The Vulnerables
A Novel
(Sprache: Englisch)
This new novel offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history. From the New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through.
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This new novel offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history. From the New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through.Lese-Probe zu „The Vulnerables “
"It was an uncertain spring."I had read the book a long time ago, and, except for this sentence, I remembered almost nothing about it. I could not have told you about the people who appeared in the book or what happened to them. I could not have told you (until later, after I'd looked it up) that the book began in the year 1880. Not that it mattered. Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described. They should teach you this in school, but they don't. Always instead the emphasis is on what you remembered. Otherwise, how could you write a critique? How could you pass an exam? How could you ever get a degree in literature?
I like the novelist who confessed that the only thing to have stayed with him after reading Anna Karenina was the detail of a picnic basket holding a jar of honey.
What stayed with me all this time after reading The Years was how it opened, with that first sentence, followed by a description of the weather.
Never open a book with the weather is one of the first rules of writing. I have never understood why not.
"Implacable November weather" is the third sentence of Bleak House. After which Dickens famously goes on a lot about fog.
"It was a dark and stormy night." I have never understood why this phrase has been universally acknowledged to be the worst way for (I forget who: something else to look up) to begin a novel. Scorned for being both unexciting and, at the same time, too melodramatic.
(Edward Bulwer-Lytton, originally. In a book called Paul Clifford, in 1830. Others thereafter, in mockery, most memorably Ray Bradbury, Madeleine L'Engle, and Snoopy.)
Unimaginative was the word Oscar Wilde used to describe people for whom weather is a topic of conversation.
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Of course, in his day, weather English weather in particular was boring. Not the far more erratic, often apocalyptic event people all over the world obsess about today.
Important to point out, however, that it wasn't normal fog condensed vapor, a low cloud that Dickens was talking about, but a miasma caused by London's appalling industrial pollution.
It was an uncertain spring.
Early each morning I went for a walk. It was my chief pleasure in a dearth of pleasures, observing day by day the arrival of a new season: the magnolias putting out their petals and so poignantly soon, as it seemed to me every year, but never more so than the spring of 2020 shedding their petals. The cherry blossoms, even lovelier loveliest, agreed but likewise short-lived. The daffodils and the narcissus narcisusses? narcissi? and the gaudy tulips that seemed almost like wild mouths screaming for attention. "Too excitable" is how Sylvia Plath once saw a vase of "too red" ones. Like Rilke's roses "standing up and shouting red." To Elizabeth Bishop, the spots on the tips of the dogwood petals were like burns from a cigarette butt. Poets.
Can it be accidental that the names for flowers are also always beautiful words? Rose. Violet. Lily. Names so appealing that people choose them for their baby girls. Jasmine. Camellia. I once knew a bulldog named Petunia. A cat named Mimosa.
So many other beautiful ones I can think of: anemone, lilac, azalea. Of course, there must be an exception. There are always exceptions. But though I'm not so keen about phlox, I can't come up with a single really ugly flower name, can you?
There are other plants, though, like weeds and herbs, with hideous names, like vetch. We're thinking of naming the baby Vetch. Meet the twins: Mugwort and Milkvetch. Horehound. Bugbane. Wormwood: the na
Important to point out, however, that it wasn't normal fog condensed vapor, a low cloud that Dickens was talking about, but a miasma caused by London's appalling industrial pollution.
It was an uncertain spring.
Early each morning I went for a walk. It was my chief pleasure in a dearth of pleasures, observing day by day the arrival of a new season: the magnolias putting out their petals and so poignantly soon, as it seemed to me every year, but never more so than the spring of 2020 shedding their petals. The cherry blossoms, even lovelier loveliest, agreed but likewise short-lived. The daffodils and the narcissus narcisusses? narcissi? and the gaudy tulips that seemed almost like wild mouths screaming for attention. "Too excitable" is how Sylvia Plath once saw a vase of "too red" ones. Like Rilke's roses "standing up and shouting red." To Elizabeth Bishop, the spots on the tips of the dogwood petals were like burns from a cigarette butt. Poets.
Can it be accidental that the names for flowers are also always beautiful words? Rose. Violet. Lily. Names so appealing that people choose them for their baby girls. Jasmine. Camellia. I once knew a bulldog named Petunia. A cat named Mimosa.
So many other beautiful ones I can think of: anemone, lilac, azalea. Of course, there must be an exception. There are always exceptions. But though I'm not so keen about phlox, I can't come up with a single really ugly flower name, can you?
There are other plants, though, like weeds and herbs, with hideous names, like vetch. We're thinking of naming the baby Vetch. Meet the twins: Mugwort and Milkvetch. Horehound. Bugbane. Wormwood: the na
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Autoren-Porträt von Sigrid Nunez
Sigrid Nunez is the author of the novels A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, The Friend, and What Are You Going Through, among others. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. She has been the recipient of several awards, including the National Book Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Guggenheim. Her books have been translated into thirty languages. She lives in New York City.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Sigrid Nunez
- 2023, Internationale Ausgabe, 256 Seiten, Maße: 13,1 x 20,2 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: Riverhead Books
- ISBN-10: 0593715888
- ISBN-13: 9780593715888
- Erscheinungsdatum: 10.11.2023
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
Praise for The Vulnerables: "Hilarious and deeply reflective." TIME
I am committed, until one of us dies, to Nunez s novels. I find them ideal. They are short, wise, provocative, funny good and strong company. Dwight Garner, The New York Times
With the intimacy and humor of a great conversation, this novel makes you feel smarter and more alive. People
An ode to our basic need to connect with other beings, be they human or animal, even in a global crisis that told us to stay apart. NPR
"Nunez has exhibited a gift for storytelling forms that smuggle dark matter into books, which, nonetheless, proceed with bright, good humor. They are as sophisticated as they are straightforward, as death-haunted as they are life-bringing." New York Times Magazine
"Ms. Nunez gracefully leaps from big emotions, including grief, to erudite literary digressions or biting wit. . .The Vulnerables manages to be both playful and dead serious. . .This inventive novel adds tongue-in-cheek humor into the mix." Wall Street Journal
"Above all, The Vulnerables is about how we navigate the bizarre and hostile climates we re still living through; how we find meaning in being there for each other in some capacity...a novel that cracks open windows and offers a reassuring breeze, reminding us that it s OK and perhaps even necessary to need each other; it s only human." San Francisco Chronicle
"Little explosions of pathos detonate periodically through this story their power even more impressive for the way Nunez repeatedly lulls us into the comfort of her wry, ruminative voice...The Vulnerables isn t a rejection of the novel as a form, so much as a test of its dimensions." The Washington Post
"Nunez is one of our best writers on animals and the strange, touching bonds we form with them...[Her] rare ability to be at once wistfully elegiac and sharply hilarious make The
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Vulnerables a gift." The Boston Globe
"It s a difficult task to write about a collective experience many of us would prefer to never recall, but Nunez does so, with a subtle kindness towards us all in a place when the world was at one of its most 'vulnerable' moments." Huff Post
"Rather than dwelling in despair, Nunez s book expands into a meditation on pain and the formation of unusual intimacies." The New Yorker
"Strikes the difficult balance of being both elegiac and comedic as it seeks to explore what it means to be alive during our complex moment in history. Like much of her work, Nunez s latest seeks brief and blisteringly beautiful moments of connection, which burn ever brighter amid the haunting loneliness she crafts." Chicago Review of Books
"A structure that insists on the possibility of connection. The novel s most valuable offering comes from its ability to gather elements and hold them together, as we wished to hold one another. In this respect, love pervades every page. LA Review of Books
In The Vulnerables, Nunez is back with her signature blend of wryness and poignant observation. . .Nunez sheds light on what it means to be vulnerable, and of how humans find comfort during times of crisis. Electric Literature
Funny and thoughtful. . .Nunez manages to make a story of mortality go down easy. Publishers Weekly
Nunez is a master at writing vivid characters in ordinary situations and bringing them to life, making every page fly by. And The Vulnerables is no different it s a poignant and deft portrayal of humanity in a time when nothing felt normal. Shondaland
"[A] penetrating interrogation of the nature of reading, writing, creating fiction especially in a time of widespread peril." Shelf Awareness
"Nunez s subject is the core business of being alive: the tenuous beauty of human connection, the nature of memory, the purpose of writing, the passage of time. . .the result is almost arrestingly straightforward. Spare and understated and often quite funny, the experience is less like reading fiction than like eavesdropping on someone else s brain. . . .[The Vulnerables] itself is strangely, sweetly hopeful. . .Sharp and surprisingly tender." Kirkus, STARRED review
"Nunez s ninth novel finds the dark humor in the complexities of modern life. A meditation on what it means to be alive in this moment, as much as it is an inquiry into the purpose of writing itself." W Magazine
"It s a difficult task to write about a collective experience many of us would prefer to never recall, but Nunez does so, with a subtle kindness towards us all in a place when the world was at one of its most 'vulnerable' moments." Huff Post
"Rather than dwelling in despair, Nunez s book expands into a meditation on pain and the formation of unusual intimacies." The New Yorker
"Strikes the difficult balance of being both elegiac and comedic as it seeks to explore what it means to be alive during our complex moment in history. Like much of her work, Nunez s latest seeks brief and blisteringly beautiful moments of connection, which burn ever brighter amid the haunting loneliness she crafts." Chicago Review of Books
"A structure that insists on the possibility of connection. The novel s most valuable offering comes from its ability to gather elements and hold them together, as we wished to hold one another. In this respect, love pervades every page. LA Review of Books
In The Vulnerables, Nunez is back with her signature blend of wryness and poignant observation. . .Nunez sheds light on what it means to be vulnerable, and of how humans find comfort during times of crisis. Electric Literature
Funny and thoughtful. . .Nunez manages to make a story of mortality go down easy. Publishers Weekly
Nunez is a master at writing vivid characters in ordinary situations and bringing them to life, making every page fly by. And The Vulnerables is no different it s a poignant and deft portrayal of humanity in a time when nothing felt normal. Shondaland
"[A] penetrating interrogation of the nature of reading, writing, creating fiction especially in a time of widespread peril." Shelf Awareness
"Nunez s subject is the core business of being alive: the tenuous beauty of human connection, the nature of memory, the purpose of writing, the passage of time. . .the result is almost arrestingly straightforward. Spare and understated and often quite funny, the experience is less like reading fiction than like eavesdropping on someone else s brain. . . .[The Vulnerables] itself is strangely, sweetly hopeful. . .Sharp and surprisingly tender." Kirkus, STARRED review
"Nunez s ninth novel finds the dark humor in the complexities of modern life. A meditation on what it means to be alive in this moment, as much as it is an inquiry into the purpose of writing itself." W Magazine
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