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Lily King: Euphoria

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Lily King Euphoria

Euphoria: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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National best-selling and award-winning author Lily King’s new novel is the story of three young, gifted anthropologists in the 1930s caught in a passionate love triangle that threatens their bonds, their careers, and, ultimately, their lives. English anthropologist Andrew Bankson has been alone in the field for several years, studying a tribe on the Sepik River in the Territory of New Guinea with little success. Increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when he encounters the famous and controversial Nell Stone and her wry, mercurial Australian husband Fen. Bankson is enthralled by the magnetic couple whose eager attentions pull him back from the brink of despair. Nell and Fen have their own reasons for befriending Bankson. Emotionally and physically raw from studying the bloodthirsty Mumbanyo tribe, the couple is hungry for a new discovery. But when Bankson leads them to the artistic, female-dominated Tam, he ignites an intellectual and emotional firestorm between the three of them that burns out of anyone’s control. Ultimately, their groundbreaking work will make history, but not without sacrifice. Inspired by events in the life of revolutionary anthropologist Margaret Mead, is a captivating story of desire, possession and discovery from one of our finest contemporary novelists.

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Even still, it took a long time to feel much of anything again.

It was spring term of my last year at Charterhouse when I was called out of study hall and sent to the headmaster’s office. He told me Martin had shot himself and was dead. My parents had given instructions that I was to finish the school term before coming home. Martin had killed himself on John’s birthday beneath the statue of Anteros in Piccadilly Circus. There was an inquest, and a hearing, and his photograph on the front of the Daily Mirror. It was the most public suicide in English history. It must have been a great topic of conversation just beyond my earshot. To me, no one spoke a word.

I began my studies at Cambridge, where I took zoology, organic chemistry, botany, and physiology. That Christmas holiday I had planned to go to Spain with some chums, but the house fell through at the last minute and I ended up traveling the three miles to my parents’ house, where my father had me join him in a study at the British Museum on the anomalous striped feathers of the red-legged partridge. Next term I began to suspect, as Martin had before me, that I was not made for science. And yet I had to be made for science; Martin had made it clear that any other path was not worth taking. The meaning of life is the quest to understand the structure and order of the natural world — that was the mantra I was raised on. To deviate from it was suicide. When an opportunity arose to go to the Galápagos, the Holy Grail, I leapt at it. That was where the spark would be rekindled, where I would become enlightened. But I found the work as tedious on a boat as it was in the Bird Room at the British Museum with my father. I came to see that the whole Darwinian story of the fat-beaked finches eating nuts and the thin-beaked finches eating grubs was bunk because they were all mixed in together eating caterpillars quite happily. The only discovery I made was that I love a warm humid climate. I had never felt so good in my skin. But I came home despondent about my future as a scientist. I knew that I could not spend my life in a laboratory.

I took a course in psychology. I joined the Cambridge Antiquarian Society and found myself on a train to Cheltenham for an archaeological dig. I had taken a fancy to a girl named Emma in the Society, and had hoped to maneuver it so I’d sit with her, but another fellow had had the same idea and a bit more foresight, so I was left on my own behind them. An older man, clearly a Cambridge don, took the seat beside me, and once I gave up my sulk about the girl, we began talking. He was curious about my trip to the Galápagos, not about the birds or the caterpillars but about the Ecuadorian mestizos. He asked a number of questions I didn’t know how to answer but found intriguing and wished I’d thought to ask myself when I was there. He was A. C. Haddon, and this was my first conversation about a discipline he told me was called Anthropology. By the end of the ride, he’d invited me to do my Part II in Ethnology. Within a month, I’d switched over from the biological sciences. It was a bit terrifying, a bit of a free fall, to go from an extremely ordered and structured physical science to a nascent, barely twenty-year-old social science. Anthropology at that time was in transition, moving from the study of men dead and gone to the study of living people, and slowly letting go of the rigid belief that the natural and inevitable culmination of every society is the Western model.

I left for my first field trip the summer after I graduated. I could not get away fast enough. My father had died that winter (I’d been at his bedside; I’d had a chance to say goodbye, which made it easier) and my mother clung harder than usual to me. She became both unthinkably needy and cold-blooded. I do not know if she was trying to make up for the absence of my father or if his absence had unleashed a part of her personality that had been dormant during their long marriage. In either case, my mother was both anxious for my company and sickened by the man she imagined I was becoming. She thought anthropology a weak science, a false science, a phantasmagoria of words with no substance or purpose. She was so certain and uncompromising that even short visits were dangerous to my already wobbly convictions.

Initially I was supposed to find a tribe on the Sepik River of the Mandated Territory of New Guinea, an area which had yet to be penetrated by missionaries or industry. But when I arrived in Port Moresby I was told that the region wasn’t safe. There had been a spate of headhunting raids. So I went to the island of New Britain where I studied the Baining, an impossible tribe who refused to tell me anything until I learned their language and when I had learned their language still refused to tell me. They would direct me to some person a half day’s walk away and when I returned I would discover they’d held a ceremony in my absence. I could get nothing out of them and even after a year I hadn’t figured out their genealogy because of a plethora of name taboos, which prevented them from ever saying aloud the names of certain relatives. But it must also be said that I had no idea what I was doing. For the first month I went around measuring their heads with calipers until someone asked me why and I had no answer apart from having been instructed to do so. I chucked the calipers away but never really understood what I was meant to be documenting instead. On my way home, I stopped in Sydney for a few months. Haddon was teaching at the university and he took me on as his assistant for his ethnography classes. In my spare time I worked on a monograph about the Baining. After he read it, Haddon claimed I was the first person to ever admit to having limitations as an anthropologist, to not understanding the natives when they conversed among themselves, to not having witnessed the full-blown version of a ceremony, to being duped and tricked and mocked. He was taken by my candor, but for me to have pretended otherwise would have been chicanery, like poor Kammerer injecting India ink into the feet of his midwife frogs to prove Lamarck’s inheritance theory that characteristics acquired after birth can be passed on. At the end of the semester, I took a brief trip up the Sepik with my students to see a tribe or two, just to see what I had missed by not going there initially. I was quite taken with the Kiona, if only because when I asked a question through a translator, they answered it. We stayed four nights, and a week later I returned to England.

I’d been gone three years. I thought that might be enough travel for a while, but the combination of the winter gloom, my mother’s restless bullying, and the stale cerebral self-conscious wit that bubbled like a frothy mold in every corner of Cambridge drove me to return to the Kiona as fast as I could manage.

5

My village of Nengai lay forty river miles west of Angoram. As the crow flies it would have been half that, but the Sepik, the longest river in New Guinea, is flamboyantly serpentine, the Amazon of the South Pacific, with a tendency to meander to such extremes that it has created, I learned a decade later under much different circumstances, over fifteen thousand oxbow lakes, places where the loops bent around so far they broke off. But when you are in a dugout canoe at night, even if it is motorized, you are not cognizant of the inefficient zig and zag of your route. You simply feel the river bend one way and then eventually another. You get used to the bugs in your eyes and mouth and the shiny rucked bulges of crocs and the monkeys caterwauling on high branches and the thrash and bustle of thousands of nocturnal creatures gorging themselves while their predators sleep. You do not feel the extra, unnecessary twenty miles. If anything, you wish the trip were longer.

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