Quarry (French Litearture) - Softcover

Houdart, Célia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1628973277 ISBN 13: 9781628973273

Verlag: Dalkey Archive Press, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

In Pisa, Italy, an Armenian immigrant named Marco Iprannossian sits in jail awaiting judgment on the attempted murder of a local official.

The novel opens on the first day of his hearing―three years after his arrest―and follows the lives of Marco, his friends on the outside, the judge presiding over this case, her husband, and their teenage daughter, Lea. Through deceptively structured as a crime novel, Quarry's real concerns are both far smaller and far larger than those of a typical whodunit.

Houdart's modern tale, presented in a series of brief, elliptical snapshots, is a precision-cut gem of literary minimalism.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

After graduating from Paris's École Normal Supérieure, Célia Houdart spent several years in the world of avant-garde theatre before dedicating herself to fiction. Quarry is her third novel.

K. E. Gormley is a librarian and translator originally from Baltimore, now living in the Philadelphia suburbs.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

At the counter of a café that had recently changed owners, Marian asked for an espresso and an apricot croissant. Blurred reflections slid over the brushed stain- less steel: hands reaching out to greet newcomers, the constant shuffle of cups and water glasses.

Next, Marian headed to the north side of the city. The radial roads converging on the Piazza dei Cavalieri were filled with students. Skinny jeans. Hair plastered to the forehead or sculpted with gel in front of the mirror. Bicycles swerving to avoid couples with their arms wrapped around each other’s waists.

The courthouse, which dated from the 1930s, had an imposing facade pierced vertically by three rectangular openings surmounted by a loggia. At the entrance stood two carabinieri, one a very young man. A court reporter on the stairway was digging inside the arm of his jacket, trying to straighten a twisted shirtsleeve.

Marian’s office was small, with pale gray walls. She picked the dead blooms off a pink azalea and let them fall into the wastebasket in a rain of petals, thinking about what she’d have to say on this, the second day of the hearing. She took off her raincoat and slipped her robe on over her street clothes.

The courthouse lobby was already resounding with voices that could be heard echoing up the stairs. Marian slid some files into a black leather portfolio. Then she looked around the office for a ring, an aquamarine that had once belonged to her mother. She wore it on the little finger of her right hand and, because it fit loosely, had gotten into the habit of rotating it around her finger with her thumb. She searched between books, lifted file trays. Nothing. Without that ring, she thought, she would be stumbling over her words when it came time to speak.

2

A police van pulled up and parked in front of the courthouse steps. A man in a bulletproof vest emerged from the back holding another man―fortyish, brown-haired, thin―by the arm. They both had to duck coming out of the van because of their height. Once out, both stopped for a moment, blinded by the sun. At the same time, the driver got out and slammed the door. He went over to the young carabiniere at the entrance and handed him a plastic sleeve containing a sheet of light-blue paper and a ballpoint pen. While the young man was initialing the document, the other carabiniere asked the thin man to hold out his manacled wrists. The carabiniere put his hands pincerlike over the steel cuffs and gently slid them forward. He checked the lock housings and the stress-bearing joints. The light glinting off the metal bothered him. He had to squint to see clearly. Then the two carabinieri positioned themselves on either side of the thin man and grabbed him by the arms. The older one gave a curt order in a faint Neapolitan accent and gestured at the stairs in front of them with his chin.

They entered a cavernous lobby striped with thin ribbons of sunlight. All three men wore rubber-soled shoes. They moved noiselessly. Their progress through the courthouse had a ghostly quality to it. The thin man was dressed in a black suit jacket missing several buttons, a white dress shirt, and charcoal-gray pants that were slightly too large.

In the hallway, some jurors were checking their summonses. They were familiar with the building but had been disoriented by new a signage system and wanted to make sure they hadn’t wandered into the wrong wing.

Both double doors of the courtroom stood open. The carabinieri escorted the thin man to a chair on a low dais and made him sit. From here he had a view of the entire room. It seemed to him that there were far fewer people than there had been the day before. Against the wall to his right was a row of benches whose sagging leatherette formed a series of strange, melted craters.

3

Three years earlier, at the beginning of July, the prefect of Pisa had been vacationing with his wife in a rented villa on the island of Elba. It was the siesta hour. His wife was reading by the pool. A big red beach towel lay drying on the diving board. The prefect was in his bedroom, stretched out on the bed, taking a nap. A man entered the house through the living-room bay window, which had been left open a crack. He emptied out a chest of drawers, taking some designer scarves and an Olympus camera. The sound of the lens cap falling onto the tile floor woke the prefect. He sat bolt upright in bed. He called out to his wife, but because the pool was at the other end of the yard she didn’t hear him. When the man saw the prefect’s silhouette against the light, he fired three shots in his direction and then fled, scrambling over the metal gate at the end of the driveway.

They were later able to reconstruct his path thanks to a network of fine black hoses which had been torn out of the lawn, revealing that the man had tripped over the automatic sprinkler system in two specific locations.

The prefect, meanwhile, took a few staggering steps and then fell. He struck his temple on a doorjamb and lost consciousness, a nine-millimeter bullet lodged in his right lung. He spent five weeks in critical condition at the San Martino e Frediano Hospital. Short-term memory problems and breathing difficulties had plagued him ever since. The feeling of wool caught in his throat persisted to this day.

On August 1 of the same year, the police arrested Marco Ipranossian, an Armenian, at the Florence train station. In a small leatherette pouch tucked inside his shirt they found a forged car title and a dry-cleaning slip with the address of a trattoria in Rio nell’Elba written on the back.

4

The entrance of the jurors altered the acoustics of the room, dampening its sounds. A brunette woman―pale pink suit, pistachio blouse, hair in a bun―sat down in the front row. She took a little notebook and a miniature pencil from her beige leather bag. Sitting behind her was a tall man of about fifty in dark glasses. From time to time he removed them to dab at his conjunctivitis-reddened eyes with the corner of a handkerchief.

The hearing began with the prefect summarizing his testimony from the previous day. He said he thought the man who shot him had been stockier. But he couldn’t be sure. When first questioned, he had described a man of average build seen only in outline, with the light behind him. Marco Ipranossian’s lawyer, Mr. Onofrio, was scarcely twenty-five years old and had been assigned to his case by legal aid. He spoke very rapidly, sometimes giving the impression of not pausing for breath. On the first day of the hearing, Mr. Onofrio had moved that his client be released for lack of evidence. The motion had been denied. Today, as he was presenting his client’s life story, the woman in the front row looked up from her notebook and studied Marco Ipranossian with interest. She saw little resemblance to the photo that had appeared in Il Tirreno the summer of his arrest. The man in the second row, whose conjunctivitis was reacting badly to the frigid air emitted by the malfunctioning air-conditioning system, listened to the proceedings with his eyes closed, mentally following the images conjured up by each speaker.

When the bells of the San Zeno Church struck noon, Marco Ipranossian was sitting hunched over in his seat. He was listening. He drew his cuffed hands closer to his chest, bent and unbent his numbed fingers to rid them of the pins and needles. He contemplated the hollow formed by the tendon between his thumb and wrist, into which, as a child, he used to pour sand or granulated sugar.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Dalkey Archive Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1628973277
• ISBN 13: 9781628973273
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 128
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland