Sara Majka - Cities I've Never Lived In - Stories

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Sara Majka - Cities I've Never Lived In - Stories» 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: 2016, Издательство: Graywolf Press, Жанр: Современная проза, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

In subtle, sensuous prose, the stories in Sara Majka's debut collection explore distance in all its forms: the emotional spaces that open up between family members, friends, and lovers; the gaps that emerge between who we were and who we are; the gulf between our private and public selves. At the center of the collection is a series of stories narrated by a young American woman in the wake of a divorce; wry and shy but never less than open to the world, she recalls the places and people she has been close to, the dreams she has pursued and those she has left unfulfilled. Interspersed with these intimate first-person stories are stand-alone pieces where the tight focus on the narrator's life gives way to closely observed accounts of the lives of others. A book about belonging, and how much of yourself to give up in the pursuit of that,
offers stories that reveal, with great sadness and great humor, the ways we are most of all citizens of the places where we cannot be.
Cities I've Never Lived In
A Public Space
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR “A human and eloquent exploration of isolation.” —Publishers Weekly
“These stories are a marvel that will break your heart. . Majka’s debut is breath-stopping.” —A.N. Devers, Longreads
"These stories are sparse and fierce and move elegantly to the very heart of the reader. The voice remains with me, has left an emotional trace like a person I lived with and loved and often recall.” —Catherine Lacey, author of Nobody is Ever Missing
“A collection that leaves you longing — as one longs to return to much loved, much missed homes and communities and cities — for places that you, the reader have never been. Prodigal with insight into why and how people love and leave, and love again. Humane, dazzling, and knowing.”
— Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners
“Like Alice Munro and Raymond Carver, Sara Majka writes stories of people on society’s ragged edge — in money trouble, work trouble, heart trouble — and does so with tremendous subtlety and a grave sophistication all her own. Every one of the spare sentences in this book is heavy with implication and insight. It’s impossible to read these stories too closely.” —Salvatore Scibona, author of The End
“I cannot remember a book that more perfectly achieves the sensation of, as Majka describes, ‘being nowhere, or in someone else’s life, or between lives.’ With each subsequent story, the feeling intensified until, as only the very best writing can do, I felt transformed by the experience. Cities I’ve Never Lived In is a momentous book, and Majka is a writer operating at a very high level of insight.” —Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang

is like no other book I’ve read: graceful and poignant, original and wise. Its stories unfold in the bars, thrift stores, and rented rooms of a Maine you won’t find in tourist guidebooks or outdoor catalogs, but their deeper territory is the human heart: loss and loneliness, desire and grief, and the strange beauty to be found in desolation. Like the memories that haunt her watchful, wounded characters, Sara Majka’s exquisite prose stayed with me long after I had turned the last page of this terrific debut.” —Mia Alvar, author of In the Country
“This is a beautiful and destabilizing book filled with ghosts. Majka is a writer I’d read anything by.” —Diane Cook, author of Man Vs. Nature
“The characters in Sara Majka’s haunting collection drift through cities and landscapes like refugees from feeling, searching for something they can’t begin to name. These stories confound all our expectations: they fade in and out like memories or dreams, at once indelible and impossible to grasp. Again and again they broke my heart. Majka is a daring and enormously gifted writer, and this is a thrilling, devastating debut.” —Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You

Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories — 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 «Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories», 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

Sara Majka

Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories

for my mom

REVERÓN’S DOLLS

Maybe ten or eleven years ago, when I was in the middle of a divorce from a man I still loved, I took the train into the city. We were both moving often during this time, as if it were the best solution to a shattered life: to move from place to place, trying to thread together, if not our marriage and our lives, then something in ourselves. Richard was teaching in the Hudson Valley, and I had moved back to Maine, but would go sometimes to see him, and we would take long walks through the estates along the river, and drive up to Hudson, where there was a café that we liked, with an outside patio made of concrete. The croissants were carefully made there, though they served everything on paper plates.

Richard would order while I waited at the table, and when he returned we would eat and often complain about the waste of paper. After a time I would get in my car and find my way back to Maine, though I didn’t know the roads well and I’d have to pull over to call him. The wood signs had road numbers neither of us knew, but we would piece it together and tell each other small jokes.

During one of these trips I took the train into the city. I wasn’t well in the way that I would be several years later, and the wave of the power lines in the midday sun seemed alive to me. I watched them for the better part of the journey — the way the lines threaded up and down, and passed through sun and shadows. It felt as if there was only me and the distant spectacle keeping pace with me.

The train was dirty, with few people on it. We passed empty lots and warehouses. When we pulled into Grand Central, I entered the station and stood against the wall, so that I could look at the ceiling without being noticed. The exhibit was in the new MoMA, which seemed that day like a church built to disorient. A large white space, with escalators that took you from floor to floor, and every floor looked like the one before it. I was there to see the work of a Venezuelan artist named Armando Reverón. The Times had run an article with photographs of his life-sized dolls and of his self-portraits with the dolls. The exhibit took up one gallery, with the paintings in front and the dolls in back. For a time I sat on a bench, then I left the gallery.

In the spring I saw Richard again, him in his lightweight coat, standing in the parking lot near his office at the college. He was dating someone by then, someone who lived in town. He looked at me — a small, unseasonably dressed woman — and what he saw I didn’t know; probably he felt sorry for me, but I also imagine it — my discomposure — made him happy, standing there, holding his cup of coffee.

картинка 1

After the divorce, I went to a cottage along the water that belonged to a friend. Richard and I had gone there several times when we were together, always in odd seasons, during odd weather, when no one else wanted it. I planned to be there all winter, unless someone else came. Richard came one day. There was a cafeteria-style restaurant that served cheap fish meals, where people ate together at long tables, and we met there. He sat down with me and looked at the people at the tables — they were fishermen, and women who cleaned hotel rooms during the season, and men who cooked during the season, and now it was out of season and no one had much to do — and said it hadn’t changed much. After, we walked through the town. I felt like a caretaker showing a house that I loved but that had been more neglected than it ought to have been. We could go clamming, I said. He asked after the tide and I said, 3:00 p.m., and he said, That’s a good tide. I thought of my body underneath my coat, of what it would feel like to take my coat off in the kitchen while he was there.

Clamming happens in many villages along the East Coast. Clam beds are seeded, in that people aren’t looking for wild clams, but are searching for clams that have been put there much as fields are sown. I know little about the lives of clams, though I’m left with the idea that they drift, that the tide raises them and they skirt along until being brought down. You get them by going while the tide is out, and raking with an instrument that looks like a garden tool. You know you’ve hit a clam by the weight and the ping against the rake. Then you reach down and toss it to the pile. If it’s so large the clam will be chewy, or so small it passes through the gauge, you put it in the sand and stomp on the ground. This keeps it from the seagulls that come in, once you leave, like ravens to a kill that’s been left behind. When the birds get clams, they fly to a flat roof and drop them to break them open. To the people under the roofs it sounds like solitary hail.

картинка 2

Later on I was in the city, where I stayed in a married couple’s apartment while they traveled. It was a corner apartment filled with light, overlooking a church. The husband was an artist and the walls were covered with his canvases. I’m not sure if the husband had wanted them hung, but the wife had, so I would wake and have coffee with the sun coming in and the brightness of the paintings. There were cats who slept with me, and there were stairs to the roof. If you went up just as it was getting dark, the last of the light receded behind the steeple and made it loom as if in a magical way, and I was full of the feeling of being nowhere, or in someone else’s life, or between lives.

The old man who lived below the roof had a window on his landing that was coated in film, and he had placed four dying plants in front of it, leading me to believe the dead plants on the roof were also his. Those were entirely dead, and looked like buried branches, or like a Zen garden of sparseness. It was as if he had first tried a garden on the roof, but when those died he receded further, only daring to try outside his door, and as those were dying he enclosed himself even more, and I never saw him.

When the couple was there, we would smoke on the roof and eat bean salads. I would watch the light around the steeple and feel happy that I was there, feeling for a time that there was nothing but the roof, and them, and their happiness. Then we would creep back down. We weren’t supposed to talk on the landing because of the man, though often they’d forget and would tell each other small jokes. It seemed the sort of carelessness that love can evoke, where things can be taken with great seriousness, but also without any at all. But I never forgot about the man and felt him each time I passed his landing, with that dark mat and pile of shoes, and the plants crowding the sill, which rather than suggesting hope, seemed a fleeting and failed attempt at life.

One time when I was visiting, the couple told me that a woman was now living with him. She was much younger, didn’t speak good English, and barely went out. They didn’t know how he could have gotten her. She was young, not unpretty. On my last visit, though, the wife said, It’s just the man again.

It’s hard to talk about love. It’s as if it closes when we’re not experiencing it and becomes impossible to recall. After my divorce, I briefly dated someone much younger. He was about to move to Berlin. I had been there once and remembered trying to make out a subway map at night when a student walked over to help. The student had been tall in the dark, as tall, it seemed, as the post the map was on. It’s strange what you remember, what will keep. Whole years can pass, can end up being unimportant, but that stranger in Berlin I remember.

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories» 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 «Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories» 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