Red Weather
A Novel
(Sprache: Englisch)
Growing up in working-class Milwaukee, Yuri Balodis, a Latvian-American teenager, struggles to cope with the complexities of adolescence, including conflict with his fiercely patriotic parents, who disapprove of Yuri's relationship with Hannah Graham, the daughter of a prominent Milwaukee socialist.
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Growing up in working-class Milwaukee, Yuri Balodis, a Latvian-American teenager, struggles to cope with the complexities of adolescence, including conflict with his fiercely patriotic parents, who disapprove of Yuri's relationship with Hannah Graham, the daughter of a prominent Milwaukee socialist.
Klappentext zu „Red Weather “
The setting is Milwaukee, Wisconsin-if not America's heart, then at least its liver-home to an array of breweries and abandoned factories and down-on-their-luck Eastern European immigrants. The year is 1989.Revolutions are sweeping through the nations of the Eastern Bloc. Communism is unraveling. And nobody feels this unraveling more piquantly than Yuri Balodis-a fifteen-year-old first-generation American living with his Latvian-immigrant parents in Milwaukee's Third Ward.
It's a turbulent time. And when Yuri falls in love with Hannah Graham-the daring daughter of a prominent local socialist-chaos ensues. Within weeks, Yuri is ensnared by both Hannah and socialism. He joins the staff of the Socialist Worker . He starts quoting Lenin and Marx indiscriminately.
His parents, of course, are horrified and deeply saddened. They try to educate him, to show him why, in their opinion, communism has ruined so many lives. But Yuri is stubborn. And his ideological betrayal will have more serious consequences than breaking his parents' hearts.
Red Weather is by turns funny and bittersweet, tinged with a rueful comic sense that will instantly remind you of the absurd complications of love. Pauls Toutonghi's stunning debut novel is at once reminiscent of Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner .
From the Hardcover edition.
Lese-Probe zu „Red Weather “
1Wednesday, august 16, 1989
Milwaukee is not famous. Don't believe the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, which has claimed since 1871 that Schlitz is "the beer that made Milwaukee famous." This is an indisputable lie. As a teenage resident of downtown Milwaukee--as an inhabitant of the zip code 53202--I was as anonymous as anyone else in America. There was no fame magically coursing through my city's rusted water pipes. There was no fame in the boarded-up homes and concrete warehouses of my neighborhood.
Schlitz or no Schlitz, my family lived in a four-story building on the border of a Section 8 housing development. We inhabited one wing of the top floor. My mom posted this sign just above our mailbox, in cheerful red ink and Scotch tape:
The Balodis Family Welcome You!
Come into our home in Apartment Number 7!
Greeting!
In Latvian, Balodis means pigeon. We were a small roost of Soviet immigrant pigeons--just the three of us--huddled together amid the urban decay.
Yes, the apartment was dingy. But dingy in a hopeful way, dingy with a heart. Looking back on it fifteen years later, I recognize that it did have certain low-budget flair. There were posters tacked to the walls, or rather, 81/2-by-11 advertisements that my mom had carefully torn out of the magazines in the library. These were advertisements of many different sorts: Coca-Cola, Wrangler Jeans, the Toyota Camry. Anything with bright colors or a sense of consumer wealth. She tacked them up behind sheets of plastic, and at night the plastic would catch the lamplight and shimmer. "That, my darling," she liked to say, "is the most beautiful advertising bulletin, do you not think?"
On the main living room wall there was an enormous vainags, a yellow wreath that was made mostly from straw and dried flowers. This vainags supposedly brought good luck if you rubbed it, and so there was perpetually a trail of crumbled straw on the floor. That, coupled with the open jar of salt on the dinner
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table--salt to bring flavor and fertility to our house--made me feel something like a barnyard animal.
We had five rooms: a kitchen, a bathroom, two bedrooms, and a living room. We ate our meals at a table in the kitchen, just the three of us--at times it would get a little lonely. But to my dad, this was the extreme of luxury. "Yuri," he once told me, "for an apartment similar to this in Riga--you would have to turn in at least four neighbors to the KGB." He loved the thick, olive-colored shag carpeting. Barefoot--this is how he liked to be when he was home. His feet were enormous and hairy, and slightly redolent of decay. He liked to shuffle through the carpet, to luxuriate his decaying feet in the petroleum fibers.
Invariably, though, my dad would end up drinking on the balcony. I do believe that if the weather had been more cooperative he would have slept there, covered in his nylon sleeping bag, staring up at the stars. Some summer evenings when my parents weren't fighting they'd drink wine outside and stand uncomfortably close to each other. This would force me to hurry to my bedroom, where I'd burrow under the covers, embarrassed by their affection, and try to read with a flashlight.
The first Latvians, my dad would often tell me, came to Wisconsin in 1903. The Wisconsin Valley Land Company lured them to the farmland west of Milwaukee. They came with the Croats and the Lithuanians, the Bulgarians and the Slovaks, the Armenians and the Fins, the Poles and the Ukrainians and the Montenegrins. Part of an Eastern European exodus--a steady stream of immigrants from east of the Danube--the Latvians became factory workers and farmers and solid middle-class citizens of middle America. They founded their own Latvian Lutheran Evangelical Church--all the way out in Wa
We had five rooms: a kitchen, a bathroom, two bedrooms, and a living room. We ate our meals at a table in the kitchen, just the three of us--at times it would get a little lonely. But to my dad, this was the extreme of luxury. "Yuri," he once told me, "for an apartment similar to this in Riga--you would have to turn in at least four neighbors to the KGB." He loved the thick, olive-colored shag carpeting. Barefoot--this is how he liked to be when he was home. His feet were enormous and hairy, and slightly redolent of decay. He liked to shuffle through the carpet, to luxuriate his decaying feet in the petroleum fibers.
Invariably, though, my dad would end up drinking on the balcony. I do believe that if the weather had been more cooperative he would have slept there, covered in his nylon sleeping bag, staring up at the stars. Some summer evenings when my parents weren't fighting they'd drink wine outside and stand uncomfortably close to each other. This would force me to hurry to my bedroom, where I'd burrow under the covers, embarrassed by their affection, and try to read with a flashlight.
The first Latvians, my dad would often tell me, came to Wisconsin in 1903. The Wisconsin Valley Land Company lured them to the farmland west of Milwaukee. They came with the Croats and the Lithuanians, the Bulgarians and the Slovaks, the Armenians and the Fins, the Poles and the Ukrainians and the Montenegrins. Part of an Eastern European exodus--a steady stream of immigrants from east of the Danube--the Latvians became factory workers and farmers and solid middle-class citizens of middle America. They founded their own Latvian Lutheran Evangelical Church--all the way out in Wa
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Autoren-Porträt von Pauls Toutonghi
Pauls Toutonghi, geboren 1976 als Sohn eines ägyptischen Vaters und einer lettischen Mutter, lebt in Portland, Oregon. Seine Texte wurden bereits mehrfach ausgezeichnet.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Pauls Toutonghi
- 2007, 272 Seiten, Maße: 12,5 x 20,5 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: Three Rivers Press
- ISBN-10: 030733676X
- ISBN-13: 9780307336767
- Erscheinungsdatum: 14.01.2009
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
"Pauls Toutonghi is such an original, it seems almost blasphemous to try comparing him to others, but here goes: Gary Shteyngart meets David Sedaris meets Frank McCourt. In other words, he's whip-smart and hilarious and Red Weather is a guaranteed knockout." -Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng"Pauls Toutonghi's vibrant first novel, lyrical and rich in human insight, celebrates the essential experience of the first-generation American, whose struggle for full nativeness is always joined within the dizzying, tragic, and exuberant campaign to become an adult." -Ken Kalfus, author of The Commissariat of Enlightenment
"Pauls Toutonghi's humor is imbued with a rare generosity of spirit. And, with his debut novel, he has written a moving and entertaining love letter to youth, to family, to his heritage, and, perhaps most important, to Milwaukee, a city that is woefully underrepresented in contemporary fiction." -Adam Langer, author of Crossing California
" Red Weather introduces a wonderful new character to the world of fiction-Rudolfi Balodis-a hero, a thief, an ex-communist, an alcoholic, a janitor, a Latvian, a singer of the blues, and above all else a father. Pauls Toutonghi skillfully develops this comic tale of immigrants in Milwaukee into a first-rate novel about the conflicts, love, and ultimate understanding between fathers and sons. I laughed, I cried, I ate borscht." -Hannah Tinti, author of Animal Crackers
From the Hardcover edition.
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