The Maples Stories - Couverture rigide

Updike, John

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0307271765 ISBN 13 : 9780307271761

Editeur : Everyman's Library, 2009

Synopsis

Eighteen classic short stories that form a luminous chronicle of the life and times of one marriage in all its rich emotional complexity—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series.

In 1956, Updike published a story, “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. Over the next two decades, he returned to these characters again and again, tracing their years together raising children, finding moments of intermittent happiness, and facing the heartbreak of infidelity and estrangement. Seventeen Maples stories were collected in 1979 in a paperback edition titled Too Far to Go, prompted by a television adaptation. Now those stories appear in hardcover for the first time, with the addition of a later story, “Grandparenting,” which returns us to the Maples’s lives long after their wrenching divorce.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

JOHN UPDIKE was the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels, including The Centaur, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2009.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

FOREWORD

THE MAPLES PRESENTED themselves to the writer in New York City in 1956, dropped from his sight for seven years, and reappeared in the suburbs of Boston in 1963, giving blood. They figured in a dozen stories since, until the couple’s divorce in 1976. Their name, bestowed by a young man who had grown up in a small town shaded by Norway maples, and who then moved to the New England of sugar maples and flame-bright swamp maples, retained for him an arboreal innocence, a straightforward and cooling leafiness. Though the Maples stories trace the decline and fall of a marriage, they also illumine a history in many ways happy, of growing children and a million mundane moments shared. That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. The moral of these stories is that all blessings are mixed. Also, that people are incorrigibly themselves. The musical pattern, the advance and retreat, of the Maples’ duet is repeated over and over, ever more harshly transposed. They are shy, cheerful, and dissatisfied. They like one another, and aremysteries to one another. One of them is usually feeling slightly unwell, and the seesaw of their erotic interest rarely balances. Yet they talk, more easily than any other characters the author has acted as agent for. A tribe segregated in a valley develops an accent, then a dialect, and then a language all its own; so does a couple. Let this collection preserve one particular dead tongue, no easier to parse than Latin. To the fourteen Maples stories I have added two that from the internal evidence appear to take place in Richard Maple’s mind, and a fragment that cried off completion.

In the thirty years since the above preface was written, this collection of linked stories, quickly assembled to coincide with a made-for-television movie called Too Far to Go, has had a gratifying career in paperback: in England as a Penguin book titled Your Lover Just Called, and in translations into, by my reckoning, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Serbian, Japanese, and Hebrew. Some of the German editions of Der weite Weg zu zweit were in hardcover, but this is the first hardbound edition in English. I was delighted to be told of it, and have availed myself of the opportunity to revise a few words and phrases, and to include one more Maples story, ‘Grandparenting.’ The couple surprised me, in the mid-Eighties, by reappearing in a wintry Hartford, married to others but brought together by the birth of their first grandchild. I have not encountered them since, though mutual friends assure me that they are both still alive and look well, considering.

John Updike

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Everyman's Library
• Date d'édition: 2009
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0307271765
• ISBN 13: 9780307271761
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 256
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Purmerul LTD; https://strengholt.nl/en/; ; 22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9; 0; Plovdiv; 4000; Bulgarie