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Alexandra Kleeman: Intimations: Stories

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Alexandra Kleeman Intimations: Stories

Intimations: Stories: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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From the celebrated author of ,a thought-provoking, often unsettling story collection that consists, broadly, of narrative diagrams of the three main stages in a human life: birth, life, and death. Alexandra Kleeman’s debut novel earned her comparisons to Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Ben Marcus, and Tom Perrotta. It was praised by the as "a powerful allegory of our civilization’s many maladies, artfully and elegantly articulated, by one of the young wise women of our generation." In her second book, a collection of twelve stories irresistibly seductive in their strangeness, she explores human life from beginning to end: the distress of birth into a world already formed; the brief and confusing period of "living" where we understand what is expected of us and struggle to do it; and the death-y period toward the end where we sense it is ending and will end only partially understood, at best. The title is taken from one of the stories ("Intimation"), but is also a play on Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" — only in this case it’s not clear exactly what is being intimated, but it’s nothing so gleaming and good as Immortality. The middle, "Living" section of the book, is fleshed out with a set of stories that borrow more from traditional realist fiction to illustrate the inner lives of the characters. At once familiar and mysterious, these stories have an eerie resonance as its characters find themselves in new and surprising situations. An unnamed woman enters a room with no exit and a ready-made life; the disappearance of people, objects, and memory creates an apocalypse; the art of dance is used to try to tame a feral child; the key to surviving a house-party lies in knowing the difference between fake and real blood. Elegant, surprising, wondrous, and haunting, is an utterly transporting collection from one of our most ingenious and brilliant young writers.

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Lucy licks her lips, studies the menu. “I’d like the Lobster à la Bordelaise. With extra wedges of lemon and some Tabasco, please.”

In white wine, with a broth based on lobster flesh, simmered with diced carrots, onions, and potatoes. The lobster must be fresh, unfrozen, caught from cold water that hardens the shell. A lobster is sweetest and full of the richest flesh right before a molt, when the shell is at its most protective. Before it has shed its sense of safety.

And for me? A cup of the corn chowder, with a small salad. Dressing on the side.

Susan looks at me with a combination of amusement and scorn. “Oh, Anne-Marie. Only you would attempt vegetarianism on the Cape, in the summer. Why not live a little, eat the best? After all, you are what you eat.”

But I am not.

4

What a beautiful day as thousands and thousands of lobsters skitter up from the water, whispering their single word over and over again as the sky blues brightly overhead. What a beautiful color staining the swollen breasts of the gulls as they argue over the last contents of the great lobster, nearly fainting from their own fullness. Susan and Lucy look over at me from a distance and they put down their red rubber ball, uncertain. We were to take a sunset stroll to the leeward side of the cove, hand in hand, as when we were children, but now a sound comes from the sea and I sense our plans must be reconsidered.

The sound rises like the whistling of a teakettle but breaks into a shriek, a single beautiful tone that pierces the sea breeze like a knife, cracks it like a mallet, and when it has gone on long enough I can begin to hear the word whispered beneath. By the time the lobsters have begun to kill us, I recognize it distinctly.

The lobsters take down a healthy athletic type, they take him behind the knees and he crumples like a doll. The lobsters with their clumsy claws are terrible in droves, the sun glistens off their backs and they are a wave, a tide, a drowning of speckled brown and red crawling over the faces of people. I look down at my hands covered in blue and tell myself this is not happening, but of course it is. They fight their way into the mouths and down the airways of vacationers of all ages, indiscriminate.

And you are running toward me while the lobsters are killing us all, your hair ruffled in the breeze and the sun glistening off your smooth shoulders, and you are mouthing something, shouting it, something I cannot hear over the screams of lobsters and of people. You reach me and then you whisper in my ear that we must kill them all. I nod slowly as you grab one of the largest in your hands and tear it in half. You hold one of the halves out to me, it drips blue on the warm, soft sand. I take it in my hands tentatively, like it could hurt me, and I bite down.

5

So full. Full of lobster meat and the sadness of the lobster meat. Full of the feeling of having cracked hundreds upon hundreds of precious shells. Full of the sound and the sight of destruction, the lobsters dead in a pile, some of them with lipstick marks on their empty husks. Their voices piled up on one another. I felt a whispering coming from deep within my belly, the voices not yet at rest, and they said in a tone sympathetic and unsympathetic at the same time, Next Next Next. “Well,” I said, “what do we do next?” “Lobster dinner?” he asked, chuckling a little as if I ought to be chuckling with him as well. And as he leaned in to kiss me, my eye saw his open mouth grow larger and larger until it seemed it could swallow me whole.

The Dancing-Master

1

The body of Victor Tallon bends both of its knees on the downbeat, sinking and suddenly halting, like a toy abandoned by a child. Legs crooked, he remains there too long, squatting shallowly in the midst of what had once been a passable plié. The stiff arms hold their shape, suspended as if from threads extending invisibly into the heavens. After several seconds, the finely positioned arms begin to quiver.

From where I stand, I watch this tremor grow bolder, as I watch also the eyes beginning to brim with a considerable quantity of tears. He moistens rapidly. His emptied mouth gapes toward the audience like a dark hole deep, deep in the woods. Meanwhile, the music has already moved on, marching toward the fourth bar, though a strain of hesitancy creeps into the notes as it occurs to each of the players that they might soon be ordered to slow down, or to cease entirely.

I give him a stern appraisal, from the slack mouth to the slackening hips. He should now be executing the élevé, but it is all terribly wrong. He tilts left somewhat and looks as though he might topple. Though he has been perfectly still for the last few minutes, poised mid-sequence for fear of making an error, now his legs begin to wriggle in place. It occurs to me that he might fall upon all fours and make a dash for the palace doors, straight for the elegant foyer and its elegant escape, fleeing like a dog from a promise of certain punishment. Such a turn would not take me by surprise: Victor Tallon is a savage, and holds a coward’s attitude toward the art of dance. But when I lower my hand gently to the rod at my hip, he pitches forward and releases a gasp, a spasm of fearful sound. The neck protruding from his collar and coat is pink with fear, twisted round like a wrung goose. Then he resumes his choreography, proceeding as instructed through the rise, the jeté, another plié, another élevé, another light and airy kick. For one such as he, accustomed to the harsh admonitions of the wilderness, only a similar harshness will stir him to civilized action.

I look to the braggart philosopher Portesquieu to measure his response, but he does not meet my eye. Victor continues to sway a bit too much for my liking, giving the elegant chacotte an unseemly teetering quality. However, it must be said that his posture is impeccable.

2

Young Victor Tallon wandered into our village three years and thirty-seven days ago, wearing upon his head a flap of filthy linen made more vile by the matted teats of hair hung beneath it. The physician who examined him estimated his age at sixteen years, though with his stunted height and well-developed teeth he could have been a man closer to my own. When we realized that he was more than a beggar — far more, by way of being far less — we descended upon him as children upon a sack of sweets. Not only was he unable to give us an account of himself, his name, origin, occupation, the name of his father, the occupation of his father, the whereabouts of his mother, etcetera, he was unable to account for anything at all. To our questions and threats, he made a soft chuffing sound, followed by a sort of attempt to bite the air, snapping at it and gnashing his teeth as though he had seized upon some delicacy. Men and women of all ages and ranks, we convened upon the town square to see this empty vessel, to gather around him, to lift up his lips to examine his gums, to explore his sensitivity to prodding and loud sounds.

That night in the tavern, the philosopher Portesquieu addressed me before all present. Dancing-master, he said from a mouth stained with meat, why do you not try your hand at reforming the wild young man? You claim that you are a favorite of the court, surely some official would commend him to your custody, to teach him the essentials of modern thought and comportment. Perhaps knowing the proper execution of the gavotte would help the boy make sense of the world.

Amid his laughter, I reflected upon the many spiritual benefits that a mastery of the dance could offer. A firm knowledge of the social dances — invented for pleasure yet placed in the service of the public good — could benefit the poor savage in both mind and body. For if the elegant gestures of the dance spring from a deeply cultivated sense of intelligence and propriety, it is clear that knowledge of these gestures would cultivate the appropriate intelligence in its practitioner.

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