John Irving - In One Person

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In One Person: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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A compelling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity,
is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character of In One Person, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a “sexual suspect,” a phrase first used by John Irving in 1978 in his landmark novel of “terminal cases,” The World According to Garp.
His most political novel since
and
, John Irving’s
is a poignant tribute to Billy’s friends and lovers—a theatrical cast of characters who defy category and convention. Not least, In One Person is an intimate and unforgettable portrait of the solitariness of a bisexual man who is dedicated to making himself “worthwhile.” * * *
“This tender exploration of nascent desire, of love and loss, manages to be sweeping, brilliant, political, provocative, tragic, and funny—it is precisely the kind of astonishing alchemy we associate with a John Irving novel. The unfolding of the AIDS epidemic in the United States in the ’80s was the defining moment for me as a physician. With my patients’ deaths, almost always occurring in the prime of life, I would find myself cataloging the other losses—namely, what these people might have offered society had they lived the full measure of their days: their art, their literature, the children they might have raised.
is the novel that for me will define that era. A profound truth is arrived at in these pages. It is Irving at his most daring, at his most ambitious. It is America and American writing, both at their very best.”
— ABRAHAM VERGHESE “
is a novel that makes you proud to be human. It is a book that not only accepts but also loves our differences. From the beginning of his career, Irving has always cherished our peculiarities—in a fierce, not a saccharine, way. Now he has extended his sympathies—and ours—still further into areas that even the misfits eschew. Anthropologists say that the interstitial—whatever lies between two familiar opposites—is usually declared either taboo or sacred. John Irving in this magnificent novel—his best and most passionate since
—has sacralized what lies between polarizing genders and orientations. And have I mentioned it is also a gripping page-turner and a beautifully constructed work of art?”
— EDMUND WHITE

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“Sorry—I just had to keep reading!” he said. Then the ship rolled in the other direction, and the soldier sallied forth, skipping over the seats again. When he’d slid all the way to the last toilet, he either lost control of the book or he let it go, gripping the toilet seat with both hands. The book floated away in the seawater.

“What were you reading?” the code-boy called.

Madame Bovary !” the soldier shouted in the storm.

“I can tell you what happens,” the sergeant said.

“Please don’t!” the bookworm answered. “I want to read it for myself!”

In the dream, or in the story someone (who was not Richard Abbott) was telling me, my father never saw this soldier for the rest of the voyage. “Past a barely visible Gibraltar,” I remember the dream (or someone) saying, “the convoy slipped into the Mediterranean.”

One night, off the coast of Sicily, the soldiers belowdecks were awakened by crashing noises and the sounds of cannon fire; the convoy was under aerial attack by the Luftwaffe . Subsequently, my dad heard that an adjacent Liberty ship had been hit and sunk with all hands. As for the soldier who’d been reading Madame Bovary in the storm, he failed to introduce himself to my dad before the convoy made landfall at Taranto. The code-boy’s war story would continue and conclude without my disappearing dad ever encountering the toilet-traveling man.

“Years later,” said the dream (or the storyteller), my father was “finishing up” at Harvard. He was riding on the Boston subway, the MTA; he’d got on at the Charles Street station, and was on his way back to Harvard Square.

A man who got on at Kendall Square began to stare at him. The sergeant was “discomfited” by the strange man’s interest in him; “it felt like an unnatural interest—a foreboding of something violent, or at least unpleasant.” (It was the language of the story that made this recurrent dream seem more real to me than other dreams. It was a dream with a first-person narrator—a dream with a voice .)

The man on the subway started changing seats; he kept moving closer to my dad. When they were almost in physical contact with each other, and the subway was slowing down for the next stop, the stranger turned to my father and said, “Hi. I’m Bovary. Remember me?” Then the subway stopped at Central Square, where the bookworm got off, and the sergeant was once more on his way to Harvard Square.

I WAS TOLD THAT the fever part of scarlet fever abates within a week—usually within three to five days. I’m pretty sure that I was over the fever part when I asked Richard Abbott if he’d ever told me this story—perhaps at the onset of the rash, or during the sore-throat part, which began a couple of days before the rash. My tongue had been the color of a strawberry, but when I first spoke to Richard about this most vivid and recurrent dream, my tongue was a beefy dark red—more of a raspberry color—and the rash was starting to go away.

“I don’t know this story, Bill,” Richard told me. “This is the first time I’ve heard it.”

“Oh.”

“It sounds like a Grandpa Harry story to me,” Richard said.

But when I asked my grandfather if he’d told me the Madame Bovary story, Grandpa Harry started his “Ah, well” routine, hemming and hawing his way in circles around the question. No, he “ definitely didn’t” tell me the story, my grandfather said. Yes, Harry had heard the story—“a secondhand version, if I recall correctly”—but he conveniently couldn’t remember who’d told him. “It was Uncle Bob, maybe—perhaps it was Bob who told you, Bill.” Then my grandfather felt my forehead, and mumbled words to the effect that my fever seemed to be gone. When he peered into my mouth, he announced: “That’s still a pretty ugly-lookin’ tongue, though I would say the rash is disappearin’ a bit.”

“It was too real to be a dream—at least, to begin with,” I told Grandpa Harry.

“Ah, well—if you’re good at imaginin’ things, which I believe you are pretty good at, Bill, I would say that some dreams can seem very real,” my grandfather hemmed and hawed.

“I’ll ask Uncle Bob,” I said.

Bob was always putting squash balls in my pockets, or in my shoes—or under my pillow. It was a game; when I found the balls, I gave them back. “Oh, I’ve been looking for that squash ball all over, Billy!” Bob would say. “I’m so glad you found it.”

“What’s Madame Bovary about?” I asked Uncle Bob. He’d come to see how I was recuperating from the scarlet fever, and I’d given him the squash ball I had found in the glass for my toothbrush—in the bathroom I shared with Grandpa Harry.

Nana Victoria “would rather die” than share a bathroom with him, Harry had told me, but I liked sharing a bathroom with my grandfather.

“Truth be told, I haven’t actually read Madame Bovary, Billy,” Uncle Bob told me; he peered into the hallway, outside my bedroom, checking to be sure that my mom (or my grandmother, or Aunt Muriel) wasn’t within listening distance. Even though the coast was clear, Bob lowered his voice: “I believe it’s about adultery, Billy—an unfaithful wife.” I must have looked baffled, utterly uncomprehending, because Uncle Bob quickly said, “You should ask Richard what Madame Bovary is about—literature, you know, is Richard’s department.”

“It’s a novel?” I asked.

“I don’t think it’s a true story,” Uncle Bob answered. “But Richard would know.”

“Or I could ask Miss Frost,” I suggested.

“Uh-huh, you could—just don’t say it was my idea,” Uncle Bob said.

“I know a story,” I started to say. “Maybe you told me.”

“You mean the one about the guy reading Madame Bovary on a hundred toilets at the same time?” Bob cried. “I absolutely love that story!”

“Me, too,” I said. “It’s very funny!”

“Hilarious!” Uncle Bob declared. “No, I never told you that story, Billy—at least I don’t remember telling you that story,” he said quickly.

“Oh.”

“Maybe your mom told you?” Uncle Bob asked. I must have given him an incredulous look, because Bob suddenly said, “Probably not.”

“It’s a dream I keep having, but someone must have told me first,” I said.

“Dinner-party conversation, perhaps—one of those stories children overhear, when the adults think they’ve gone to bed or they can’t possibly be listening,” Uncle Bob said. While this was more credible than my mother being the source of the toilet-seat story, neither Bob nor I looked very convinced. “Not all mysteries are meant to be solved, Billy,” he said to me, with more conviction.

It was shortly after he’d left when I discovered another squash ball, or the same squash ball, under my covers.

I knew perfectly well that my mother hadn’t told me the Madame Bovary, multiple-toilet-seats story, but of course I asked her. “I never thought that story was the least bit funny,” she said. “I wouldn’t have had anything to do with telling you that story, Billy.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe Daddy told you—I asked him not to!” my mother said.

“No, Grandpa definitely didn’t tell me,” I said.

“I’ll bet Uncle Bob did,” my mom said.

“Uncle Bob says he doesn’t remember telling me,” I replied.

“Bob drinks—he doesn’t remember everything,” my mother told me. “And you’ve had a fever recently,” she reminded me. “You know the dreams a fever can give you, Billy.”

“I thought it was a funny story, anyway—how the man’s ass made a slapping sound as he was skipping over the toilet seats!” I said.

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