T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

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A superb new collection from "a writer who can take you anywhere" (
) In the title story of this rich new collection, T.C. Boyle has created so vivid and original a retelling of the story of Victor, the feral boy who was captured running naked through the forests of Napoleonic France, that it becomes not just new but definitive: yes, this is how it must have been. The tale is by turns magical and moving, a powerful investigation of what it means to be human.
There is perhaps no one better than T.C. Boyle at engaging, shocking, and ultimately gratifying his readers while at the same time testing his characters' emotional and physical endurance. The fourteen stories gathered here display both Boyle's astonishing range and his imaginative muscle. Nature is the dominant player in many of these stories, whether in the form of the catastrophic mudslide that allows a cynic to reclaim his own humanity ("La Conchita") or the wind-driven fires that howl through a high California canyon ("Ash Monday"). Other tales range from the drama of a man who spins Homeric lies in order to stop going to work, to that of a young woman who must babysit for a $250,000 cloned Afghan and the sad comedy of a child born to Mexican street vendors who is unable to feel pain.
Brilliant, incisive, and always entertaining, Boyle's short stories showcase the mischievous humor and socially conscious sensibility that have made him one of the most acclaimed writers of our time.

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In the years to come, Victor rarely left the house or the small square of the yard, hemmed in as it was by the walls of the surrounding buildings. Madame Guérin became too frail eventually to take him for his walks in the park and so he stood at the window instead for hours at a time or lay in the yard watching the clouds unfurl overhead. He took no pleasure in eating and yet he ate as if he were starved still, still roaming La Bassine with his stomach shrunken in disuse. The food thickened him around the middle and in the haunches. His face took on weight till he was nearly unrecognizable. No one knew. No one cared. He’d once been the sensation of Paris, but now he was forgotten, and even his name — Victor — was forgotten too. Madame Guérin no longer called him by name, no longer spoke at all except to her daughters, who rarely visited, wrapped up as they were in their own lives and passions. And the citizens of Paris, if they remembered him in passing, as they would remember the news of another generation or a tale told round the fire late at night, referred to him only as the Savage.

One morning Sultan vanished as if he’d never existed and before long there was another cat asleep in the chair or in Madame’s lap as she sat and knitted or stared wearily into the pages of her Bible.

Victor barely noticed. The cat was a thing of muscle and hidden organs. It stalked grasshoppers against the wall in the sun and ate from a dish in the kitchen, and with a long, languid thrust of its tongue it would probe itself all over, even to the slit beneath its tail, but mostly it lay inert, sleeping its life away. It was nothing to him.

The walls, the ceiling, the glimpse of the distant trees and the sky overhead and all the power of life erupting from the earth at his feet: this was nothing. Not anymore.

He was forty years old when he died.

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