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In New York's Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the 1960s, a young boy laments the approaching close of summer and the advent of sixth grade. Growing up in a household with an overworked father whom he rarely sees, an alcoholic mother who paints wonderful canvases that are never displayed, an older brother who serves as both tormentor and protector, and a younger sister who inhabits her own secret world, the boy takes his amusements where he can find them. Some of his free time is spent in the basement of the family's modest home, where he and his brother, Jim, have created Botch Town, a detailed cardboard replica of their community, complete with clay figurines representing friends and neighbors. And so the time passes with a not-always-reassuring sameness--until the night a prowler is reported stalking the neighborhood. Appointing themselves ad hoc investigators, the brothers set out to aid the police--while their little sister, Mary, smokes cigarettes, speaks in other voices, inhabits alternate personas . . . and, unbeknownst to her older siblings, moves around the inanimate residents of Botch Town. But ensuing events add a shadowy cast to the boys' night games: disappearances, deaths, and spectral sightings capped off by the arrival of a sinister man in a long white car trawling the neighborhood after dark. Strangest of all is the inescapable fact that every one of these troubling occurrences seems to correspond directly to the changes little Mary has made to the miniature town in the basement. Not since Ray Bradbury's classic Dandelion Wine has a novel so richly evoked the dark magic of small-town boyhood. At once a hypnotically compelling mystery, a masterful re-creation of a unique time and place, a celebration of youth, and a poignant and disquieting portrait of home and family--all balancing on a razor's edge separating reality from the unsettlingly remarkable--The Shadow Year is a monumental new work from one of contemporary fiction's most fearless and inventive artists.… (altro)
Immersione completa nel mondo dei ragazzini: segreti e curiosità, odio e amicizia, paure e sventatezze, bugie e verità, ma soprattutto meraviglia nei confronti delle deformazioni fisiche e mentali degli adulti, dei loro difetti e delle loro manie, salvo a considerarli con tenera simpatia nei loro familiari. La trama gialla sembra una scusa per investigare tale mondo, e la conclusione debole e fantasiosa conferma questa sensazione. ( )
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For Jim, Mary, and Dool, whose love was like a light in the shadow years
Incipit
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It began in the last days of August, when the leaves of the elm in the front yard had curled into crisp brown tubes and fallen away to litter the lawn.
Citazioni
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Through the week I would smell a hint of machine oil here and there, on the cushions of the couch, on a towel in the bathroom, as if he were a ghost leaving vague traces of his presence.
I heard the big pages turn, the fork against the plate, a match being struck, and that's when it happened. There came from outside the house the shrill scream of a woman, so loud it tore the night open wide enough for the Shadow Year to slip out.
"What if he gets lost in there?" I said. ¶ "We'll just have everyone in town flush at the same time, and he'll ride the wave out into the sump behind the baseball field," said Jim.
School started on a day so hot it seemed stolen from the heart of summer.
He was a short guy with a sharp nose and a crew cut so flat you could land a helicopter on it.
That day we all learned an important lesson in how not to laugh no matter how funny something is.
As George and I continued on our rounds, autumn came.
I wondered how dying could be a good thing.
In my mind I saw the evil queen gazing into her talking mirror, and I tried to rebuff the image by conjuring the memory of a snowy day that I was little and she pulled Jim and me to school on the sled, running as fast as she could. We laughed, she laughed, and the world was covered in white.
Charlie's daily project was trying to achieve invisibility, because the meaner kids liked to pick on him. I felt sympathy for him and also relief that he existed, since without him those same kids would probably have been picking on me.
There had been honest grief over his absence and the anguish it caused his family, but at the end of the second week the town started to slip into its old ways, as if some strong current were pulling us back to normalcy. It distressed me, though I couldn't so easily put my finger on the feeling then, how ready everyone was to leave Charlie behind and continue with the business of living.
One night, as darkness fell and we were eating dinner, my mother, quite a few glasses of sherry on her way to Bermuda, looked up and saw, through the front window, Mrs. Edison heading home from East Lake.
My heart was still beating fast, and I realized it wasn't so much the sight of Mrs. Edison that had scared me, since we were by now used to her popping up anywhere at just about any time, but it was the fact that she thought I was Charlie. I didn't want to tell Jim what was wrong, as if to give voice to it would make the connection between me and the missing boy a real one.
Night was coming sooner and sooner each day, and I rode along wondering what I should be for Halloween.
The gathering dusk chased George and me down the path and back out of the woods.
Those memories protected me as I fell a thousand stories down into sleep.
I woke from that peaceful nap of no dreams only because Jim pried open my left eye with his thumb. "This one's dead, Doctor," he said.
My mother had never even opened an eye, and as I passed her bedroom, next to Mary's, I saw her lying there, mouth open, the weight of 'Holmes' holding her down.
Mr. Barzita was one of those old people who seemed to be shrinking and would simply fade away rather than die of old age.
The thick air, the dim silence, made the place seem filled with time. Each second weighed a ton, each minute was a great glass bubble of centuries. The drudgery of the church was the most boring thing I ever lived through.
Peter Horton, his jacket button ready to pop, wearing his clodhopper shoes, sat in the front row like a cartoon cat hit by a mallet.
the Horton children milled slowly through like solid ghosts from Dorothy's Kansas.
In those few seconds, I saw the recent burst of energy leaking out of her. As usual, it had lasted for a little more than a week or so, and she'd used it all up. Like a punctured blow-up pool toy, she seemed to slowly deflate while shadows blossomed in her gaze.
The door hushed close, and as I went down the steps, I turned and looked back at Mary's face peering out of the yellow square of light that was the kitchen window.
Inside the sleeping school, it was pitch black, and the smells of red stuff, old books, bad breath, and the slightest trace of that day's baked haddock were so much more powerful in silence.
The enormity of being in the school illegally was just beginning to dawn on me.
A little wash of moonlight fell there, and we could make out the dead weeds and stone bench.
He turned and continued past the main office and the nurse's office, striding confidently as if the school belonged to him.
A light flicked on, and there was Ray's head like a flame in demonic shadows, smiling.
He showed us the furnace, a potbellied man of metal with numbered-gauge eyes within circles of glass, a spigot nose, and two pipe arms reaching out and into the walls.
It was like we were having a campout in a nightmare. There was too much darkness for me, and I was breathing fast.
He kind of sagged like old laundry and waved his hands in front of him.
The men's laughter was distant, as if they were laughing at something they remembered more than what had just been said.
Mary started with the numbers, pouring them into my ear like a batch of spaghetti dumped into a colander.
He reached in and pulled out an old wooden Popsicle stick and stuck it into the bottom of my moon. "Moonsicle," he said, holding it out to me. "I should sell the idea to Softee."
Ultime parole
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Softee's eyes stared up at me, and when I eventually closed mine, I was back in Botch Town, peering in every window, searching for something I'd lost.
In New York's Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the 1960s, a young boy laments the approaching close of summer and the advent of sixth grade. Growing up in a household with an overworked father whom he rarely sees, an alcoholic mother who paints wonderful canvases that are never displayed, an older brother who serves as both tormentor and protector, and a younger sister who inhabits her own secret world, the boy takes his amusements where he can find them. Some of his free time is spent in the basement of the family's modest home, where he and his brother, Jim, have created Botch Town, a detailed cardboard replica of their community, complete with clay figurines representing friends and neighbors. And so the time passes with a not-always-reassuring sameness--until the night a prowler is reported stalking the neighborhood. Appointing themselves ad hoc investigators, the brothers set out to aid the police--while their little sister, Mary, smokes cigarettes, speaks in other voices, inhabits alternate personas . . . and, unbeknownst to her older siblings, moves around the inanimate residents of Botch Town. But ensuing events add a shadowy cast to the boys' night games: disappearances, deaths, and spectral sightings capped off by the arrival of a sinister man in a long white car trawling the neighborhood after dark. Strangest of all is the inescapable fact that every one of these troubling occurrences seems to correspond directly to the changes little Mary has made to the miniature town in the basement. Not since Ray Bradbury's classic Dandelion Wine has a novel so richly evoked the dark magic of small-town boyhood. At once a hypnotically compelling mystery, a masterful re-creation of a unique time and place, a celebration of youth, and a poignant and disquieting portrait of home and family--all balancing on a razor's edge separating reality from the unsettlingly remarkable--The Shadow Year is a monumental new work from one of contemporary fiction's most fearless and inventive artists.