Edward Aubyn - The Patrick Melrose Novels - Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Edward Aubyn - The Patrick Melrose Novels - Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk» 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: 2012, Издательство: Picador, Жанр: Современная проза, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER An
 Best Book of the Year

Best Book of the Year
“The Melrose Novels are a masterwork for the twenty-first century, written by one of the great prose stylists in England.” —Alice Sebold, author of
For more than twenty years, acclaimed author Edward St. Aubyn has chronicled the life of Patrick Melrose, painting an extraordinary portrait of the beleaguered and self-loathing world of privilege. This single volume collects the first four novels—
,
,
, and
, a Man Booker finalist—to coincide with the publication of
, the final installment of this unique novel cycle.
By turns harrowing and hilarious, these beautifully written novels dissect the English upper class as we follow Patrick Melrose’s story from child abuse to heroin addiction and recovery.
, the first novel, unfolds over a day and an evening at the family’s chateaux in the south of France, where the sadistic and terrifying figure of David Melrose dominates the lives of his five-year-old son, Patrick, and his rich and unhappy American mother, Eleanor. From abuse to addiction, the second novel,
opens as the twenty-two-year-old Patrick sets off to collect his father’s ashes from New York, where he will spend a drug-crazed twenty-four hours. And back in England, the third novel,
, offers a sober and clean Patrick the possibility of recovery. The fourth novel, the Booker-shortlisted
, returns to the family chateau, where Patrick, now married and a father himself, struggles with child rearing, adultery, his mother’s desire for assisted suicide, and the loss of the family home to a New Age foundation.
Edward St. Aubyn offers a window into a world of utter decadence, amorality, greed, snobbery, and cruelty—welcome to the declining British aristocracy.

The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk — 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 «The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk», 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

A grey-coated doorman lifted his cap and held out his hand, while a bellboy hurried out to fetch Patrick’s bags. One welcome and two tips later Patrick was stalking sweatily through the long corridor which led to the reception. The tables in the Oval Room were occupied by pairs of lunching women, toying with plates of different-coloured lettuces and ignoring glasses of mineral water. Patrick caught sight of himself in a large gilt mirror, and noticed that, as usual, he looked rather overdressed and extremely ill. There was a disturbing contrast between the care with which the clothes had been assembled and the ease with which the face looked as if it might fall apart. His very long black overcoat, dark blue suit, and thin black and silver tie (bought by his father in the early sixties) seemed to be unrelated to the chaotic tangle of brown hair which surrounded his dead-white and shiny face. The face itself was in a spasm of contradiction. The full lips were pinched inward, the eyes reduced to narrow slits, the nose, which was permanently blocked, forced him to breathe through his open mouth and made him look rather imbecilic; and a frown concentrated his forehead into a vertical crease directly above the nose.

After he had registered, Patrick braced himself to clear as quickly as possible the long gauntlet of welcomes and tips that still lay between him and having a drink in his room. Someone took him to the lift, someone took him up in the lift (that long stale suspense, watching the numbers flicker up to thirty-nine), someone showed him how to turn on the television, someone put his suitcase down on the rack, someone pointed out the bathroom light, someone gave him his room key, and, at last, someone brought him a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a black bucket of frail ice cubes, and four glasses.

He poured himself a full glass over a few cubes of ice. The smell of the bourbon seemed to him infinitely subtle and poignant, and as he gulped down the first burning mouthful, standing by the window, looking out over Central Park, leafy and hot under a paler wider sky, he wanted to cry. It was so fucking beautiful. He felt his sadness and exhaustion fuse with the dissolving and sentimental embrace of the bourbon. It was a moment of catastrophic charm. How could he ever hope to give up drugs? They filled him with such intense emotion. The sense of power they gave him was, admittedly, rather subjective (ruling the world from under the bedcovers, until the milkman arrived and you thought he was a platoon of stormtroopers come to steal your drugs and splatter your brains across the wall), but then again, life was so subjective.

He really ought to go to the funeral parlour now, it would be appalling to miss the chance of seeing his father’s corpse (perhaps he could rest his foot on it). Patrick giggled and put down his empty glass on the windowsill. He was not going to take any smack. ‘I want to make that absolutely clear,’ he squealed in the voice of Mr Muffet, his old chemistry teacher from school. Walk tall, that was his philosophy, but get some downers first. Nobody could give up everything at once, especially (sob, sob) at a time like this. He must go down into that pulsing, burgeoning, monstrous mass of vegetation, the Park, and score. The gaggle of black and Hispanic dealers who hung around the entrance to Central Park opposite his hotel recognized Patrick as a potential customer from some way off.

‘Uppers! Downers! Check it out,’ said a tall, bruised-looking black man. Patrick walked on.

A hollow-cheeked Hispanic with a scrawny beard jerked his jaw forward and said, ‘Wot canna du for ju, my friend?’

‘I got goo-ood stuff,’ said another black man, wearing shades. ‘ Check it out.

‘Have you got any Quaaludes?’ drawled Patrick.

‘Sure, I got some Quaaludes. I got Lemon 714s – how many you want?’

‘How much?’

‘Five dollars.’

‘I’ll take six. And maybe some speed,’ Patrick added. This was what they called impulse shopping. Speed was the last thing he wanted, but he didn’t like to buy a drug unless he had the capacity to contradict it.

‘I got some Beauties, they’re phar-ma-ceu-ti-cal.’

‘You mean you made them yourself.’

‘No, man, pharmaceutical mean they’re goo-ood shit.’

‘Three of those.’

‘Ten dollars each.’

Patrick handed over sixty dollars and took the pills. By this time the other dealers had gathered round, impressed by the easy way that Patrick parted with money.

‘Ju English, right?’ said the Hispanic.

‘Don’t bother the man,’ said Shades.

‘Yes,’ said Patrick, knowing what was coming next.

‘You got free heroin over there, right?’ said the bruised-looking black man.

‘That’s right,’ said Patrick patriotically.

‘One day I’m going to come over to Britain and get me some of that free smack,’ the bruised-looking man said, looking relieved for a few seconds.

‘You do that,’ said Patrick, heading back up the steps to Fifth Avenue. ‘Bye now.’

‘You come back here tomorrow,’ said Shades possessively.

‘Yeah,’ mumbled Patrick, running up the steps. He put the Quaalude in his mouth, summoned a little saliva, and managed to force the pill down. It was an important skill to be able to swallow a pill without anything to drink. People who needed a drink were intolerable, he reflected, hailing a cab.

‘Madison Avenue and Eighty-second Street,’ he said, realizing that the Quaalude, which was after all a large pill, was stuck halfway down his throat. As the cab sped up Madison Avenue, Patrick twisted his neck into various positions in an attempt to get the pill all the way down.

By the time they reached Frank E. MacDonald’s Patrick was stretched out with his neck craned backwards and sideways over the edge of the seat, his hair touching the black rubber floor mat while he squeezed as much saliva as he could from the sides of his dry cheeks and swallowed furiously. The driver looked in the rear-view mirror. Another weirdo.

Patrick eventually dislodged the Quaalude from the ledge it had found just under his Adam’s apple, and walked through the tall oak doors of the funeral parlour, dread and absurdity competing inside him. The young woman behind the curved oak counter with Doric half-columns set at either end of its inner panel wore a blue jacket and a grey silk blouse, like an air hostess for a flight into the Afterlife.

‘I’ve come to see the corpse of David Melrose,’ said Patrick coldly. She told him to step right into the elevator and go ‘straight on up’ to the third floor, as if he might be tempted to stop off and see some other corpses on the way.

The lift was a homage to French tapestry-making. Above the buttoned leather bench, on which the bereaved could pause before facing the corpse of their loved one, was an Arcadia of petit point where a courtier pretending to be a shepherd played a flute to a courtier pretending to be a shepherdess.

This was it, the big moment: the corpse of his chief enemy, the ruins of his creator, the body of his dead father; the great weight of all that was unsaid and would never have been said; the pressure to say it now, when there was nobody to hear, and to speak also on his father’s behalf, in an act of self-division that might fissure the world and turn his body into a jigsaw puzzle. This was it.

The sound that greeted Patrick as the doors of the lift slid open made him wonder if George had organized a surprise party, but the idea was too grotesque, given the difficulty of procuring more than half a dozen people worldwide who knew his father at all well and still liked him. He stepped out onto the landing and saw, beyond two Corinthian pillars, a panelled room full of gaily dressed elderly strangers. Men in every variety of lightweight tartan, and women in big white and yellow hats, were drinking cocktails and clutching each other’s arms. At the back of the room, into which he wandered uncomprehendingly, was an open tilted coffin lined with white satin, and containing a punctiliously dressed, diminutive man with a diamond tie pin, snow-white hair, and a black suit. On a table beside him Patrick saw a stack of cards saying, ‘In Loving Memory of Hermann Newton.’ Death was no doubt an overwhelming experience, but it must be even more powerful than he had imagined if it could transform his father into a small Jew with so many amusing new friends.

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk» 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 «The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk» 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