Articles liés à The Information
L'édition de cet ISBN n'est malheureusement plus disponible.
Afficher les exemplaires de cette édition ISBN
Extrait :
Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that . . . Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and your sob probes, and you would mark them. Women-and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses-will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, "What is it?" And the men say, "Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams."
Just sad dreams. Yeah: oh sure. Just sad dreams. Or something like that.
Richard Tull was crying in his sleep. The woman beside him, his wife, Gina, woke and turned. She moved up on him from behind and laid hands on his pale and straining shoulders. There was a professionalism in her blinks and frowns and whispers: like the person at the poolside, trained in first aid; like the figure surging in on the blood-smeared macadam, a striding Christ of mouth-to-mouth. She was a woman. She knew so much more about tears than he did. She didn't know about Swift's juvenilia, or Wordsworth's senilia, or how Cressida had variously fared at the hands of Boccaccio, of Chaucer, of Robert Henryson, of Shakespeare; she didn't know Proust. But she knew tears. Gina had tears cold.
"What is it?" she said.
Richard raised a bent arm to his brow. The sniff he gave was complicated, orchestral. And when he sighed you could hear the distant seagulls falling through his lungs.
"Nothing. It isn't anything. Just sad dreams."
Or something like that.
After a while she too sighed and turned over, away from him. There in the night their bed had the towelly smell of marriage.
He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed. Richard Tull felt tired, and not just underslept. Local tiredness was up there above him-the kind of tiredness that sleep might lighten-but there was something else up there over and above it. And beneath it. That greater tiredness was not so local. It was the tiredness of time lived, with its days and days. It was the tiredness of gravity-gravity, which wants you down there in the center of the earth. That greater tiredness was here to stay: and get heavier. No nap or cuppa would ever lighten it. Richard couldn't remember crying in the night. Now his eyes were dry and open. He was in a terrible state-that of consciousness. Some while ago in his life he had lost the knack of choosing what to think about. He slid out of bed in the mornings just to find some peace. He slid out of bed in the mornings just to get a little rest. He was forty tomorrow, and reviewed books.
In the small square kitchen, which stoically awaited him, Richard engaged the electric kettle. Then he went next door and looked in on the boys. Dawn visits to their room had been known to comfort him after nights such as the one he had just experienced, with all its unwelcome information. His twin sons in their twin beds. Marius and Marcus were not identical twins. And they weren't fraternal twins either, Richard often said (unfairly, perhaps), in the sense that they showed little brotherly feeling. But that's all they were, brothers, born at the same time. It was possible, theoretically (and, Richard surmised, their mother being Gina, also practically) that Marcus and Marius had different fathers. They didn't look alike, especially, and were strikingly dissimilar in all their talents and proclivities. Not even their birthdays were content to be identical: a sanguinary summer midnight had interposed itself between the two boys and their (again) very distinctive parturitional styles, Marius, the elder, subjecting the delivery room to a systematic and intelligent stare, its negative judgment suspended by decency and disgust, whereas Marcus just clucked and sighed to himself complacently, and seemed to pat himself down, as if after a successful journey through freak weather. Now in the dawn, through the window and through the rain, the streets of London looked like the insides of an old plug. Richard contemplated his sons, their motive bodies reluctantly arrested in sleep, and reef-knotted to their bedware, and he thought, as an artist might: but the young sleep in another country, at once very dangerous and out of harm's way, perennially humid with innocuous libido-there are neutral eagles out on the windowsill, waiting, offering protection and threat.
Sometimes Richard did think and feel like an artist. He was an artist when he saw fire, even a match head (he was in his study now, lighting his first cigarette): an instinct in him acknowledged its elemental status. He was an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that society had to be like this, had any right, had any business being like this. A car in the street. Why? Why cars? This is what an artist has to be: harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles. The difficulty began when he sat down to write. The difficulty, really, began even earlier. Richard looked at his watch and thought: I can't call him yet. Or rather: Can't call him yet. For the interior monologue now waives the initial personal pronoun, in deference to Joyce. He'll still be in bed, not like the boys and their abandonment, but lying there personably, and smugly sleeping. For him, either there would be no information, or the information, such as it was, would all be good.
For an hour (it was the new system) he worked on his latest novel, deliberately but provisionally entitled Untitled. Richard Tull wasn't much of a hero. Yet there was something heroic about this early hour of flinching, flickering labor, the pencil sharpener, the Wite-Out, the vines outside the open window sallowing not with autumn but with nicotine. In the drawers of his desk or interleaved by now with the bills and summonses on the lower shelves on his bookcases, and even on the floor of the car (the terrible red Maestro), swilling around among the Ribena cartons and the dead tennis balls, lay other novels, all of them firmly entitled Unpublished. And stacked against him in the future, he knew, were yet further novels, successively entitled Unfinished, Unwritten, Unattempted, and, eventually, Unconceived.
Now came the boys-in what you would call a flurry if it didn't go on so long and involve so much inanely grooved detail, with Richard like the venerable though tacitly alcoholic pilot in the cockpit of the frayed shuttle: his clipboard, his nine-page checklist, his revving hangover-socks, sums, cereal, reading book, shaved carrot, face wash, teeth brush. Gina appeared in the middle of this and drank a cup of tea standing by the sink . . . Though the children were of course partly mysterious to Richard, thank God, he knew their childish repertoire and he knew the flavor of their hidden lives. But Gina he knew less and less about. Little Marco, for instance, believed that the sea was the creation of a rabbit who lived in a racing car. This you could discuss. Richard didn't know what Gina believed. He knew less and less about her private cosmogony.
There she stood, in light lipstick and light pancake and light woolen suit, holding her teacup in joined palms. Other working girls whose beds Richard had shared used to get up at around eleven at night to interface themselves for the other world. Gina did it all in twenty minutes. Her body threw no difficulties in her way: the wash-and-go drip-dry hair, the candid orbits that needed only the mildest of emphasis, the salmony tongue, the ten-second bowel movement, the body that all clothes loved. Gina worked two days a week, sometimes three. What she did, in public relations, seemed to him much more mysterious than what he did, or failed to do, in the study next door. Like the sun, now, her face forbade any direct address of the eyes, though of course the sun glares crazily everywhere at once and doesn't mind who is looking at it. Richard's dressing gown bent round him as he fastened Marius's shirt buttons with his eaten fingertips.
"Can you fasten it?" said Marius.
"Do you want a cup of tea making?" said Gina, surprisingly.
"Knock knock," said Marco.
Richard said, in order, "I am fastening it. No thanks, I'm okay. Who's there?"
"You," said Marco.
"No, fasten it. Come on, Daddy!" said Marius.
Richard said, "You who? You don't mean fasten it. You mean do it faster. I'm trying."
"Are they ready?" said Gina.
"Who are you calling! Knock knock," said Marco.
"I think so. Who's there?"
"What about macks?"
"Boo."
"They don't need macks, do they?"
"Mine aren't going out in that without macks."
"Boo," said Marco.
"Are you taking them in?"
"Boo who? Yeah, I thought so."
"Why are you crying!"
"Look at you. You aren't even dressed yet."
"I'll get dressed now."
"Why are you crying!"
"It's ten to nine. I'll take them."
"No, I'll take them."
"Daddy! Why are you crying?"
"What? I'm not."
"In the night you were," said Gina.
"Was I?" said Richard.
Still in his dressing gown, and barefoot, Richard followed his family out into the passage and down the four flights of stairs. They soon outspeeded him. By the time he rounded the final half-landing the front door was opening-was closing-and with a whip of its tail the flurry of their life had gone.
Richard picked up his Times and his low-quality mail (so brown, so unwelcome, so slowly moving through the city). He sifted and then thrashed his way into the newspaper until he found Today's Birthdays. There it stood. There was even a picture of him, cheek to cheek with his wife: Lady Demeter.
At eleven o'clock Richard Tull dialed the number. He felt the hastening of excitement when ...
Revue de presse :
Just sad dreams. Yeah: oh sure. Just sad dreams. Or something like that.
Richard Tull was crying in his sleep. The woman beside him, his wife, Gina, woke and turned. She moved up on him from behind and laid hands on his pale and straining shoulders. There was a professionalism in her blinks and frowns and whispers: like the person at the poolside, trained in first aid; like the figure surging in on the blood-smeared macadam, a striding Christ of mouth-to-mouth. She was a woman. She knew so much more about tears than he did. She didn't know about Swift's juvenilia, or Wordsworth's senilia, or how Cressida had variously fared at the hands of Boccaccio, of Chaucer, of Robert Henryson, of Shakespeare; she didn't know Proust. But she knew tears. Gina had tears cold.
"What is it?" she said.
Richard raised a bent arm to his brow. The sniff he gave was complicated, orchestral. And when he sighed you could hear the distant seagulls falling through his lungs.
"Nothing. It isn't anything. Just sad dreams."
Or something like that.
After a while she too sighed and turned over, away from him. There in the night their bed had the towelly smell of marriage.
He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed. Richard Tull felt tired, and not just underslept. Local tiredness was up there above him-the kind of tiredness that sleep might lighten-but there was something else up there over and above it. And beneath it. That greater tiredness was not so local. It was the tiredness of time lived, with its days and days. It was the tiredness of gravity-gravity, which wants you down there in the center of the earth. That greater tiredness was here to stay: and get heavier. No nap or cuppa would ever lighten it. Richard couldn't remember crying in the night. Now his eyes were dry and open. He was in a terrible state-that of consciousness. Some while ago in his life he had lost the knack of choosing what to think about. He slid out of bed in the mornings just to find some peace. He slid out of bed in the mornings just to get a little rest. He was forty tomorrow, and reviewed books.
In the small square kitchen, which stoically awaited him, Richard engaged the electric kettle. Then he went next door and looked in on the boys. Dawn visits to their room had been known to comfort him after nights such as the one he had just experienced, with all its unwelcome information. His twin sons in their twin beds. Marius and Marcus were not identical twins. And they weren't fraternal twins either, Richard often said (unfairly, perhaps), in the sense that they showed little brotherly feeling. But that's all they were, brothers, born at the same time. It was possible, theoretically (and, Richard surmised, their mother being Gina, also practically) that Marcus and Marius had different fathers. They didn't look alike, especially, and were strikingly dissimilar in all their talents and proclivities. Not even their birthdays were content to be identical: a sanguinary summer midnight had interposed itself between the two boys and their (again) very distinctive parturitional styles, Marius, the elder, subjecting the delivery room to a systematic and intelligent stare, its negative judgment suspended by decency and disgust, whereas Marcus just clucked and sighed to himself complacently, and seemed to pat himself down, as if after a successful journey through freak weather. Now in the dawn, through the window and through the rain, the streets of London looked like the insides of an old plug. Richard contemplated his sons, their motive bodies reluctantly arrested in sleep, and reef-knotted to their bedware, and he thought, as an artist might: but the young sleep in another country, at once very dangerous and out of harm's way, perennially humid with innocuous libido-there are neutral eagles out on the windowsill, waiting, offering protection and threat.
Sometimes Richard did think and feel like an artist. He was an artist when he saw fire, even a match head (he was in his study now, lighting his first cigarette): an instinct in him acknowledged its elemental status. He was an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that society had to be like this, had any right, had any business being like this. A car in the street. Why? Why cars? This is what an artist has to be: harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles. The difficulty began when he sat down to write. The difficulty, really, began even earlier. Richard looked at his watch and thought: I can't call him yet. Or rather: Can't call him yet. For the interior monologue now waives the initial personal pronoun, in deference to Joyce. He'll still be in bed, not like the boys and their abandonment, but lying there personably, and smugly sleeping. For him, either there would be no information, or the information, such as it was, would all be good.
For an hour (it was the new system) he worked on his latest novel, deliberately but provisionally entitled Untitled. Richard Tull wasn't much of a hero. Yet there was something heroic about this early hour of flinching, flickering labor, the pencil sharpener, the Wite-Out, the vines outside the open window sallowing not with autumn but with nicotine. In the drawers of his desk or interleaved by now with the bills and summonses on the lower shelves on his bookcases, and even on the floor of the car (the terrible red Maestro), swilling around among the Ribena cartons and the dead tennis balls, lay other novels, all of them firmly entitled Unpublished. And stacked against him in the future, he knew, were yet further novels, successively entitled Unfinished, Unwritten, Unattempted, and, eventually, Unconceived.
Now came the boys-in what you would call a flurry if it didn't go on so long and involve so much inanely grooved detail, with Richard like the venerable though tacitly alcoholic pilot in the cockpit of the frayed shuttle: his clipboard, his nine-page checklist, his revving hangover-socks, sums, cereal, reading book, shaved carrot, face wash, teeth brush. Gina appeared in the middle of this and drank a cup of tea standing by the sink . . . Though the children were of course partly mysterious to Richard, thank God, he knew their childish repertoire and he knew the flavor of their hidden lives. But Gina he knew less and less about. Little Marco, for instance, believed that the sea was the creation of a rabbit who lived in a racing car. This you could discuss. Richard didn't know what Gina believed. He knew less and less about her private cosmogony.
There she stood, in light lipstick and light pancake and light woolen suit, holding her teacup in joined palms. Other working girls whose beds Richard had shared used to get up at around eleven at night to interface themselves for the other world. Gina did it all in twenty minutes. Her body threw no difficulties in her way: the wash-and-go drip-dry hair, the candid orbits that needed only the mildest of emphasis, the salmony tongue, the ten-second bowel movement, the body that all clothes loved. Gina worked two days a week, sometimes three. What she did, in public relations, seemed to him much more mysterious than what he did, or failed to do, in the study next door. Like the sun, now, her face forbade any direct address of the eyes, though of course the sun glares crazily everywhere at once and doesn't mind who is looking at it. Richard's dressing gown bent round him as he fastened Marius's shirt buttons with his eaten fingertips.
"Can you fasten it?" said Marius.
"Do you want a cup of tea making?" said Gina, surprisingly.
"Knock knock," said Marco.
Richard said, in order, "I am fastening it. No thanks, I'm okay. Who's there?"
"You," said Marco.
"No, fasten it. Come on, Daddy!" said Marius.
Richard said, "You who? You don't mean fasten it. You mean do it faster. I'm trying."
"Are they ready?" said Gina.
"Who are you calling! Knock knock," said Marco.
"I think so. Who's there?"
"What about macks?"
"Boo."
"They don't need macks, do they?"
"Mine aren't going out in that without macks."
"Boo," said Marco.
"Are you taking them in?"
"Boo who? Yeah, I thought so."
"Why are you crying!"
"Look at you. You aren't even dressed yet."
"I'll get dressed now."
"Why are you crying!"
"It's ten to nine. I'll take them."
"No, I'll take them."
"Daddy! Why are you crying?"
"What? I'm not."
"In the night you were," said Gina.
"Was I?" said Richard.
Still in his dressing gown, and barefoot, Richard followed his family out into the passage and down the four flights of stairs. They soon outspeeded him. By the time he rounded the final half-landing the front door was opening-was closing-and with a whip of its tail the flurry of their life had gone.
Richard picked up his Times and his low-quality mail (so brown, so unwelcome, so slowly moving through the city). He sifted and then thrashed his way into the newspaper until he found Today's Birthdays. There it stood. There was even a picture of him, cheek to cheek with his wife: Lady Demeter.
At eleven o'clock Richard Tull dialed the number. He felt the hastening of excitement when ...
"Mr. Amis is his generation's top literary dog...Dazzling...You're never out of reach of a sparkly phrase, stiletto metaphor or drop-dead insight into the human condition...Mr. Amis goes where other humorists fear to tread...Look out, Flaubert! Look out, Joyce!" —The New York Times Book Review
"This is Amis' best work to date...Funny, angry, caustic and brilliant." —The Montreal Gazette
"Talent of a very high order...Darkly funny...vastly sophisticated...A particularly ingenious masterpiece of comic plotting." —The Toronto Star
"A brilliantly funny and highly nasty tour of the British book world." —The Globe and Mail
"A masterpiece. Amis captures, more vividly than any writer of his generation, the pulse and feel of contemporary life...Amis's portrait of the literary world...is brilliantly damaging...A bloody good book." —Vogue
"[Amis's] best book...Unsparingly intelligent and witty, a satirical novel charged with sexual envy, artistic misgivings, and generalized self-loathing." —Elle
"This is Amis' best work to date...Funny, angry, caustic and brilliant." —The Montreal Gazette
"Talent of a very high order...Darkly funny...vastly sophisticated...A particularly ingenious masterpiece of comic plotting." —The Toronto Star
"A brilliantly funny and highly nasty tour of the British book world." —The Globe and Mail
"A masterpiece. Amis captures, more vividly than any writer of his generation, the pulse and feel of contemporary life...Amis's portrait of the literary world...is brilliantly damaging...A bloody good book." —Vogue
"[Amis's] best book...Unsparingly intelligent and witty, a satirical novel charged with sexual envy, artistic misgivings, and generalized self-loathing." —Elle
Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.
- ÉditeurFlamingo
- Date d'édition1995
- ISBN 10 0002253569
- ISBN 13 9780002253567
- ReliureRelié
- Numéro d'édition1
- Nombre de pages400
- Evaluation vendeur
Acheter neuf
En savoir plus sur cette édition
EUR 20,63
Frais de port :
EUR 3,74
Vers Etats-Unis
Autres éditions populaires du même titre
Meilleurs résultats de recherche sur AbeBooks
Image d'archives
The Information
Edité par
Flamingo (HarperCollins)
(1995)
ISBN 10 : 0002253569
ISBN 13 : 9780002253567
Neuf
Couverture rigide
Quantité disponible : 1
Vendeur :
Evaluation vendeur
Description du livre Hardcover. Etat : new. New. Fast Shipping and good customer service. N° de réf. du vendeur Holz_New_0002253569
Acheter neuf
EUR 20,63
Autre devise
Image d'archives
The Information
Edité par
Flamingo (HarperCollins)
(1995)
ISBN 10 : 0002253569
ISBN 13 : 9780002253567
Neuf
Couverture rigide
Quantité disponible : 1
Vendeur :
Evaluation vendeur
Description du livre Hardcover. Etat : new. New. N° de réf. du vendeur Wizard0002253569
Acheter neuf
EUR 24,65
Autre devise
Image d'archives
The Information
Edité par
Flamingo (HarperCollins)
(1995)
ISBN 10 : 0002253569
ISBN 13 : 9780002253567
Neuf
Couverture rigide
Quantité disponible : 1
Vendeur :
Evaluation vendeur
Description du livre Hardcover. Etat : new. Prompt service guaranteed. N° de réf. du vendeur Clean0002253569
Acheter neuf
EUR 26,08
Autre devise
Image d'archives
The Information
Edité par
Flamingo (HarperCollins)
(1995)
ISBN 10 : 0002253569
ISBN 13 : 9780002253567
Neuf
Couverture rigide
Quantité disponible : 1
Vendeur :
Evaluation vendeur
Description du livre Etat : New. Buy with confidence! Book is in new, never-used condition. N° de réf. du vendeur bk0002253569xvz189zvxnew
Acheter neuf
EUR 30,36
Autre devise
Image d'archives
The Information
Edité par
Flamingo (HarperCollins)
(1995)
ISBN 10 : 0002253569
ISBN 13 : 9780002253567
Neuf
Couverture rigide
Quantité disponible : 1
Vendeur :
Evaluation vendeur
Description du livre Etat : New. New! This book is in the same immaculate condition as when it was published. N° de réf. du vendeur 353-0002253569-new
Acheter neuf
EUR 30,36
Autre devise
Image d'archives
The Information
Edité par
Flamingo (HarperCollins)
(1995)
ISBN 10 : 0002253569
ISBN 13 : 9780002253567
Neuf
Couverture rigide
Quantité disponible : 1
Vendeur :
Evaluation vendeur
Description du livre Hardcover. Etat : new. New Copy. Customer Service Guaranteed. N° de réf. du vendeur think0002253569
Acheter neuf
EUR 26,49
Autre devise
Image d'archives
The Information
Edité par
Harpercollins Pub Ltd
(1995)
ISBN 10 : 0002253569
ISBN 13 : 9780002253567
Neuf
Couverture rigide
Quantité disponible : 1
Vendeur :
Evaluation vendeur
Description du livre Etat : new. N° de réf. du vendeur FrontCover0002253569
Acheter neuf
EUR 28,19
Autre devise
Image d'archives
Information
Edité par
Daedalus Books Inc Remainders
(1995)
ISBN 10 : 0002253569
ISBN 13 : 9780002253567
Neuf
Couverture rigide
Quantité disponible : 1
Vendeur :
Evaluation vendeur
Description du livre Hardcover. Etat : New. N° de réf. du vendeur Abebooks91958
Acheter neuf
EUR 56,80
Autre devise
Image d'archives
Information
Edité par
Daedalus Books Inc Remainders
(1995)
ISBN 10 : 0002253569
ISBN 13 : 9780002253567
Neuf
Couverture rigide
Quantité disponible : 2
Vendeur :
Evaluation vendeur
Description du livre Hardcover. Etat : New. Brand New!. N° de réf. du vendeur VIB0002253569
Acheter neuf
EUR 57,79
Autre devise
Image d'archives
The Information (First British Edition)
Edité par
Flamingo, LONDON
(1995)
ISBN 10 : 0002253569
ISBN 13 : 9780002253567
Neuf
Couverture rigide
Edition originale
Quantité disponible : 1
Vendeur :
Evaluation vendeur
Description du livre Hardcover. Etat : New. Etat de la jaquette : New. 1st Edition. Flamingo (London), 1995. First edition First printing. Hardbound. New/New. A pristine unread copy. (Without marks or bruises or smells or any other defect. Comes with archival-quality mylar cover dust jacket. Purchased new and never opened. Shipped in well padded box. Smoke-free shop. You cannot find a better copy. N° de réf. du vendeur 1267
Acheter neuf
EUR 72,21
Autre devise