I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

Informationen zum Autor LORRIE MOORE is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, as well as the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her achievement in the short story. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Klappentext With her distinctive, irresistible wordplay and singular wry humor and wisdom, Lorrie Moore offers a daring, meditative exploration of love and death, passion and grief, and what it means to be haunted by the past, both by history and the human heart. Part ghost story, part tragic-comic portrait of lovers and siblings. Leseprobe Dearest Sister, The moon has roved away in the sky and I don't even know what the pleiades are but at last I can sit alone in the dark by this lamp, my truest self, day's end toasted to the per­fect moment and speak to you. Such peace to have the house quietoutside I believe I hear the groaning deer. The wild-eyed varmints in the traps are past wailing, and the nightjars whistle their hillbilly tunes. I can momentarily stop pretending to tend to my accounts in the desk cartonnier. The gentleman lodger who is keen to relieve me of my spinsterhood has gone upstairs to bed, clacking his walking stick along the rails of the banister, just to create a bit of tension; now overhead his footfall to and from the basin squeaks the boards. I have a vague affection for him, which is not usable enough for marriage. I cannot see what he offers in that regard, despite some impressively memorized Shakespeare and Lord Byron and some queerly fine mimicry of the other lodgers: Priscilla the plump quakeress, tragically maddened by love. Miriam with her laryngitis and Confederate widow's weeds (the town has run out of that slimming black silk and resorts to a confused dark Union blue). Or Mick, the old Chickasaw bachelor, who keeps a whole hawk wing pinned to his never-doffed cowboy hat. Dapper as a finch, the handsome lodger can also recite the bewildering poems of Felicia Hemans, one of which features a virtuous heroine torn from home by piratessweet Jesus take the reins. His mustache is black and thick as broom bristle and the words come flying out from beneath it like the lines of a play in a theater on fire. He has an intriguing trunk of costumes in his closetcotton tights, wool tights, a spellbinding number of tights, some wigs he combs out and puts on for amusement, and even some stuffing for a hunchback which he portrays unnerv­ingly and then lets the stuffing fall completely out. I don't know how he could manage a vigorous sword fight wearing those wigs. If I don't laugh he puts it all away. He says he suffers stage fright everywhere but the stage. He says he will help me build a plat­form on the side of the house, if I would like to get into wicked show business and put great joy into the hearts of simple men. I will certainly think about that, say I and go about my chores. Why, Miss Libby, an Elizabeth should learn Elizabethan. Should she now. I do desire that we be better strangers. He is bold. But he has his own straitened circumstances which I hardly need to take on as my own, though he appears always in fine fettlehandsome in the silvery variegated fashion of rabbits and foxes, a pair of pomaded muttonchops which he says hide a bite scar from his boyhood horse, Cola. The muttonchops fetch­ingly collect snow in January, though he limpssome might say imperceptibly but that has the lie built right in, so I don't say that, not being a good liar. A cork foot from the secesh, he told me. Mounted the real foot and donated it to a Lost Cause Army Medical Museum, he said, and sometimes he goes and visits it just to say hello. Well, everyone got a little too dressed up for that cause, I do not reply, claret-capes and ostrich plumes, as if the...

Klappentext

With her distinctive, irresistible wordplay and singular wry humor and wisdom, Lorrie Moore offers a daring, meditative exploration of love and death, passion and grief, and what it means to be haunted by the past, both by history and the human heart. Part ghost story, part tragic-comic portrait of lovers and siblings.

Zusammenfassung
Lorrie Moore’s first novel since A Gate at the Stairs—a daring, meditative exploration of love and death, passion and grief, and what it means to be haunted by the past, both by history and the human heart

From ***“one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation” (Caryn James; The New York Times*)—a ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and romantic), and the vanishing and persistence of all things—seen and unseen.

A teacher visiting his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the nineteenth century stolen from a boarding house. A therapy clown and an assassin, both presumed dead, but perhaps not dead at all . . .

With her distinctive, irresistible wordplay and singular wry humor and wisdom, Lorrie Moore has given us a magic box of longing and surprise as she writes about love and rebirth and the pull towards life. Bold, meditative, theatrical, this new novel is an inventive, poetic portrait of lovers and siblings as it questions the stories we have been told which may or may not be true. I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home takes us through a trap door, into a windswept, imagined journey to the tragic-comic landscape that is, unmistakably, the world of Lorrie Moore.

Leseprobe
Dearest Sister,

The moon has roved away in the sky and I don’t even know what the pleiades are but at last I can sit alone in the dark by this lamp, my truest self, day’s end toasted to the per­fect moment and speak to you. Such peace to have the house quiet—outside I believe I hear the groaning deer. The wild-eyed varmints in the traps are past wailing, and the nightjars whistle their hillbilly tunes. I can momentarily stop pretending to tend to my accounts in the desk cartonnier. The gentleman lodger who is keen to relieve me of my spinsterhood has gone upstairs to bed, clacking his walking stick along the rails of the banister, just to create a bit of tension; now overhead his footfall to and from the basin squeaks the boards. I have a vague affection for him, which is not usable enough for marriage. I cannot see what he offers in that regard, despite some impressively memorized Shakespeare and Lord Byron and some queerly fine mimicry of the other lodgers: Priscilla the plump quakeress, tragically maddened by love. Miriam with her laryngitis and Confederate widow’s weeds (the town has run out of that slimming black silk and resorts to a confused dark Union blue). Or Mick, the old Chickasaw bachelor, who keeps a whole hawk wing pinned to his never-doffed cowboy hat.

Dapper as a finch, the handsome lodger can also recite the bewildering poems of Felicia Hemans, one of which features a virtuous heroine torn from home by pirates—sweet Jesus take the reins. His mustache is black and thick as broom bristle and the words come flying out from beneath it like the lines of a play in a theater on fire. He has an intriguing trunk of costumes in his closet—cotton tights, wool tights, a spellbinding number of tights, some wigs he combs out and puts on for amusement, and even some stuffing for a hunchback which he portrays unnerv­ingly and then lets the stuffing fall completely out. I don’t know how he could manage a vigorous sword fight wearing those wigs. If I don’t laugh he puts it all away. He says he suffers stage fright everywhere but the stage. He says he will help me build a plat­form on the side of the house, if I would like to get into wicked show business and put great joy into the hearts of simple men.…