Find Him!: A Novel (Modern Library Torchbearers) - Softcover

Kraf, Elaine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593731913 ISBN 13: 9780593731918

Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

An uncanny novel which provides keen insight on patriarchal violence and female identity by the author of feminist cult classic The Princess of 72nd Street

With an introduction by Violet Kupersmith

Understand my beginning with Oliver. You will see that my love for him is not a romantic fantasy. Every bit of this love was formed from the reality of primary needs—ingestion, excretion, simple pleasure and pain.

Our narrator’s name and origins are unknown, but she claims to be from “another star.” Though she arrived as a fully grown woman, she did not yet have the ability to speak or look after herself. She lives with Oliver, who serves as both her caregiver and her captor and keeps the two of them in isolation from the rest of the world. Though she has no freedom, she insists that he did his best to protect her, to develop her into something more than she was.

Now she blends into our society, though she is still different at heart. The problem is, she can’t find Oliver. She goes back to their beginning to examine her relationship with him, a strange mix of father, lover, abuser, teacher.

And then there is the question of Edith, a mysterious woman whose absence seems to haunt them both.

Originally published in 1977 and seemingly woven from the fragments of nightmares and fantasies, Find Him! is a paragon of Elaine Kraf’s iconoclastic style, challenging and captivating in equal measure.

The Modern Library Torchbearers Series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Elaine Kraf (1936–2013) was a writer and painter. She was the author of four published works of fiction—I Am Clarence (1969), The House of Madelaine (1971), Find Him! (1977), and The Princess of 72nd Street (1979)—as well as several unpublished novels, plays, and poetry collections. Kraf was the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts awards, a 1971 fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a 1977 residency at Yaddo. She was born and lived in New York City.

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The first word I remember is the word “chew.” Fat fist clutching the handle of a large spoon, up in into my mouth, covered with black hairs, gray ones and random brown dots is what my eyes remember of their first consciousness. Obediently my mouth opened with eyes to a collection of hot colors. Out came something unpleasant to my tongue—it was hard, lined down and wouldn’t slide. “Chew.” Persistently he replaced the brown thing on the spoon. Loudly, “Chew.” I spit it out again. Realizing at last that I did not understand, he gave a demonstration. Not with his own teeth; he knew that looking at things and understanding them was beyond my abilities. Neither gently nor roughly he opened and closed my mouth. Using two hands he knocked my teeth together—“rach rach”—my eyes shut also. I didn’t like it. He continued—“rach rach”—threw it into my mouth between crashes—that brown stringy thing, cold and hard. “Chew.” He moved my jaws together manually while juggling the meat into the proper position. I gave him a deep bite on his thumb and forefinger. “Chew.” His pain was well worth it because at the instant my teeth bit into his flesh, I understood the lesson. Smiling, not knowing or noticing his pain, I proceeded to pick out other pieces of the brown stringy meat from the pot of colors. And I chewed deliberately with satisfaction. He smiled. At that time, prior to my becoming a person, my achievements were his own—he patting my head and laughing. I smiled as he held me on his lap singing “Chew chew chew,” while bouncing his knee in rhythm. We were happy in those early months when I was learning the rudiments of ingestion, control of excretion and simple commands—days when I flickered awake for a second seeing a fingernail or an ear. Music in those early recognitions. I cry for then when I had no existence and did not even realize that my body belonged to me. Few adults are so privileged to begin in this manner. OLIVER. Few adults have begun their existence with only Oliver’s assistance. And in spite of what came later, I would not change places with anyone on the entire earth. None!

It is important to me, the beginning. I remember it in detail with my eyes, with my tongue then then—fat fist clutching the handle of a large spoon, up in into my mouth hot colors—soft pale green leafwings, round orange flowers wet with yellow in the center, and those hard pieces of brown composed of thick threads lined down that had to be chewed. Chewing and swallowing are my own now, done alone or in the company of others. Nothing tastes as good. It is my own business like so many other things. But then I was Oliver and my eating was our business—one of the things that we later lost, slipping away as everything.

Understand my beginning with Oliver. You will see that my love for him is not a romantic fantasy. Every bit of this love was formed from the reality of primary needs—ingestion, excretion, simple pleasure and pain.

I am inviting YOU to enter and eat the feast that OLIVER and I created. In order to do this, you must abandon your world, at least temporarily. I hope that you will be able to understand what I am talking about. It will not be easy for you. I appreciate this because I have tried and failed to understand your world: your vocations, customs, social divisions, politics and wristwatches. Oliver taught me something about the society outside our walls but he never prepared me for its complexity. I am a woman from another star. Someone returning from another century would not have been as alienated. I read a lot. Not about way back when it was all being made by someone or falling together like a big accident, but about after that, century to century, B.C. to A.D. The differences between people from one century to another are not as great as the differences between any people of any time and myself. There were always groups not just two except for Adam and Eve and that might even be a poem. Except for Adam and Eve there were always groups, special ceremonies, looking for food, fighting for land, worshipping, paying for things, laws and burials for everyone, the right clothing, horses or ships, and fairy tales. But I came into existence with one man and had no contact with any society—knew only what I learned from him. He, Oliver, was my culture and my society. We had no horses.

•

The exact date or hour of my appearance is forever out of my reach. I have no knowledge of how I arrived or why. Even the physical manner of my entrance is a mystery since there were no doors in Edith’s house. There was no Edith there either. Yet that is not entirely true. (Things can be both true and false, you know, despite logicians.) But I will try not to confuse you. I never made her acquaintance, in the way that I might meet you in the grocery store and introduce myself, although I lived in her house for three years and gradually discovered her importance to Oliver.

Here it is dark and light dark and light

Crosshatched patterns on the floor move

Then disappear or a light flashed over or

Turned on by shuffling feet not the same

Away a yellow balloon half-deflated with

A shadow on its left lies on a windowsill

Right in the center every morning wings of

Real silver birds flap up and down forever

Not there

Since I had no identity, no ability to think or speak, how can I believe in any existence prior to the one into which I first opened my eyes? But I was already an adult at the time of my appearance. Logically it would seem I had a past. Of what significance is a logically assumed past when I can experience nothing of it, can remember nothing before my three years with Oliver. How I arrived, how Oliver reacted to my arrival—these are things that will never be clear to me, although I have some theories about the latter question. If there was any name or identification on my body when I appeared, Oliver never disclosed this to me. No name. Perhaps he did not consider a name important—my Oliver ignores many things. He has his reasons. If he destroyed my identification, I trust that it was after careful consideration and for the best.

My early memories are diffuse; I have already told you of the hand with the spoon. That is my first clear memory. It is important and remains with me more vividly than later things—the taste of the hot vegetables, some fibrous and bitter, others fragrantly pliant, the tough brown meat I chewed, and ever always the taste to my teeth and tongue of Oliver’s metallic, saltysweet fingers.

There are so many things I must guess. The first memory of the hand and spoon occurred some months after my arrival. My mind lapsed often—slipped backward into soft-wet non-differentiation. Everything, nothing, secret. Again a kind of awareness, my eyes focused, saw Oliver walking slowly toward his room, always away—my wide stare without comprehension hurt. Then I ran softly down the long hallway pulling at his shirt from behind. (Perhaps I feared his disappearance even then.) Slowly, so slowly Oliver became aware of my tugging and of the low sounds I made—“Oomah . . . geeeh, geeeh, geeeeeeh . . .” He turned toward me—always at the last instant before going into his room—patted my head, looked. Then the door closed. Away. Until I slept or until he came out again, I lay near his door. “Geeeeeeh.” Even then, before I could understand or think, I felt some kind of anguish or discomfort when Oliver was not near me. I feel this now, although I know what it means and how to interpret it. It is the exact feeling now, only changed by words inside. It was a feeling that I was to know in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593731913
• ISBN 13: 9780593731918
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 241
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland