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Fiction.
Literature.
Problema: sei uno scrittore fallito sulla soglia dei cinquant'anni. Il tuo ex fidanzato, cui sei stato legato per nove anni, sta per sposare un altro. Non puoi andare al suo matrimonio, sarebbe troppo strano, e non puoi rifiutare, sembrerebbe una sconfitta. Sulla tua scrivania intanto languono una serie di improbabili inviti da festival ed editori di tutto il mondo. Domanda: come puoi risolvere entrambi i problemi? Soluzione: accetti tutti gli inviti, se sei Arthur Less. Inizia così una specie di folle e fantasioso giro del mondo in 80 giorni che porterà Less in Messico, Francia, Germania, Italia, Marocco, India e Giappone, riuscendo a frapporre migliaia di chilometri tra lui e i problemi che si rifiuta di affrontare. Cosa potrebbe andare storto? Tanto per cominciare, Arthur rischierà di innamorarsi a Parigi e di morire a Berlino, sfuggirà per un pelo a una tempesta di sabbia in Marocco e arriverà in Giappone troppo tardi per la fioritura dei ciliegi. In un giorno e in un luogo imprecisati, Less compirà i fatidici cinquant'anni: questa seconda fase della vita gli arriverà addosso come un missile, trascinando con sé il suo primo amore e anche l'ultimo. Dall'autore di Le confessioni di Max Tivoli e Storia di un matrimonio, una commedia romantica, una satira sul tipico occidentale all'estero, una riflessione sul tempo e sul… (altro)
Un altro cinquantenne americano che si parla, o meglio, si scrive addosso. Non mi interessa, Pulitzer o non Pulitzer. Basta, per piacere ! Abbandonato dopo poche pagine. Mi dispiace solo di averlo fatto comprare in inglese alla biblioteca comunale che già l'aveva comprato in italiano .
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Dedica
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pour Daniel Handler
Incipit
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From where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad. Look at him: seated primly on the hotel lobby's plush round sofa, blue suit and white shirt, legs knee-crossed so that one polished loafer hangs free of its heel. The pose of a young man. His slim shadow is, in fact, still that of his younger self, but at nearly fifty he is like those bronze statues in public parks that, despite one lucky knee rubbed raw by schoolchildren, discolor beautifully until they match the trees.
Citazioni
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By his forties, all he has managed to grow is a gentle sense of himself, akin to the transparent carapace of a soft-shelled crab.
Freddy put on his red glasses, and in each aquarium a little blue fish swam.
From the open window came the song of roofers hammering and the smell of molten tar.
Arthur Less, encircling the globe! It feels cosmonautical in nature.
It is a bad musical, but, like a bad lay, a bad musical can do its job perfectly well. By the end, Arthur Less is in tears, sobbing in his seat, and he thinks he has been sobbing quietly until the lights come up and the woman seated beside him turns and says, "Honey, I don't know what happened in your life, but I am so so sorry," and gives him a lilac-scented embrace. Nothing happened to me, he wants to say to her. Nothing happened to me. I'm just a homosexual at a Broadway show.
Less stands and studies him: the lines on his face like origami that has been unfolded and smoothed down with your hand, the little freckles on the forehead, the white fuzz from his ears to his crown, the coppery eyes flashing with anything but rancor.
As he crosses the restaurant, Peter telepathically shakes hands with friends on all sides of the room, then locks his gaze with the smitten Less.
"Who the hell is Arthur Less?" Less stands in the doorway, space helmet under his arm, a smile imprinted on his face. How many times has he been asked this question? Certainly enough for it not to sting; he has been asked it when he was very young, back in the Carlos days, when he could overhear someone explaining how Arthur Less was that kid from Delaware in the green Speedo, the thin one by the pool, or later, when it was explained he was the lover of Robert Brownburn, the shy one by the bar, or even later, when it was noted he was his ex-lover and maybe shouldn't be invited over anymore, or when he was introduced as the author of a first novel, and then a second novel, and then as that fellow someone knew from somewhere long ago. And at last: as the man Freddy Pelu had been sleeping with for nine whole years, until Freddy married Tom Dennis. He has been all those things, to all those people who did not know who he was.
It takes an hour and a half in traffic to get to the hotel; the rivers of red taillights conjure lava flows that destroyed ancient villages.
Was this how men felt? Straight men? Alone so often, but if they faltered—if they lost a wedding ring!—then the whole band of brothers would descend to fix the problem? Life was not hard; you shouldered it bravely, knowing all the time that if you sent the signal, help would arrive. How wonderful to be part of such a club. Half a dozen men gathered around, engaged in the task. To save his marriage and his pride. So they did have hearts, after all. They were not cold, cruel dominators; they were not high school bullies to be avoided in the halls. They were good; they were kind; they came to the rescue. And today Less was one of them.
"I think the saddest thing in the world is a twenty-five-year-old talking about the stock market. Or taxes. Or real estate, goddamn it! That's all you'll be talking about when you're forty. Real estate! any twenty-five-year-old who says the word refinance should be taken out and shot. Talk about love and music and poetry. Things everyone forgets they ever thought were important. Waste every day, that's what I say."
The sky takes on a shimmer as blue as her eye shadow, and as the men approach the waves they seem to redouble in violence like a fire that has been fed a bundle of kindling. Together they stand in the sun before those terrible waves, in the fall of that terrible year.
Less opens his eyes to a countryside of autumn vineyards, endless rows of the crucified plants, a pink rosebush always planted at the end.
He ends his workout lacquered in sweat, feeling he has beat back another day from time's assault.
Less promises himself a better workout in two days. In return for this promise: a dollhouse whiskey from the room's dollhouse bar.
cherry and plum blossoms made the slightest wind into a ticker-tape parade
Nothing has happened in right field all season, which is why he was put there: a kind of athletic Canada.
And his mother, a softball champ in her day, has had to pretend none of this matters to her at all and drives Less to games with a speech about sportsmanship that is more a dismantling of her own beliefs than a relief to the boy.
The two switch gears to Italian, and so begins what sounds like a squabble but could really be anything at all.
The windows are open and blowing the cheap white curtains around; the sky is foxed and gray above the linden trees.
It seems an impossibility that he is here, in Berlin, at this moment, waiting in the darkness as the sweat begins to darken his chest like a bullet wound.
Less stands below it, experiencing that Wonderland sensation of having been shrunk, by Finley Dwyer, into a tiny version of himself
Less himself staring at the ceiling fan and wondering if the room was in motion below a stationary fan, or the opposite, much like a medieval man wondering if the sky moved or the earth.
Less let himself be embraced by its branches, the scent of its pink Seussian flowers.
"Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young." "Yes! It's like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won't ever be back."
The sky out the window is lowering the last of its gauzy veils, revealing bright naked Venus.
"Me, I was at dinner, and an old man was beside me. So boring! Talking about real estate. I thought, Please, God, do not let me be this man when I am old. Later I find out he was a year younger than I."
Now, in the new space between him and the Spaniard, one can make out the Erector-set miracle of the Eiffel Tower.
There is piano music inside; the son has been put to work, and whatever hangover he has does not show in the bright garlands of notes that come out the window, onto the balcony.
A flight of starlings goes off behind him, headed to church.
The chimneys all looked like flowerpots.
Alex was bald as a malted milk ball.
The Moroccan officers, in the green and red of cocktail olives, stay calm
"We know there's no love of your life. Love isn't terrifying like that. It's walking the fucking dog so the other one can sleep in, it's doing taxes, it's cleaning the bathroom without hard feelings. It's having an ally in life. It's not fire, it's not lightning."
This insanity, the insanity of her lover, has her bewildered and hurt and incandescent.
That the mind cannot be trusted is a certainty. "What is love, Arthur? What is it?"
"Arthur, happiness is bullshit. That is the wisdom I give you from my twenty-two hours of being fifty."
The driver works the horn like an outlaw at a gunfight.
Stray dogs and goats leap from the road wearing guilty expressions, and people leap aside wearing innocent ones.
He finds himself awakening at dawn, when the sea is brightening but the sun still struggles in its bedclothes, and sits down to lash his protagonist a few more times with his authorial whip.
Then the doctor, an elderly woman in black glasses, leans into view. Thin, bony, creased with lines as if crumbled in a pocket for a long time, with a wattle under her chin.
And Robert says nothing; he knows the absurdity of asking someone to explain love or sorrow.
Robert has never been kind to his body; he's worn it like an old leather coat tossed in oceans and left crumpled in corners, and Less saw its marks and scars and aches not as failures of age but the opposite: the evidence, as Raymond Chandler once wrote, of "a gaudy life."
Ultime parole
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After choosing the path people wanted, the man who would do, the easy way out of things - your eyes wide in surprise as you see me - after holding it all in my hands and refusing it, what do I want from life? And I say: "Less!"
Fiction.
Literature.
Problema: sei uno scrittore fallito sulla soglia dei cinquant'anni. Il tuo ex fidanzato, cui sei stato legato per nove anni, sta per sposare un altro. Non puoi andare al suo matrimonio, sarebbe troppo strano, e non puoi rifiutare, sembrerebbe una sconfitta. Sulla tua scrivania intanto languono una serie di improbabili inviti da festival ed editori di tutto il mondo. Domanda: come puoi risolvere entrambi i problemi? Soluzione: accetti tutti gli inviti, se sei Arthur Less. Inizia così una specie di folle e fantasioso giro del mondo in 80 giorni che porterà Less in Messico, Francia, Germania, Italia, Marocco, India e Giappone, riuscendo a frapporre migliaia di chilometri tra lui e i problemi che si rifiuta di affrontare. Cosa potrebbe andare storto? Tanto per cominciare, Arthur rischierà di innamorarsi a Parigi e di morire a Berlino, sfuggirà per un pelo a una tempesta di sabbia in Marocco e arriverà in Giappone troppo tardi per la fioritura dei ciliegi. In un giorno e in un luogo imprecisati, Less compirà i fatidici cinquant'anni: questa seconda fase della vita gli arriverà addosso come un missile, trascinando con sé il suo primo amore e anche l'ultimo. Dall'autore di Le confessioni di Max Tivoli e Storia di un matrimonio, una commedia romantica, una satira sul tipico occidentale all'estero, una riflessione sul tempo e sul
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