Bruce Wagner - Memorial

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Bruce Wagner - Memorial» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Год выпуска: 2006, Издательство: Simon & Schuster, Жанр: Современная проза, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

Memorial: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «Memorial»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

In his most profound and accomplished book to date, acclaimed author Bruce Wagner breaks from Hollywood culture with a novel of exceptional literary dimension and searing emotional depth. Joan Herlihy is a semi-successful architect grasping at the illustrious commission that will catapult her to international renown, glossy de cor magazines, and the luxe condo designs of Meier, Koolhaas, and Hadid: the incestuous cult of contemporary Starchitects. Unexpectedly, she finds her Venice Beach firm on the short list for a coveted private memorial — a Napa billionaire's vanity tribute to relatives killed in the Christmas tsunami — with life-changing consequences. Her brother Chester clings to a failing career as a location scout before suffering an accidental injury resulting from an outrageous prank; the tragicomic repercussions lead him through a maze of addiction, delusion, paranoia — and ultimately, transcendence.
Virtually abandoned by her family, the indomitable Marjorie Herlihy — mother, widow, and dreamer — falls prey to a confidence scheme dizzying in its sadism and complexity. And unbeknownst to Marj and her children, the father who disappeared decades ago is alive and well nearby, recently in the local news for reasons that will prove to be both his redemption and his undoing. Spiraling toward catastrophe, separate lives collide as family members make a valiant attempt to reunite and create an enduring legacy. To rewrite a ruined American dream.
Deeply compassionate and violently irreverent, "Memorial" is a testament to faith and forgiveness, and a luminous tribute to spirituality in the twenty-first century. With an unflagging eye on a society ruptured by naturaland unnatural disaster, and an insatiable love for humanity, Wagner delivers a masterpiece.

Memorial — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «Memorial», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Bruce Wagner

Memorial

to Gavin de Becker

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! as the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow’s springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Passage to India!

Lo, soul! Seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?

The earth to be spann’d, connected by net-work,

The people to become brothers and sisters,

The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,

The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,

The lands to be welded together.

(A worship new, I sing;

You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours!

You engineers! You architects, machinists, yours!

You, not for trade or transportation only,

But in God’s name, and for thy sake, O soul.)

— Walt Whitman

I.Joan

37now but thinks of herself as 40, to soften the coming blow. “Then,” the litany goes, “I’ll be 50—a woman in her 50s.” “Then I’ll be 63.” “Then 70. Then 76, 77.” “Then I will be 81–83.” She doesn’t go so far as to muse upon a future place of residence or quality of caretakers, shuddering when she passes assisted living homes, extended care America, thinking of her mom, but is certain of one thing, that she will be alone: all the while feeling those ages to be just round the corner, come in a blink, knowing intellectually re the fleetingness of time that there were many celebrated men and women, avatars, essayists, and intellects who could back her subjective notions with hard text or admirably glib spiritual pronouncement. Easy to evoke, even during mundane daytime chores, those philosophical flights of grad school days gone by, wild and romantically jagged cerebral nights. Stanford semiotics, string theory and such, rhapsodically sprayed like Halloween gunk on the trees and bushes of verbiage, space and time — collapse of reason and rationale like so many symphonies pounded to the size of the head of a pin, Gödel, Escher, Bach, so be it. Wasn’t that the dream of this life?

She’d been having a specific dream-within-the-dream for over a year now, as if her mind, that great computer, were searching for a lost j-peg: the Perfect Memorial file. In a nocturnal reverie she called the Castle of Perseverance, details of the catastrophe were vague and illegible, as 10-minute-old skywriting on a still summer’s day or the half-erased chalkmarks of simple equations upon green slate. Joan floated there too, billowy charcoal housecoat open like the commodious wings of that tree-flying squirrel she saw on a Discovery Channel doc, or a whimsical matron’s smock in a children’s book, and she could always just about make out the smokily verdant terrain below. The locus of the Event—“mound zero” is what one of her wittier lover-confidants called it — for which, in nondreaming life, her firm, ARK, had been hired to commemorate, the REM/Rem locus, as it turned out, was neither domestic nor international but hovered somewhere above, in a cottonball Canadian Christo-wrapped airspace 5 full skycrapers above. Sometimes a superstructure the firm had bid for and lost — there were a number of them, more than Barbet wanted to count — but one in particular, in China, seemed persistently to shanghai her nightworld, grafting failed CG skinsketch onto gauzy somnambulist constructions. In the dream, millions were to be memorialized, when the truth is ARK (10 years ago aptly, chicly named) had been hired by a billionaire whose brother and sister-in-law died near Chennai in the Christmas tsunami. The monument in Napa was to represent just the 2 of them, swept into a full-moon lake of mangroves, left hanging in trees like ornaments, though of course the design would have to be something beyond, as if representing all swampy, swami’d souls, because while the Northern California tribute was to sit on 400 obscenely private acres, it would become a well-known thing, famously endowed, famously elegiac. It had already been written about in the architectural trade and popular press, as if there was a difference between them anymore, and, if secured, would inevitably lead to other commissions. No doubt.

The jewel box site and predictably pending dumbass dustup over elitist venue mandated things be done just right. While Joan slept, ghosts of the battered, float-bloated dead wafted and moaned, debris-spun like dirty shredded cardboard Niagaran barrels, the hundreds of thousands never to be seen again deviously commingled with intransigent Katrina-killed old folks in attics (again she thought of Mother), wet silvery heads jammed into memorabilia-choked roofs with their rictus mouths, Pontchartrain floaters and bloaters and jokey FEMA hieroglyphs on sodden walls of Sumatran mud and Gentilly lace. Upon awakening, Joan became uneasy, as if somehow her ARK’s desire and egoistic need to win said competition was unclean. It was the kind of dream, scrim of hallucinatory blowback, that sent her out for mocha latte in a daze, bypassing the stainless steel Impressa, wondering with embarrassment when she gave the barista her order if she’d actually forgotten to brush her teeth.

II.Ray

RAY lives in City of Industry with his roommate, Ghulpa, and fluffy terrier mix Friar. Friar’s full name is Friar Tuck. Ray sometimes calls him Nip/Tuck (after Ghulpa’s favorite show) or just the Friar.

Near midnight they came busting down the door, a whole crew of LAPD and sheriffs, to cuff the crusty 76 year old diabetic. They threw in a stun gun that started a small carpet fire. He had a heart attack. Ghulpa hollered and the Friar got shot in the hip when one of the officers’ pistols went off. All a mistake con brio, police had the wrong address, admitted as much, and there was Ray, Raymond Rausch with his yellow ribbons for the soldiers in the front window, on his stomach like a roped calf and shocked at how calm he’d remained through the home invasion calamity. Even the paramedics took note.

He befouled himself but limned the story sans trousershit for weeks to whoever would listen, how cool and collected he was, mostly he told the writer from the Times who was working up one of those nakedly Pulitzer-aspiring series about wrong-door break-ins, and recounted for the ACLU folks as well. Kept saying the whole time he was only worried for his doggie. All gave kindly props and thankfully never learned about the pants crapola, conversationally trying to relate Ray’s bravado to the vague idea formulated that he was some kind of war vet, but the amicable old Republican said no, never been in a war, though not for tryin, born a cool customer, not one to be ruffled by a well-intentioned batter-ram entry. He’d seen enough Dallas SWATs and Law & Order s to know that snitches weren’t the most reliable folks on the planet.

Ghulpa usually chimed in during interlocution, subtly sardonic, that Ray was too busy having “a hot attack” to get worked up, true enough, small infarct as it turned out, not much damage incurred. But that was Ghulpa. She liked taking the wind from his sails. She was from Calcutta and nothing rattled her, for real. Plus she was modest, happy her musty-smelling old man inexorably steered journalistic attentions to dear shot-up Nip/Tuck. It wouldn’t have been right for him to be mouthy about how he had been on the futon, spooning his Indian galfriend at commencement of the doorshatter, small fire, pistolshot, dog yelp, and pain-seizured beshitting. (To bed boast wasn’t Ray’s way.) They weren’t intimate like that but still she was grateful, and he was proud how wet-hen feisty she got at the cops for busting in. He wasn’t even sure she was legal but BG put herself out there, got in everyone’s face, Ray never saw that side of her before (not really), not in spades anyway as they say. They’d only been together 11 months, longest ride he’d hitched in 30 years, since Marjorie, never thought of her as wife material for chrissake done with all that. So proud of BG, cataract’d eye twinkled when she spoke with such righteousness to the Times or ACLU or whomever; Ghulpa’s accent danced, lit, and lilted around strings of rational invective, articulate as hell and logical in that adjunctive bobbleheaded Hindu way. Might have to make an honest woman of her yet.

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «Memorial»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «Memorial» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.


Отзывы о книге «Memorial»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «Memorial» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.

x