Mount Chicago: A Novel - Softcover

Levin, Adam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593466721 ISBN 13: 9780593466728

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

From the award-winning author of Bubblegum and The Instructions, a daring new novel about the irony, the humor, and the heartbreak of survivorship.

"Adam Levin is one of our wildest writers and our funniest." –George Saunders, bestselling, award-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo

A one-in-ten-billion natural disaster devastates Chicago. A Jewish comedian, his most devoted fan, and the city’s mayor must struggle to move forward while the world—quite literally—caves beneath their feet.  With this polyphonic tale of Chicago-style politics and political correctness, stand-up comedy and Jewish identity, celebrity, drugs, and animal psychology, Levin has constructed a monument to laughter, love, art, and resilience in an age of spectacular loss.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ADAM LEVIN is the author of Bubblegum, The Instructions, and Hot Pink. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and Playboy. He has been a New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award winner, a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and a National Jewish Book Award finalist. A longtime Chicagoan, Levin currently lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Carrying Pictures of Chairman Mao  
 
None of this happened. None of it will. The events I’ll describe, most of which will be set in the early twenty-twenties, will all be described in the late twenty-teens. The characters who those events will affect do not exist outside these pages, not even those characters who’ll strongly resemble certain people I know, and not even in those cases where the characters resembling people I know will have the same names as the people they’ll resemble. It’ll all be made up. I’m making it up.
 
No one I’ve been close with has ever died. I’ve met a couple Schutzes, but never an Apter. Not a single Gladman. I have never had more than $106,019.00. I have usually had less than $4,000.00. Today—February 2, 2018—I have a little less than $30,000. The seventeenth of November, 2021, will not fall on a Sunday, but a Wednesday. The Rainbo Club doesn’t serve Corona. Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds wasn’t released till 2009. The Grant Park Lollapalooza Festival never takes place before the end of July. I have never had tenure or nieces or neph- ews. I’ve known comedic actors, but none of them were stand-ups. My dealings with mayors have not been extensive.

Once, at a Chicago Public Library ceremony honoring the author Don DeLillo, my wife shook the four-and-two-thirds-fingered hand of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who, later that evening, in his speech to those gathered, twice pronounced DeLillo like this:
Duh-lee-lee-yo.

Two decades–plus prior, when I was fourteen years old, summer- jobbing downtown at my father’s insurance firm, I spotted the city’s second Mayor Richard Daley, i.e. Richard M., a quarter block away. I was out on my lunch break. He was walking up Wacker with a couple other men, and he appeared so very squat and red-faced that I, who had started eating acid earlier that year, thought that maybe I was finally having a flashback, and so I approached him to get a closer look.
I got closer than I’d meant to.
I wasn’t, it turned out, having a flashback.
 
I’ve never had a flashback. I no longer think that flashbacks are real. The only people who ever report having flashbacks are people who have had bad trips on acid.
Bad trips are panic attacks one has while on acid. If someone is on acid the first time they suffer a panic attack, they don’t think, “I am hav- ing a panic attack,” but rather, “I am having a bad trip.” And then, the next time they suffer a panic attack, they think, “This is kind of like that bad trip I had. I am having a flashback,” and that’s what they tell people about their panic attack: “I had a flashback.”
And people believe them. And the ones who like acid but who haven’t ever had a bad trip on acid imagine that a flashback will not feel like a panic attack, but like whatever being high on acid had felt like to them— like some kind of fun. So they imagine a flashback must be some kind of fun. But they never have flashbacks. There’s no such thing.

I have had bad trips, which is to say that I have had panic attacks while high on acid. But I didn’t have my first panic attack while not high on acid until I was nearly thirty years old, by which point I’d long since quit taking acid, and had long since worked (and, not so long after that, quit working) as a psychotherapist.
As a psychotherapist, I worked with a number of clients with anxiety disorders, which is to say a number of clients who suffered frequently from panic attacks, so when I had my first one while not high on acid, I wasn’t confused: I knew it was just a panic attack. It wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t as terrible as having a bad trip. Not remotely.

Bad trips are worse than anything. Mine were, at least. Unrelenting fear and pain. A sense of being on the verge of inflicting permanent damage on yourself. A sense that if you aren’t vigilant enough, you might—to pick just a couple examples—you might accidentally choke on your tongue, or swallow your lips or portions of your cheeks before having even realized you’d chewed them off.
I had all my bad trips at the age of seventeen. Three out of three trips in a row were bad. I’d taken acid some eighty-ninety times before that. I’d thought the world of acid, had faith in acid. I believed that taking it was central to who I was, and I suspected I was God. Not metaphorically.
 
I suspected that I had made the universe, filled it up with things and beings, and that I, wanting to experience my creations as one of my creations, had inflicted amnesia on myself, then birthed myself as the human being Adam Levin, and that when all was said and done, my amnesia would lift, and I would know what the experience of the uni- verse I’d created was like for those who weren’t God, i.e. for those who I’d created. That seemed to me like something that God would really want.
 
When I was not high on acid, I didn’t feel like an amnesiac God, but often I would think as though I were—I’d been doing so since the age of four or five. Why? I’m unable to say why exactly, though I think I remember the moment it started.
My mom and I were watching Sesame Street. Or The Electric Com- pany. I don’t recall which, but we were on our couch, watching one of those shows (or maybe it was The Great Space Coaster), and one of the puppets on the show kept saying, “I think therefore I am.” Repeating the phrase, over and over, changing the intonations and stresses. “I think therefore I am. I think therefore I am. I think therefore I am? I think therefore I am.” Etc. It went on for a minute, maybe two.
Confused, I asked my mom to explain what the puppet was saying.
“It’s saying,” she said, “that because it knows it thinks, it knows it’s
real.”
“It’s a puppet, though,” I said. “It doesn’t think.”
“But we’re supposed to forget it’s a puppet while we’re watching the show. We’re supposed to pretend that the puppet can think, and that since it knows it thinks, it knows it’s real.”
“That’s true?” I said.
“Well, not for the puppet, unless we pretend. But what the puppet’s saying is true for people. They know that they think, so they know that they’re real.”
“I know I’m real because I know I think?” “Yes.”
“How do I know I think?” I said.
“Because you can hear yourself think,” she said. “That’s it?” I said. “That’s the only way?”
“Why are you making that face?” she said. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“How do I know that you think?” I said. “I can’t hear you think.” “I’m telling you I do.”
“But I can’t hear you doing it.”
“You can hear me talk,” she said. “What I’m saying is the sound of what I’m thinking.”
“How do I know that?” “Because I’m telling you.”
“That doesn’t mean . . . That doesn’t make sense.” “Calm down,” she said.
“I can hear the puppet talk.” “Calm down,” she said.
“I can hear the puppet talk and the puppet isn’t thinking!” “I’m not a puppet, Adam. I’m real.”
“I...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593466721
• ISBN 13: 9780593466728
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 592
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland