The King of Infinite Space

In this lush, magical, queer, and feminist take on Meet Ben Dane: brilliant, devastating, devoted, honest to a fault (truly, a fault). His Broadway theater baron father is dead--but on purpose or by accident? The question rips him apart. Unable to face alone his mother''s ghastly remarriage to his uncle, Ben turns to his dearest friend, Horatio Patel, whom he hasn''t seen since their relationship changed forever from platonic to something...other. Loyal to a fault (truly, a fault), Horatio is on the first flight to New York City when he finds himself next to a sly tailor who portends inevitable disaster. And who seems ominously like an architect of mayhem himself. Meanwhile, Ben''s ex-fiancé, Lia, sundered her from her loved ones thanks to her addiction recovery and torn from her art, has been drawn into the fold of three florists from New Orleans--seemingly ageless sisters who teach her the language of flowers, and whose magical bouquets hold both curses and cures. For a price. On one explosive night these kinetic forces will collide, and the only possible outcome is death. But in the masterly hands of Lyndsay Faye, the story we all know has abundant surprises in store. Impish, captivating, and achingly romantic, this is <Hamlet< as you''ve never seen it before.

Autorentext

Lyndsay Faye

Klappentext

In this lush, magical, queer, and feminist take on Hamlet in modern-day New York City, a neuro-atypical physicist, along with his best friend Horatio and artist ex-fiancé, Lia, are caught up in the otherworldly events surrounding the death of his father.

Meet Ben Dane: brilliant, devastating, devoted, honest to a fault (truly, a fault). His Broadway theater baron father is dead—but on purpose or by accident? The question rips him apart.

Unable to face alone his mother's ghastly remarriage to his uncle, Ben turns to his dearest friend, Horatio Patel, whom he hasn't seen since their relationship changed forever from platonic to something...other. Loyal to a fault (truly, a fault), Horatio is on the first flight to New York City when he finds himself next to a sly tailor who portends inevitable disaster. And who seems ominously like an architect of mayhem himself.

Meanwhile, Ben's ex-fiancé, Lia, sundered her from her loved ones thanks to her addiction recovery and torn from her art, has been drawn into the fold of three florists from New Orleans—seemingly ageless sisters who teach her the language of flowers, and whose magical bouquets hold both curses and cures. For a price.

On one explosive night these kinetic forces will collide, and the only possible outcome is death. But in the masterly hands of Lyndsay Faye, the story we all know has abundant surprises in store. Impish, captivating, and achingly romantic, this is Hamlet as you've never seen it before.

Leseprobe

Lia (1)

i am not police sirens
i am the crackle of a fireplace
-Rupi Kaur, milk and honey

Lia never knows when she'll appear in one of Benjamin's nightmares. But since it's started happening, they tend to meet in the charred shell of the original World's Stage Theatre, the smoke hanging as solid as proscenium curtains.

Sometimes the damage is the way it really happened. Total annihilation on the lower floor and a dragon-razed mezzanine. Sometimes the destruction is rendered pretty and whimsical. The ruined velvet seats crowd against either wall, creating a proud aisle like an apocalyptic road. Or granite-sparkling ashes flit toward her pupils. Or the roof is gone, and Lia looks up to see stark, perfect constellations.

Unheard of in midtown Manhattan, what with the light pollution.

But the artist in Lia can easily imagine it anyhow.

Always, there is the terror. Even when nothing more significant happens than her boots sloughing through cinders.

This theatre burned twenty years ago.

Lia knows there isn't any logic to dreams. But it's nauseating, and she always thinks a little petulantly, spectacular, another nightmare, being in the cremated bones of this place is automatically a nightmare, and it isn't even in my head.

Because it's all in Ben's.

This time Ben sits downstage left, staring into the orchestra pit. He's ropy and pale in a red T-shirt and torn jeans-a towheaded, manic-eyed eight-year-old instead of her towheaded, manic-eyed ex-fiancé. His shiner is pulpy, and the sweet curve of his lower lip gapes like an extra mouth.

So that helps to date things. It's Ben before therapists, Ben before meds. Ben the toilet plunger, the lunch money source, the punching bag.

Looking down, she sees a pair of green corduroy pants she lived in throughout the late nineties; so she's Ben's age, too. It's before she got the hang of her coarse nut-brown corkscrews, for instance. They're cropped at her nape, much longer on top, like they were for that heinous school picture. A Halloween wig from the discount bin.

Ben has a song stuck in his head, seemingly. From all corners of the building, "Harvest Moon" by Neil Young croons its easy melody. A deeply harmless ballad. Still, Lia's blood runs thin and bluish in her wrists.

Hear what I have to say
Just like children sleeping
We could dream this night away

"Neil Young is pretty cheesy for you, isn't he?" Lia observes.

"Oh my god." Ben scrambles to his knees with a look of pure hunger.

Please not this again.

"Hi," she says.

"You're back," he blurts, standing. "I mean you're, like, you're here. Again."

"Don't ask me how. We went over this maybe ten times already."

"Sorry. No, I wasn't going to. Just, you know, there you are."

"Let's not make a scene of it."

"I'm literally on a stage." The premonition of Ben's adult smirk appears. "Wouldn't a scene be, dunno. Appropriate?"

"No scenes." Lia's heart thuds like a doomed heretic's. "I'm here against my will."

"Right, but. God, you can't understand how much I've missed-"

"Benjamin, change topics, or I swear I'm going to walk away and keep walking till I-I have no idea. Fall out of your ear."

"You-"

"Do not discuss me. Us. There's too much to . . . there's just too much. We tried it last time and I could barely function for three days after I woke up. Tell me a different story."

Longing, anger, and disappointment threaten to crumple Ben's face like a child's after a terrible fall. But Ben isn't a little boy-he only looks like one. Straightening, he nods. It was a kaleidoscope of emotions, longing and loss as a high-pitched garble.

The last flicker looked simply like love, though. Which is excruciating.

"So this theatre was built in nineteen-thirteen," Ben forces out. "Um. Right, sure, you know that. Please bear with me. This is offhand, and I generally prepare my lectures. World's Stage survived the Great War, the Great Depression-which I gotta add is geographically waaaaaay more impressive-World War Two, Vietnam, and the dissolution of the Brit-pop boy band Take That, which prompted dozens of emergency suicide hotlines to be set up in the UK. Horatio has firsthand tales. And anyway, then one spark, one instant when the temperature surpasses the flash point in the presence of both fuel and an oxidizer, and what happens?"

Lia's arms are bare and cold. The ceiling sends a drizzle of plaster to the ground.

"The fire tetrahedron begins!" Ben sounds like he's walking a tightrope. "Wheeee! Oh shit, and don't forget gravity has to be present, that's what, like, prevents the flame from being snuffed out immediately by the waste material produced via its own combustion. But yes, so then the solids and gases create visible …