The Optimists Pa: A Haunting Literary Novel of Trauma and a Photojournalist's Shattered Faith After Genocide - Softcover

Miller, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156030551 ISBN 13: 9780156030557

Verlag: Mariner, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

Clem Glass was a successful photojournalist, firm in the belief that photographs could capture truth and beauty. Until he went to Africa and witnessed the aftermath of a genocidal massacre.
Clem returns to London with his faith in human nature shattered and his life derailed. Nothing-work, love, sex-can rouse his interest and no other outlook can restore his faith. The one person Clem is able to connect with is his sister, who has made her own sudden retreat from reality into the shadows of mental illness, and he finds some peace nursing her back to health in rural Somerset. Then news arrives that offers him the chance to confront the source of his nightmares.

In The Optimists, Miller explores the perilously thin line between self-delusion and optimism.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ANDREW MILLER's novel Ingenious Pain won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the International IMPAC Award. He was short-listed for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award for his novel Oxygen.

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Clem Glass was a successful photojournalist, firm in the belief that photographs could capture truth and beauty. Until he went to Africa and witnessed the aftermath of a genocidal massacre.
Clem returns to London with his faith in human nature shattered and his life derailed. Nothing-work, love, sex- can rouse his interest and no other outlook can restore his faith. The one person Clem is able to connect with is his sister, who has made her own sudden retreat from reality into the shadows of mental illness, and he finds some peace nursing her back to health in rural Somerset. Then news arrives that offers him the chance to confront the source of his nightmares.

From the celebrated author of Ingenious Pain and Oxygen, this is a masterfully rendered novel that explores the perilously thin line between self-delusion and optimism.

Aus dem Klappentext

Clem Glass was a successful photojournalist, firm in the belief that photographs could capture truth and beauty. Until he went to Africa and witnessed the aftermath of a genocidal massacre.
Clem returns to London with his faith in human nature shattered and his life derailed. Nothing-work, love, sex- can rouse his interest and no other outlook can restore his faith. The one person Clem is able to connect with is his sister, who has made her own sudden retreat from reality into the shadows of mental illness, and he finds some peace nursing her back to health in rural Somerset. Then news arrives that offers him the chance to confront the source of his nightmares.
From the celebrated author of Ingenious Pain and Oxygen, this is a masterfully rendered novel that explores the perilously thin line between self-delusion and optimism.

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The Optimists

By Andrew Miller

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Copyright © 2005 Andrew Miller
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-15-603055-7

CHAPTER 1

After the massacre at the church in N — Clem Glass flew home to London. He put his boots and the clothes from his case into a black bin-liner. He carried the bag down to one of the dustbins in the basement courtyard, then came in and scoured the skin of his hands. The next morning he heard the shouting of the dustmen as they worked their way up the street. When he looked out later he saw the empty bins lined up by the railings. He lay on the floor, watching the light shift across the ceiling. He seemed to be lost in the space between two thoughts. A whole day passed. A night. A whole week he could not have begun to account for.

It was May, and already more summer than spring. The leaves on the roadside trees were dustless, vivid, part luminous. Until late into the evening cars crawled in the traffic, windows down, music thudding. Children out of school squabbled in the street, kicked balls against a wall, sang singing games their grandparents must have known — 'Un-der the ap-ple tree, my boy-friend said to me ...' The people in the house next door were substance abusers. They played tinny radios. In the small hours of the morning they sounded as though they were being dragged down to hell. Occasionally they threw stuff out of the windows. A fortnight after Clem's return they threw a ten-litre tin of purple paint from an upstairs window. The tin split and an inch-deep purple slick spread across two square yards of paving-stones and gutter. The sun put a crust on it but the paint below stayed moist. Soon there were purple footsteps, each print a little fainter than the last. There was even a set of purple dog tracks that circled a lamp-post and disappeared towards the Harrow Road.

The substance abusers were delighted. They gathered on the steps of their house waving bottles and laughing like the troops of some victorious rebel army. A week later they threw out a tin of orange paint, a huge broken egg yolk. Clem's Domke bag was by the door. The Nikon was in there, the Leica, leads, flash units, lenses, twenty or thirty rolls of film. Looking at the egg yolk cooking on the purple pavement he thought of how he would capture it: the response was automatic, a professional reflex, nothing more. The cameras would stay in their bag until he had the energy to decide what to do with them. Vaguely, he imagined taking them back to Kingsley's and selling them. The Leica was worth a lot; the Nikon, his old workhorse, worth something, a month's rent perhaps.

On an afternoon at the turn of the month the substance abusers were evicted. Two police vans arrived, then council workers came with steel screens and began to seal up the building. They covered the wooden door with a steel skin. The bay windows were wound in steel. By the front railings they left a small pile of personal belongings — a sleeping-bag, a hairdryer, some plastic flowers, a crutch. The substance abusers, the women in particular, roared and shook their fists. Clem watched them from his window on the first floor. He admired their passion; he wondered if they knew how futile it was, or if it was that, the pointlessness, that was the root of their passion. When it was over, the council workers left and the police climbed back into their vans. The evicted abusers, still gesticulating frantically, stumped off in twos and threes towards the various shelters and off-licences of the parish. A few of the locals came out and there was some laughter. At dusk, Clem went down to the street. The Grove was almost quiet. He looked at the house, then crouched and ran his fingers over the remains of the paint. Its surface now was smooth and hard as varnish, slightly uneven, mostly smooth. Then, at the edge of the slick, where the paint gave way to the midgreys of paving-stone, he noticed the faint but very precise skeletal outline of a leaf and, using the flame of his lighter, found others there, scattered around it, thread-delicate prints of dead leaves, half hidden, like drawings under tissue paper. He tried to work out how such images could possibly have been fixed there. Last autumn's rain; last autumn's sun. The weight of thousands of pressing feet. The energy released by decaying matter. The slight absorbency of stone. He examined them until his lighter was too hot to use any more. He remembered Fox Talbot's calotype of a leaf; a world-amazing picture: calotype from the Greek for beauty. He knelt. Ahead of him the metal house glittered in the lamplight. He bowed his head. Would something happen now? Could something be let go of? It was like waiting to be sick. He clenched his teeth, touched the stubborn dryness of his eyes. Behind him, a pair of children spying on him from between two parked cars began to giggle. He struggled to his feet, went up the stairs to his flat, and lay again on the living-room carpet.

At some point after nightfall the phone on his desk started to ring. After five rings the answer-machine came on. His message said he was out of the country. The machine bleeped. There was a pause in which Clem thought he could hear the crying of seabirds, then his father said, 'It's just me. Call when you're back, will you?' Another pause, then: 'Thank you.'

CHAPTER 2

In T-shirt, jeans, old brogues, he went on walks that lasted most of the day. The direction was not important. Turn left and he came to the houses of the rich; to the right was the railway bridge, the canal, the council blocks, the supermarket. Under the green girders of the bridge the rails ran like a firebreak through the heart of the city. In the moments when no trains were passing the scene was oddly tranquil. There were young trees at the verges of the track, and tough-looking bushes with gaudy flowers that grew out of the embankment walls or thrust their leaves through the ballast stones. It was not unusual to look down on a half-dozen butterflies, drifting over the tracks like wastepaper.

The canal he learned to avoid. The water was too still, too black: he was afraid of what might appear in it. It would not take much. A plastic bag crumpled into the form of a face. A piece of driftwood mistaken for a hand.

He ate wherever he happened to find himself, whatever was near. A Portuguese place just off the Grove, a Turkish café in Notting Hill, a couscous restaurant on Golborne Road. He ate, paid, spoke to no one other than the waiters. Each afternoon he went to a newsagent to look at the front pages of the papers. In the time before — and this was how he thought of his life before the church at N —, 'the time before'— he had read two, sometimes three newspapers a day, valuing the sense that he knew what was going on in the world and that it was possible to know. Since coming back the news did not convince him as it used to, not because he imagined they were making it up (though he had been around journalists long enough to know that that was not unusual) but because the world they described no longer matched the one he carried in his head, a place it was hard to say anything rational about at all. He looked now only to see if there was a story from Africa, from the aftermath of the killing, from the fall-out. If there was, he scanned for a mention of the Bourgmestre, but was always more relieved than disappointed when he found nothing. He wasn't ready yet for Sylvestre Ruzindana. He was a long way from being ready.

He became one of the people who go to the cinema in the middle of the day. He had an ideal film in mind, something with a few songs, an unimportant...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Mariner
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0156030551
• ISBN 13: 9780156030557
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 324
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Product Safety Manager; enquiries@harpercollins.ie; ; HarperCollins, Macken House, 39/40 Mayor Street Upper; Dublin 1; D01 C9W8; Irland