A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom

From the bestselling author of A Ladder to the Sky a darkly funny novel that races like a beating heart (People) comes a new novel that plays out across all of human history: a story as precise as it is unlimited.

This story starts with a family. For now, it is a father and a mother with two sons, one with his father s violence in his blood, one with his mother s artistry. One leaves. One stays. They will be joined by others whose deeds will determine their fate. It is a beginning.

Their stories will intertwine and evolve over the course of two thousand years. They will meet again and again at different times and in different places. From Palestine at the dawn of the first millennium and journeying across fifty countries to a life among the stars in the third, the world will change around them, but their destinies remain the same. It must play out as foretold.

From the award-winning author of The Heart s Invisible Furies comes A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom, an epic tale of humanity. The story of all of us, stretching across two millennia. Imaginative, unique, heartbreaking, this is John Boyne at his most creative and compelling.

Autorentext

John Boyne

Klappentext

From the bestselling author of A Ladder to the Sky—“a darkly funny novel that races like a beating heart” (People)—comes a new novel that plays out across all of human history: a story as precise as it is unlimited.

This story starts with a family. For now, it is a father and a mother with two sons, one with his father’s violence in his blood, one with his mother’s artistry. One leaves. One stays. They will be joined by others whose deeds will determine their fate. It is a beginning.

Their stories will intertwine and evolve over the course of two thousand years. They will meet again and again at different times and in different places. From Palestine at the dawn of the first millennium and journeying across fifty countries to a life among the stars in the third, the world will change around them, but their destinies remain the same. It must play out as foretold.

From the award-winning author of The Heart’s Invisible Furies comes A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom, an epic tale of humanity. The story of all of us, stretching across two millennia. Imaginative, unique, heartbreaking, this is John Boyne at his most creative and compelling.

Zusammenfassung
Praise for The Heart s Invisible Furies

By turns whimsical and heartbreaking, Boyne s sprawling novel treads Dickensian territory across seven decades of Irish history, ending with a redemption for both a country and a native son. People

Bleak, bittersweet, and Irish to the bone . . . Explore[s] the relationship between Catholicism and patriarchy in midcentury Ireland and beyond. O: The Oprah Magazine

A picaresque, lolloping odyssey for the individual characters and for the nation that confines them . . . The book blazes with anger as it commemorates lives wrecked by social contempt and self loathing. . . . A substantial achievement. The Guardian

Praise for A Ladder to the Sky

A satire of writerly ambition wrapped in a psychological thriller . . . an homage to Patricia Highsmith, Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe, but its execution is entirely Boyne s own. The Washington Post

Boyne s mastery of perspective, last seen in The Heart s Invisible Furies, works beautifully here. . . . So dark it seems almost impossible to enjoy reading A Ladder to the Sky as much as you definitely will enjoy reading it. NPR

Delicious. Vanity Fair

A darkly funny novel that races like a beating heart. People

Leseprobe
Palestine

a.d. 1

On the night that I was born, my father, Marinus, left our home while my mother was in labor and, over the eight hours that followed, slaughtered a dozen infant boys, the sons of our neighbors and friends, each one under the age of two years.

He owned four swords, including a pair of gladii and an ornamental sica that had been handed down through three generations of our family, but he chose the smallest weapon in his arsenal, a triangular dagger with a wooden handle and silver blade known as a parazonium, to end each of the babies lives. A ruby jewel of considerable value lay at the center of the quillion, its liquid blush ready to reflect the blood that spilled from the bodies of the children.

A man of duty, he did not hesitate as he marched from door to door, searching each house for hidden nurslings before plunging his knife into the heart of every boy he found, and while mothers screamed in horror and rained curses down upon his head, fathers stood silently in corners, mute and impotent, knowing that if they dared to speak, the blade would surely find its way across their throats before their sentence came to an end. Older siblings trembled in fear as they watched Marinus go about his dark business, soiling themselves, frightened that they, too, were about to face the judgment of the gods for some unspecified crime, but no, once the babe had been dispatched from this world for the next, my father barely glanced in their direction before making his way to the next house, and the next, and the next after that, for there were more babies to discover and more lives to bring to a premature end.

After each murder, he wiped the blade clean on his tunic, the fabric growing increasingly discolored as the sun began to peep over the horizon in the east, a fiery witness to unspeakable crimes, and soon the gray disappeared beneath an incarnadine coat.

Of course, Marinus was not the only man engaged in sanguineous misadventures that night. More than thirty other soldiers had been deployed by King Herod to the towns that surrounded Bethlehem, from Ramat Rachel in the north to Rafida in the south, and from Har Gilo in the west to Juhazm in the east, until more than three hundred infant boys were put to death for the crime of being a potential King of the Jews.

When my father returned home in the early morning, his spirit dyed with a barbaric tint that could never be erased, I was suckling at my mother s breast and he placed a trembling hand upon my skull, resting it there for a moment as he gave me his blessing and begged forgiveness from the immortals atop Mount Olympus. When he took it away, a trace of blood was left in its wake, a deadly deposit, and I ve always wondered whether some residue of his crimes remained indelibly upon my soul, a tattoo invisible to all but the eyes of the gods, a reminder of the massacre of the innocents that was taking place as I filled my lungs with air for the first time.

There is, of course, an unhappy irony to the fact that he dispatched a dozen babies from this world, for he would be responsible for bringing the same number into it over the course of his life, although few would survive past their infant years.

He also saw off four wives, although none, I hasten to add, at his own hand, and while my mother, Floriana, was the last woman to marry him, she would not be the last to share either his bed or his home.

Marinus s first marriage took place when he was only twelve years old, a forced contract with his cousin Iunia, the ritual taking place in a stone temple in the town of Za tara, where they were both born. The marriage was not a success. His father and uncle, greedy men with cruel dispositions, spent their lives slipping between periods of hostility and camaraderie and their children paid the price for their inconstancy. The couple being so young, it was said that all four pa