous dandy and aesthete who shocked and amused the English-speaking world.
Nicholas Frankel is Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University.
“Frankel provides a valuable service in comprehensively editing these works for a fresh generation of readers.” — Joseph Bristow, University of California, Los Angeles
The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Edited by Nicholas Frankel
Harvard University Press
Paperback
408 pages
Publication: May 2018
ISBN 9780674984387
€17.00
# more books
The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde
-Clemency Petition to the Home Secretary, 2 July 1896
-De Profundis
-Letter to the Daily Chronicle, 27 May 1897
-The Ballad of Reading Gaol
-Letter to the Daily Chronicle, 23 March 1898
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What does it mean to fight for a ‘mother country’ that refuses to accept you as one of its own?
Britain’s First World War poets changed the way we view military conflict and had a deep impact on the national psyche. Yet the stories of the 15,600 volunteers who signed up to the British West Indian Regiment remain largely unknown. Sadly, these citizens of empire were not embraced as compatriots on an equal footing. Instead they faced prejudice, injustice and discrimination while being confined to menial and auxiliary work, regardless of rank or status.
As a collaborative project, co-commissioned by 14-18 NOW, BBC Contains Strong Language and the British Council, Unwritten Poems invited contemporary Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora poets to write into that vexed space, and explore the nature of war and humanity – as it exists now, and at a time when Britain’s colonial ambitions were still at a peak. Unwritten: Caribbean Poems After the First World War is a result of that provocation and also includes new material written for broadcast and live performance.
Unwritten:
Caribbean Poems After the First World War
by Karen McCarthy Woolf (Author, Editor)
With contributions from Jay Bernard, Malika Booker, Kat Francois, Jay T. John, Anthony Joseph, Ishion Hutchinson, Charnell Lucien, Vladimir Lucien, Rachel Manley, Tanya Shirley and Karen McCarthy Woolf.
Paperback
Publisher: Nine Arches Press
4 Oct. 2018
Poetry
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1911027298
ISBN-13: 978-1911027294
Product Dimensions: 16.3 x 1 x 23 cm
160 pages
Price: £14.99
# new book
Caribbean Poems After the First World War
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Hij heeft geen idee waar Jacob begraven is. Toen heeft hij er niet naar gevraagd.
Hebben ze met z’n drieën nooit bloemen willen brengen naar zijn graf? Hij weet het niet meer. Er was te veel afstand tussen de zigeuners en de dorpelingen. Ze werden gedoogd, daar hield het mee op. Je ging er niet mee om. Dat wilden ze zelf waarschijnlijk ook niet. Ze bleven onder elkaar.
Hij rijdt door naar huis. Het is bijna twaalf uur.
Met moeite kan hij bij de bel.
Lizet doet open.
`Dat werd tijd. Ik zit op je te wachten.’
`Het is nog geen twaalf uur.’
`Ik wil de boel aan kant hebben. Hoe was het?’
`Geen mens. Jij niet. Niemand.’
Over die hoerenmadam praat hij niet.
Hij rijdt door naar de keuken. De tafel is gedekt. In een hoek staat de kinderwagen. De baby van zijn dochter slaapt. De kat ligt in het mandje onder in de wagen.
Lizet legt een beboterde snee brood op zijn bord en doet er een omelet op.
Hij neemt een hap. Het ei is koud. Hij schuift het bord terug.
`Is het niet goed?’
`Het smaakt niet als het koud is.’
Buiten slaat de torenklok twaalf uur. Hij rolt zijn stoel terug.
`Eet je niet?’
`Nee.’
`Doe ik daar al die moeite voor?’
`Vanochtend gooide je mijn koffie weg. Nu is het ei koud.’
`Je was beter af in dat revalidatiecentrum’, gooit ze eruit.
`Ik ben blij dat je het gezegd hebt.’
`Zo bedoel ik het niet.’
`Je krijgt je zin.’
`Dram niet zo door.’
`Ik geef je gelijk.’
Ze weet dat ze te ver is gegaan. Nu heeft hij haar in de tang, ook al is het maar voor een paar tellen.
Met de lift gaat hij naar boven. Hij kijkt niet naar de schilderijen van de Wijer bij de trap. Hij wil niets zien.
Als hij van buiten komt, ziet hij elke keer hoe klein zijn kamer is. Ze lijkt steeds kleiner te worden. Een cel. Hij wil hier weg.
Hij kijkt niet in de spiegel. Hij wil zijn kwade hoofd niet zien.
Zijn bed is niet opgemaakt. Hij sluit zijn ogen en houdt de handen voor zijn oren, om de woede in hem te bedaren. Hij moet rustig worden. Aanvallen van woede kunnen het tekort aan bloed in zijn hoofd verergeren, zodat hij een aanval van verwardheid kan krijgen. Hij wil het niet. Hij moet overeind blijven. Als hij een aanval krijgt, laat ze hem in zijn vet gaar koken. Dan komt ze niet eens naar zijn kamer om hem te verzorgen.
Ze heeft hem al eens een hele nacht in zijn rolstoel laten zitten, voor straf. Hij was zo duizelig dat hij niet bij machte was om zelf in bed te komen. Toen hij naar het toilet ging, was hij naast de pot gevallen. Pas toen had ze hem geholpen. De vernedering had meer pijn gedaan dan de blauwe plekken.
Toch moet hij eventjes gaan liggen. Plat liggen is het best voor de bloedtoevoer naar zijn hoofd. Hij glijdt vanuit de rolstoel op bed en valt achterover. Het is gelukt. Hij rukt de plaid uit de rolstoel en trekt die over zijn hoofd. Donker verzacht zijn woede.
In huis is het stil. Zijn woorden hebben pijn gedaan, daar is hij zeker van. Hij heeft het niet gewild, maar hij heeft het ook niet kunnen voorkomen.
Hoe moet hij hier weg? Nergens zitten ze te wachten op een man die thuis nog een vrouw en dochter heeft die hem kunnen verzorgen. Maar de grens is bereikt.
Kan hij zijn manuscripten meenemen? Al die mappen? Het zijn stofnesten. Daar hebben ze de pest aan in zo’n verpleeghuis.
Hij zal het dorp missen. En de kleine rivier. De kleuren en de geuren van de Wijer.
Ton van Reen: Het diepste blauw (084)
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No writer plunged more vigorously into the chaotic energies of the 1960s than Norman Mailer, fearlessly revolutionizing literary norms and genres to capture the decade’s political, social, and sexual explosions.
Declaring himself to have “the mind of an outlaw,” he adhered closely to his own vision of what it meant to be a writer.
In a way uniquely his own, he merged the public and the private, the personal and the political, taking risks with every sentence. Here, for the first time in a single volume, are four of his most extraordinary works.
War hero, television star, existential hipster, seducer, murderer: such is Stephen Rojack, the hero of An American Dream (1965), Mailer’s hallucinatory voyage through the dark night of an America awash in money, sex, and violence.
Mailer challenged himself by serializing the book while he was still writing it, an approach he compared to “ten-second chess.” The result is a fever dream of a novel, navigating through the most extreme fears and fantasies of a culture hooked on power.
In Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) a motor-mouthed eighteen-year-old Texan on the eve of military service recounts an exclusive grizzly bear hunt in Alaska with an obscene exuberance that finally comes close to horror. Although the word “Vietnam” appears only on the book’s final page, the whole work is imbued with a sense of frantic bloodthirstiness that exposes the macho roots of the war.
With the acclaimed “non-fiction novel” The Armies of the Night (1968), an account of the October 1967 anti-Vietnam War march on the Pentagon, Mailer brought a new approach to journalism, casting himself (“he would have been admirable, except that he was an absolute egomaniac, a Beast”) as a player in the drama as he reported, alongside a stunning gallery of student activists, politicians, intellectuals, and policemen. Winning both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, The Armies of the Night immediately established itself as an essential record of its moment.
In Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968) Mailer continued his eyewitness chronicle of American political life, embedding himself at the 1968 Republican and Democratic presidential conventions and drawing unforgettable portraits of Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Lyndon Johnson, Eugene McCarthy, and many others. His reading of the nation’s political undercurrents continues to surprise with its relevance.
J. Michael Lennon, editor, emeritus professor of English at Wilkes University, is Norman Mailer’s archivist, editor, and authorized biographer, and president of the Norman Mailer Society. His books include Norman Mailer: A Double Life (2013) and Selected Letters of Norman Mailer (2014).
This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.
Norman Mailer: Four Books of the 1960s (LOA #305):
-An American Dream
-Why Are We in Vietnam?
-The Armies of the Night
-Miami and the Siege of Chicago
Hardcover
March 13, 2018
by Norman Mailer (Author)
J. Michael Lennon (Editor)
937 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59853-558-7
Library of America Series
N° 305
LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House
List Price: $45.00
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
# new books
Norman Mailer:
Four Books of the 1960s (LOA #305):
-An American Dream
-Why Are We in Vietnam?
-The Armies of the Night
-Miami and the Siege of Chicago
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More in: - Book Lovers, - Book Stories, Archive M-N, Art & Literature News, Norman Mailer, WAR & PEACE
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