Vintage Contemporaries / A Multitude of Sins
Stories
(Sprache: Englisch)
Love, and our frequent failure to meet its challenges, is the subject of this wonderfully insightful collection of short stories
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Love, and our frequent failure to meet its challenges, is the subject of this wonderfully insightful collection of short stories
Klappentext zu „Vintage Contemporaries / A Multitude of Sins “
NATIONAL BESTSELLER PEN/MALAMUD AWARD WINNER A masterful collection of short stories that explores intimacy and love and their failures from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Independence Day and one of the country s best writers (San Francisco Chronicle). With remarkable insight and candor, Richard Ford examines liaisons in and out and to the sides of marriage. An illicit visit to the Grand Canyon reveals a vastness even more profound. A couple weekending in Maine try to recapture the ardor that has disappeared from their life together. And on a spring evening, a young wife tells her husband of her affair with the host of the dinner party they re about to join. The rigorous intensity Ford brings to these vivid, unforgettable dramas marks this as his most powerfully arresting book to date confirming the judgment of the New York Times Book Review that nobody now writing looks more like an American classic.
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privacyThis was at a time when my marriage was still happy.
We were living in a large city in the northeast. It was winter. February. The coldest month. I was, of course, still trying to write, and my wife was working as a translator for a small publishing company that specialized in Czech scientific papers. We had been married for ten years and were still enjoying that strange, exhilarating illusion that we had survived the worst of life's hardships.
The apartment we rented was in the old factory section on the south end of the city, the living space only a great, empty room with tall windows front and back, and almost no electric light. The natural light was all. A famous avant-garde theater director had lived in the room before and put on his jagged, nihilistic plays there, so that all the walls were painted black, and along one were still riser seats for his small disaffected audiences. Our bed--my wife's and mine--was in one dark corner where we'd arranged some of the tall, black-canvas scenery drops for our privacy. Though, of course, there was no one for us to need privacy from.
Each night when my wife came back from her work, we would go out into the cold, shining streets and find a restaurant to have our meal in. Later we would stop for an hour in a bar and have coffee or a brandy, and talk intensely about the translations my wife was working on, though never (blessedly) about the work I was by then already failing at.
Our wish, needless to say, was to stay out of the apartment as long as we could. For not only was there almost no light inside, but each night at seven the building's owner would turn off the heat, so that by ten--on our floor, the highest--it was too cold to be anywhere but in bed piled over with blankets, barely able to move. My wife, at that time, was working long hours and was always fatigued, and although sometimes we would come home a little drunk and make love in the dark bed under blankets, mostly she would fall
... mehr
straight into bed exhausted and be snoring before I could climb in beside her.
And so it happened that on many nights that winter, in the cold, large, nearly empty room, I would be awake, often wide awake from the strong coffee we'd drunk. And often I would walk the floor from window to window, looking out into the night, down to the vacant street or up into the ghostly sky that burned with the shimmery luminance of the city's buildings, buildings I couldn't even see. Often I had a blanket or sometimes two around my shoulders, and I wore the coarse heavy socks I'd kept from when I was a boy.
It was on such a cold night that--through the windows at the back of the flat, windows giving first onto an alley below, then farther across a space where a wire factory had been demolished, providing a view of buildings on the street parallel to ours--I saw, inside a long, yellow-lit apartment, the figure of a woman slowly undressing, from all appearances oblivious to the world outside the window glass.
Because of the distance, I could not see her well or at all clearly, could only see that she was small in stature and seemingly thin, with close-cropped dark hair--a petite woman in every sense. The yellow light in the room where she was seemed to blaze and made her skin bronze and shiny, and her movements, seen through the windows, appeared stylized and slightly unreal, like the movements of a silhouette or in an old motion picture.
I, though, alone in the frigid dark, wrapped in blankets that covered my head like a shawl, with my wife sleeping, oblivious, a few paces away--I was rapt by this sight. At first I moved close to the window glass, close enough to feel the cold on my cheeks. But then, sensing I might be noticed even at that distance, I slipped back into the room. Eventually I went to the corner and clicked off the small lamp my wife kept beside our bed, so that I was totally hidden in the dark. And after another few minutes I
And so it happened that on many nights that winter, in the cold, large, nearly empty room, I would be awake, often wide awake from the strong coffee we'd drunk. And often I would walk the floor from window to window, looking out into the night, down to the vacant street or up into the ghostly sky that burned with the shimmery luminance of the city's buildings, buildings I couldn't even see. Often I had a blanket or sometimes two around my shoulders, and I wore the coarse heavy socks I'd kept from when I was a boy.
It was on such a cold night that--through the windows at the back of the flat, windows giving first onto an alley below, then farther across a space where a wire factory had been demolished, providing a view of buildings on the street parallel to ours--I saw, inside a long, yellow-lit apartment, the figure of a woman slowly undressing, from all appearances oblivious to the world outside the window glass.
Because of the distance, I could not see her well or at all clearly, could only see that she was small in stature and seemingly thin, with close-cropped dark hair--a petite woman in every sense. The yellow light in the room where she was seemed to blaze and made her skin bronze and shiny, and her movements, seen through the windows, appeared stylized and slightly unreal, like the movements of a silhouette or in an old motion picture.
I, though, alone in the frigid dark, wrapped in blankets that covered my head like a shawl, with my wife sleeping, oblivious, a few paces away--I was rapt by this sight. At first I moved close to the window glass, close enough to feel the cold on my cheeks. But then, sensing I might be noticed even at that distance, I slipped back into the room. Eventually I went to the corner and clicked off the small lamp my wife kept beside our bed, so that I was totally hidden in the dark. And after another few minutes I
... weniger
Autoren-Porträt von Richard Ford
RICHARD FORD is the author of six novels and three collections of stories. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Independence Day and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction. Ford's best known titles are The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land, and Let Me Be Frank with You.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Richard Ford
- 2003, 304 Seiten, Maße: 13,2 x 20,5 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: Vintage, New York
- ISBN-10: 037572656X
- ISBN-13: 9780375726569
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
One of the country s best writers.... No one looks harder at contemporary American life, sees more, or expresses it with such hushed, deliberate care. San Francisco ChronicleHaunting.... In each of these stories ... there is something as delicate as the atmosphere in a Henry James tale.... There is also the spirit of something ineffable ... a yearning for the world to be better than we expect. Chekhov and Cheever mastered such miracles from everyday dramas. Ford is among their company. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Wrenching, intense, overflowing with compassion, A Multitude Of Sins leads us into the restless ambiguities of the heart. Dan Cryer, Newsday
"Encompass[es] the comedy and pathos and wit of our dislocated times. [and] reminds us how powerful short stories can be. Los Angeles Times
"Scorching.... These stories are wry, stark, and heartbreaking and, with the quiet moral urgency at their core, make up Ford's most stinging collection to date." Elle
"Robust.... This is vigorous writing, unfolding with the leisurely confidence that is the practiced craftsman's best illusion." The Boston Globe
"Very powerful.... Ford has a fine sense of place, be it southern, western, or foreign." The New York Review of Books
"Reasserts claims that in the hands of a lesser author would appear quaintly old-fashioned: that our lives have real importance, that there is such a thing as sin, that all of our actions have consequences. It is a testament to Ford's gifts as a writer that in A Multitude of Sins this previously well-traveled ethical terrain feels shockingly new." The New Leader
"Elegant, pristine, precise ... these stories are indisputable proof that Ford is a contemporary master of the short story." Esquire
"[Ford gives] a scope to private life that puts him in company with the master realists think of Chekhov's short fiction or the best work of F. Scott Fitzgerald." Minneapolis Star-Tribune
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