Steve Toltz - Quicksand

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Quicksand: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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A daring, brilliant new novel from Man Booker Prize finalist Steve Toltz, for fans of Dave Eggers, Martin Amis, and David Foster Wallace: a fearlessly funny, outrageously inventive dark comedy about two lifelong friends.
Liam is a struggling writer and a failing cop. Aldo, his best friend and muse, is a haplessly criminal entrepreneur with an uncanny knack for disaster. As Aldo's luck worsens, Liam is inspired to base his next book on his best friend's exponential misfortunes and hopeless quest to win back his one great love: his ex-wife, Stella. What begins as an attempt to make sense of Aldo's mishaps spirals into a profound story of faith and friendship.
With the same originality and buoyancy that catapulted his first novel,
, onto prize lists around the world — including shortlists for the Man Booker Prize and the
First Book Award — Steve Toltz has created a rousing, hysterically funny but unapologetically dark satire about fate, faith, friendship, and the artist's obligation to his muse. Sharp, witty, kinetic, and utterly engrossing,
is a subversive portrait of twenty-first-century society in all its hypocrisy and absurdity.

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In short , he turns his nose up, is ambivalent, and outright refuses every human method of disposing of a body. Eventually, with a heavy heart, he decides it is much less hassle to remain alive. And that’s when the story takes its surprising turn! The reveal at the end of the book is that the corpse is not a real corpse but a young boy with leukaemia, his ghostly pallor due to his prolonged sickness and iron deficiency, and the pallbearers are his brothers who have broken him out of hospital and put him in a coffin to help the young boy confront the stark reality of his inevitable death.

I closed the book and felt like I had been shot with an arrow and slung across a saddle and galloped into hell. Perhaps due to the frankness of Mimi’s photographs and the unsentimental manner in which the prose tackled the subject, the tale was almost unbearably poignant and weird. The library had grown calmer, the students had ceased their loud whispering, having retreated to their respective smartphones. I couldn’t understand my oppressive, mixed overreaction; everything paltry inside me bristled and throbbed repulsively. It was as if I had recognised myself in the fussy corpse, in that boy’s attitude and overall dilemma. Absurd. I left the book on the table, but then came back and returned it to the shelf. I didn’t want any children to happen upon it.

VII

That night, I dug out the pornographic poster of Mimi Underwood and sat on my bed looking at her dark, large, distended nipples and her exquisite — or in her mind, revolting — birthmark, that I found at the worst lovely and at the best incredibly erotic. About midnight, staring out of my window into the black sky and a misty halo of moon, I called the number on the poster. Your Honour, because in this era I recorded all calls to women for education and training purposes, I submit exhibit C, the following recording dated March thirty-first 2013:

Hello?

Hello, Mimi Underwood! What’s that I’m hearing?

I’m brushing my hair.

Sounds knotty.

What do you want?

It’s Aldo Benjamin. The guy from the —

I recognise your voice. What do you want?

You recognise my voice? I’m flattered.

Don’t be. It’s unforgettable for all the wrong reasons. What do you want?

You didn’t change your number.

I’ll say it for the last time.

This is the woman who beat me with a car antenna, isn’t it?

An apology, then?

I find it almost inconceivable that you didn’t change your number.

You’ve called at a bad time. I’m having the worst week of my life.

That’s what you said last time! I bet you have a lot of worst weeks. Did you know we went to the same high school?

Which one? I went to a few.

Zetland High.

The one with all the pigeons? Yeah, for a few months about twenty fucking years ago, so what? Thousands of people have been to that high school.

So what is right.

So I’m hanging up now.

I read The Fussy Corpse .

(silence)

That makes twelve of you. Did you buy it?

I read it in the library. Sorry. I have to say it was really something. It should come with a warning to emotionally or psychologically buckle up. My heart has been beating irregularly ever since I finished it.

So you didn’t buy it, and you didn’t even borrow it. Now I’m really hanging up.

I understand.

(long silence)

Mimi, are your eyes closed or open?

Closed.

Mine too.

(more silence)

Mimi, I want to tell you something.

What is it?

(silence)

I’ve never been angry in a dream.

So?

You know what I hate most in life? When someone says to me, ‘You know who you look like?’ Then they name some overweight and unattractive character actor.

Why would you think I care about this?

I’ve always wanted to live in the type of old-worldy culture where it’s rude not to marry your brother’s widow.

Did you want to tell me something more important?

Yes.

What?

I want to kill myself.

I see.

Yes.

You’ll miss New Year’s Eve.

I don’t mind.

And the lunar eclipse.

When’s that?

Stick around and find out.

What’s so great about a lunar eclipse?

And crawling into fresh hotel sheets. And afternoon naps. And crying in a sad movie. And hearing a new language spoken for the first time. And wandering in the desert unable to find your tent at night.

That sounds terrifying.

Meeting a new person and watching them form judgements of you as you speak.

You like that?

Waking up on a boat to find you’ve drifted into a new estuary. Watching a sunrise with a beautiful stranger who may or may not have stolen your wallet. Crawling into the marital bed after cheating. Having your earlobes kissed and your toes sucked at the same time.

How can one person kiss your earlobes and suck your toes at the same time?

Who said anything about one person?

Mimi. I have nothing of substance in my life. All I have are my friendships and my love of God — how superficial. It’s all about me, me, me!

That’s no reason to lose the will to live.

And I’ve no real job. I don’t even have a trade, or some kind of skill-set.

What are you interested in?

Well, recently I have become obsessed with people who were mauled by their own dogs or whose children were mauled by their own dogs and who thereafter kept or defended those dogs.

That doesn’t sound like a trade to me. How old are you?

Old enough to miss slamming down a rotary phone with enough force to hurt someone’s eardrum.

What are you afraid of?

I’m a talented loser. The worst kind. Talented losers become self-aware madmen.

Aldo, I think I’ll go back to brushing my hair.

And when I was in my twenties, the girls I knew were having abortions. By my thirties, they had moved onto stillbirths. I’m almost forty. Where’s it all going to end?

You know where it ends.

I don’t. I don’t know. Do you think the inability to die could amount to a disability?

What kind of a question is that?

You asked me what I’m afraid of. That’s my fear. That there’ll always be some obstacle that prevents me from dying, from removing myself from the earth.

What are you saying?

I don’t know. Maybe I’m just overtired. I’ve no energy these days, I’m always distracted, and am often staring into space. Literally — I have a telescope.

I don’t think we’re at the heart of things.

Strange things happen to me.

What kind of strange things?

It’s hard to explain.

Try.

If there’s a foot-sized crack in a thousand-kilometre pavement, my foot will find it.

Lots of people are clumsy.

I’m clumsy, sure, no doubt. I had a stubbed-toe and head-lodged-between-banisters type of childhood and I still need to apply special concentration on escalators in regards to foot placement. I have an accident-prone personality. And I can identify with some but not all of the indicators: impulsiveness, cognitive drift, aggression. But this is something else. You know what Freud said? Accumulation puts an end to the impression of chance. I agree. This shit is not coincidence. Have you ever swallowed a fly?

Once.

Well, I’ve swallowed bees . And at least twice a year a bird flies into my head. I always fall over when I’m in the middle of yelling at someone. When I play a piano, the lid invariably closes on my fingers. I can never cross train tracks at night without a train screaming out of nowhere or traverse a lawn without the automatic sprinklers coming on. A rung has been missing on every ladder I’ve climbed. I inevitably get sick on my birthday. Whenever I travel I arrive in town the day after the fiesta. And how many overweight women can one man congratulate on being pregnant?

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