Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories - Couverture rigide

Russell, Karen

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0307957233 ISBN 13 : 9780307957238

Editeur : Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2013

Synopsis

Book by Russell Karen

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Vampires in the Lemon Grove

In October, the men and women of Sorrento harvest the primo­fiore, or “first flowering fruit,” the most succulent lemons; in March, the yellow bianchetti ripen, followed in June by the green verdelli. In every season you can find me sitting at my bench, watching them fall. Only one or two lemons tumble from the branches each hour, but I’ve been sitting here so long their falls seem contiguous, close as raindrops. My wife has no patience for this sort of meditation. “Jesus Christ, Clyde,” she says. “You need a hobby.”

   Most people mistake me for a small, kindly Italian grand­father, a nonno. I have an old nonno’s coloring, the dark walnut stain peculiar to southern Italians, a tan that won’t fade until I die (which I never will). I wear a neat periwinkle shirt, a canvas sunhat, black suspenders that sag at my chest. My loafers are battered but always polished. The few visitors to the lemon grove who notice me smile blankly into my raisin face and catch the whiff of some sort of tragedy; they whisper that I am a widower, or an old man who has survived his children. They never guess that I am a vampire.

   Santa Francesca’s Lemon Grove, where I spend my days and nights, was part of a Jesuit convent in the 1800s. Today it’s privately owned by the Alberti family, the prices are excessive, and the locals know to buy their lemons elsewhere. In summers a teenage girl named Fila mans a wooden stall at the back of the grove. She’s painfully thin, with heavy black bangs. I can tell by the careful way she saves the best lemons for me, slyly kicking them under my bench, that she knows I am a monster. Sometimes she’ll smile vacantly in my direction, but she never gives me any trouble. And because of her benevolent indifference to me, I feel a swell of love for the girl.

   Fila makes the lemonade and monitors the hot dog machine, watching the meat rotate on wire spigots. I’m fascinated by this machine. The Italian name for it translates as “carousel of beef.” Who would have guessed at such a device two hundred years ago? Back then we were all preoccupied with visions of apocalypse; Santa Francesca, the foundress of this very grove, gouged out her eyes while dictating premonitions of fire. What a shame, I often think, that she foresaw only the end times, never hot dogs.

A sign posted just outside the grove reads:

CIGERETTE PIE

HEAT DOGS

GRANITE DRINKS

Santa Francesca’s Limonata—­

THE MOST REFRISHING DRANK ON THE PLENET!!

   Every day, tourists from Wales and Germany and America are ferried over from cruise ships to the base of these cliffs. They ride the funicular up here to visit the grove, to eat “heat dogs” with speckly brown mustard and sip lemon ices. They snap photographs of the Alberti brothers, Benny and Luciano, teenage twins who cling to the trees’ wooden supports and make a grudging show of harvesting lemons, who spear each other with trowels and refer to the tourist women as “vaginas” in Italian slang. “Buona sera, vaginas!” they cry from the trees. I think the tourists are getting stupider. None of them speak Italian anymore, and these new women seem deaf to aggression. Often I fantasize about flashing my fangs at the brothers, just to keep them in line.

   As I said, the tourists usually ignore me; perhaps it’s the dominoes. A few years back, I bought a battered red set from Benny, a prop piece, and this makes me invisible, sufficiently banal to be hidden in plain sight. I have no real interest in the game; I mostly stack the pieces into little houses and corrals.

   At sunset, the tourists all around begin to shout. “Look! Up there!” It’s time for the path of I Pipistrelli Impazziti—­the descent of the bats.

   They flow from cliffs that glow like pale chalk, expelled from caves in the seeming billions. Their drop is steep and vertical, a black hail. Sometimes a change in weather sucks a bat beyond the lemon trees and into the turquoise sea. It’s three hundred feet to the lemon grove, six hundred feet to the churning foam of the Tyrrhenian. At the precipice, they soar upward and crash around the green tops of the trees.

   “Oh!” the tourists shriek, delighted, ducking their heads.

   Up close, the bats’ spread wings are alien membranes—­fragile, like something internal flipped out. The waning sun washes their bodies a dusky red. They have wrinkled black faces, these bats, tiny, like gargoyles or angry grandfathers. They have teeth like mine.

   Tonight, one of the tourists, a Texan lady with a big strawberry red updo, has successfully captured a bat in her hair, simultaneously crying real tears and howling: “TAKE THE GODDAMN PICTURE, Sarah!”

   I stare ahead at a fixed point above the trees and light a cigarette. My bent spine goes rigid. Mortal terror always trips some old wire that leaves me sad and irritable. It will be whole minutes now before everybody stops screaming.
The moon is a muted shade of orange. Twin disks of light burn in the sky and the sea. I scan the darker indents in the skyline, the cloudless spots that I know to be caves. I check my watch again. It’s eight o’clock, and all the bats have disappeared into the interior branches. Where is Magreb? My fangs are throbbing, but I won’t start without her.

   I once pictured time as a black magnifying glass and myself as a microscopic flightless insect trapped in that circle of night. But then Magreb came along, and eternity ceased to frighten me. Suddenly each moment followed its antecedent in a neat chain, moments we filled with each other.

   I watch a single bat falling from the cliffs, dropping like a stone: headfirst, motionless, dizzying to witness.

   Pull up.

   I close my eyes. I press my palms flat against the picnic table and tense the muscles of my neck.

   Pull UP. I tense until my temples pulse, until little black-and-red stars flutter behind my eyelids.

   “You can look now.”

   Magreb is sitting on the bench, blinking her bright pumpkin eyes. “You weren’t even watching. If you saw me coming down, you’d know you have nothing to worry about.” I try to smile at her and find I can’t. My own eyes feel like ice cubes.

   “It’s stupid to go so fast.” I don’t look at her. “That easterly could knock you over the rocks.”

   “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m an excellent flier.”

   She’s right. Magreb can shape-­shift midair, much more smoothly than I ever could. Even back in the 1850s, when I used to transmute into a bat two, three times a night, my metamorphosis was a shy, halting process.

   “Look!” she says, triumphant, mocking. “You’re still trembling!”

   I look down at my hands, angry to realize it’s true.

   Magreb roots through the tall, black blades of grass. “It’s late, Clyde; where’s my lemon?”

   I pluck a soft, round lemon from the grass, a summer moon, and hand it to her. The verdelli I have chosen is perfect, flawless. She looks at it with distaste and makes a big show of brushing off a marching ribbon of ants.

“A toast!” I say.

“A toast,” Magreb replies, with the rote enthusiasm of a Christian saying grace. We lift the lemons and swing them to our faces. We plunge our fangs, piercing the skin, and emit a long, united hiss: “Aaah!”

Over the years, Magreb and I have tried everything—­fangs in apples, fangs in rubber balls. We have lived everywhere: Tunis, Laos, Cincinnati, Salamanca. We spent our honeymoon hopping continents, hunting liquid chimeras: mint tea in Fez, coconut slurries in Oahu, jet-black coffee in Bogotá, jackal’s milk in Dakar, Cherry Coke floats in rural Alabama, a thousand beverages purported to have magical quenching properties. We went thirsty in every region of the globe before finding our oasis here, in the blue boot of Italy, at this dead nun’s lemonade stand. It’s only these lemons that give us any relief.

   When we first landed in Sorrento I was skeptical. The pitcher of lemonade we ordered looked cloudy and adulterated. Sugar clumped at the bottom. I took a gulp, and a whole small lemon lodged in my mouth; there is no word sufficiently lovely for the first taste, the first feeling of my fangs in that lemon. It was bracingly sour, with a delicate hint of ocean salt. After an initial prickling—­a sort of chemical effervescence along my gums—­a soothing blankness traveled from the tip of each fang to my fevered brain. These lemons are a vampire’s analgesic. If you have been thirsty for a long time, if you have been suffering, then the absence of those two feelings—­however brief—­becomes a kind of heaven. I breathed deeply through my nostrils. My throbbing fangs were still.

By daybreak, the numbness had begun to wear off. The lemons relieve our thirst without ending it, like a drink we can hold in our mouths but never swallow. Eventually the original hunger returns. I have tried to be very good, very correct and conscientious about not confusing this original hunger with the thing I feel for Magreb.
I can’t joke about my early years on the blood, can’t even think about them without guilt and acidic embarrassment. Unlike Magreb, who has never had a sip of the stuff, I listened to the village gossips and believed every rumor, internalized every report of corrupted bodies and boiled blood. Vampires were the favorite undead of the Enlightenment, and as a young boy I aped the diction and mannerisms I read about in books: Vlad the Impaler, Count Heinrich the Despoiler, Goethe’s bloodsucking bride of Corinth. I eavesdropped on the terrified prayers of an old woman in a cemetery, begging God to protect her from . . . me. I felt a dislocation then, a spreading numbness, as if I were invisible or already dead. After that, I did only what the stories suggested, beginning with that old woman’s blood. I slept in coffins, in black cedar boxes, and woke every night with a fierce headache. I was famished, perennially dizzy. I had unspeakable dreams about the sun.

   In practice I was no suave viscount, just a teenager in a red velvet cape, awkward and voracious. I wanted to touch the edges of my life—­the same instinct, I think, that inspires young mortals to flip tractors and enlist in foreign wars. One night I skulked into a late Mass with some vague plan to defeat eternity. At the back of the nave, I tossed my mousy curls, rolled my eyes heavenward, and then plunged my entire arm into the bronze pail of holy water. Death would be painful, probably, but I didn’t care about pain. I wanted to overturn my sentence. It was working; I could feel the burn beginning to spread. Actually, it was more like an itch, but I was sure the burning would start any second. I slid into a pew, snug in my misery, and waited for my body to turn to ash.

   By sunrise, I’d developed a rash between my eyebrows, a little late-flowering acne, but was otherwise fine, and I understood I truly was immortal. At that moment I yielded all discrimination; I bit anyone kind or slow enough to let me get close: men, women, even some older boys and girls. The littlest children I left alone, very proud at the time of this one scruple. I’d read stories about Hungarian vampirs who drank the blood of orphan girls, and mentioned this to Magreb early on, hoping to impress her with my decency. Not children! she wept.

   She wept for a day and a half.

   Our first date was in Cementerio de Colón, if I can call a chance meeting between headstones a date. I had been stalking her, following her swishing hips as she took a shortcut through the cemetery grass. She wore her hair in a low, snaky braid that was coming unraveled. When I was near enough to touch her trailing ribbon she whipped around. “Are you following me?” she asked, annoyed, not scared. She regarded my face with the contempt of a woman confronting the town drunk. “Oh,” she said, “your teeth . . .”

   And then she grinned. Magreb was the first and only other vampire I’d ever met. We bared our fangs over a tombstone and recognized each other. There is a loneliness that must be particular to monsters, I think, the feeling that each is the only child of a species. And now that loneliness was over.

   Our first date lasted all night. Magreb’s talk seemed to lunge forward like a train without a conductor; I suspect even she didn’t know what she was saying. I certainly wasn’t paying attention, staring dopily at her fangs, and then I heard her ask: “So, when did you figure out that the blood does nothing?” 

   At the time of this conversation, I was edging on 130. I had never gone a day since early childhood without drinking several pints of blood. The blood does nothing? My forehead burned and burned.

   “Didn’t you think it suspicious that you had a heartbeat?” she asked me. “That you had a reflection in water?” 

   When I didn’t answer, Magreb went on, “Every time I saw my own face in a mirror, I knew I wasn’t any of those ridiculous things, a bloodsucker, a sanguina. You know?”

   “Sure,” I said, nodding. For me, mirrors had the opposite effect: I saw a mouth ringed in black blood. I saw the pale son of the villagers’ fears.
Those initial days with Magreb nearly undid me. At first my euphoria was sharp and blinding, all my thoughts spooling into a single blue thread of relief—The blood does nothing! I don’t have to drink the blood!— but when that subsided, I found I had nothing left. If we didn’t have to drink the blood, then what on earth were these fangs for?

   Sometimes I think she preferred me then: I was like her own child, raw and amazed. We smashed my coffin with an ax and spent the night at a hotel. I lay there wide-eyed in the big bed, my heart thudding like a fish tail against the floor of a boat.

   “You’re really sure?” I whispered to her. “I don’t have to sleep in a coffin? I don’t have to sleep through the day?” She had already drifted off.

   A few months later, she suggested a picnic.

   “But the sun.”

   Magreb shook her head. “You poor thing, believing all that garbage.”

   By this time we’d found a dirt cellar in which to live in Western Australia, where the sun burned through the clouds like dining lace. That sun ate lakes, rising out of dead volcanoes at dawn, triple the size of a harvest moon and skull- white, a grass-scorcher. Go ahead, try to walk into that sun when you’ve been told your bones are tinder.

   I stared at the warped planks of the trapdoor above us, the copper ladder that led rung by rung to the br...

Revue de presse :

Praise for Vampires in the Lemon Grove
 
“Vampires in the Lemon Grove shows Ms. Russell more in control of her craft than ever . . . Ms. Russell deftly combines elements of the weird and supernatural with acute psychological realism; elements of the gothic with dry, contemporary humor. From apparent influences as disparate as George Saunders, Saki, Stephen King, Carson McCullers and Joy Williams, she has fashioned a quirky, textured voice that is thoroughly her own: lyrical and funny, fantastical and meditative . . . Underscores her fecund and constantly surprising storytelling gifts . . . In these tales Ms. Russell combines careful research with minutely imagined details and a wonderfully vital sleight of hand to create narratives that possess both the resonance of myth and the immediacy of something new.”
            —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
 
 “Hilarious, exquisite, first-rate . . . It’s hard not to reflect on the origins of this wildly talented young writer’s ideas . . . A grim, stupendous magic is at work in these stories . . . Her work has a velocity and trajectory that is little less than dazzling and a tough, enveloping, exhilarating voice that cannot be equaled.”
            —Joy Williams, The New York Times Book Review
 
“One of the most innovative, inspired short-story collections in the past decade . . . Vampires in the Lemon Grove is flawless and magnificent, and there’s absolutely no living author quite like Karen Russell.”
            —Michael Schaub, NPR
 
“Astonishing . . . Vampires in the Lemon Grove stands out as Russell’s best book . . . with prose so alive it practically backflips off the page . . . One of Russell’s seemingly endless gifts as a writer is that her invented worlds shed new light on the one in which we live.”
            —Molly Antopol, San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Beautiful tales . . . Vampires in the Lemon Grove should cement Russell’s reputation as one of the most remarkable fantasists writing today.”
            —Elizabeth Hand, Washington Post
 
“Russell is so grand a writer—so otherworldly, yet emotionally devastating; so daffy and daring—that she doesn’t need an imprimatur to stake her claim to literary genius . . . One of the great American writers of our young century.”
            —Maureen Corrigan, NPR
 
“Each story is more inventive than the last, juxtaposing mundane human experiences and profound questions about consciousness, love, and mortality, with a hint of the supernatural . . . As Russell’s imagination soars, so does our joy in reading this collection.”
            —Oprah.com
 
“Karen Russell’s imagination is one again on full, Technicolor, mind-bending display . . .  If Vampires in the Lemon Grove is an indicator of the future, Russell’s stories will be seizing our imaginations—and nibbling at the edges of our nightmares—for years to come.”
            —Amy Driscoll, Miami Herald
 
“A force to behold . . . Russell establishes herself as a writer to track and to treasure.”
            —Madeleine Blais, Chicago Tribune
 
“Wildly inventive . . . wondrously strange and moving.”
            —Reader’s Digest
 
“Witty, and wise, and brimming with vitality . . . In Russell’s stories, malice strolls with morality, horror tangos with humor, and the spirits of Franz Kafka and Flannery O’Connor meet with unexpected comity . . . With a voice that could spring from an unleashed demon—or an angel on amphetamines—Russell fills this exuberant collection with life’s radiance and shadows, enhanced by the possibility of redemption.”
            —Richmond Times-Dispatch
 
“Karen Russell’s stories defy definition. They are at once warm and sinister, a bubblebath with a shark fin lurking underneath the suds . . . fiction that expands the possible, gorgeous prose forged in the fires of dark beauty and wistful longing.”  
            —The Millions
 
“Like Russell’s previous work, Vampires in the Lemon Grove presents a writer with a seemingly infinite imagination and a tremendous appreciation for the possibilities of language, particularly its ability to extract beauty from the darkest places and situations . . . Her originality is relentless.”
            —SouthFlorida.com
 
“An eight-tale adrenaline-delivery system packed with long-married, problem-beset monsters, abandoned children whose lives are in dire peril, teens with creepy sixth senses, and masseuses with inexplicable healing powers . . . Darkly inventive, demonically driven narratives set in the author’s inimitable imaginative disturbia.”
            —Elle
 
“Exquisitely peculiar . . . Vampires trades in the mythological waters of the Florida Everglades for eight new, but still darkly fantastical and dangerous worlds that constantly remind the reader that monsters and violence are always around the corner, and in ourselves.”
            —Wall Street Journal
 
“Reading Vampires in the Lemon Grove is like taking off on a round-the-universe trip, each story a new adventure where the usual rules don’t apply . . . What Russell is doing doesn’t yet have a name. And that is why her work is so wonderful.”
            —Kirkus.com
 
“In these stories, familiar human emotions leap into relief against backdrops of almost Tim Burton-like weirdness . . . Her stories are as robust as can be. But they also look like something internal flipped out: us.”
            —New York
 
“A master of magical realism . . . Ms. Russell is at her best alternating between the wildly fantastical and the utterly banal, especially when she finds a way to fuse the two together . . . There is an exuberance to her descriptive abilities, a kind of ludic writerly joy in the process that translates to a readerly thrill in the results.”
            —New York Observer
 
“Delightfully weird . . . moving.”
            —Esquire
 
 “Russell’s tales flirt with the fantastical, but are rooted in darker realities . . . Even as she transforms the everyday into a wriggling bestiary, replete with colorful hallucinations and ghosts, her most haunting bits rely on the depiction of human impulses.”
            —Mother Jones
 
“Powerful . . . Russell pulls the rug out on our imagination, creating perplexing, surreal scenarios that bump into the common reality that most of us take for granted.”
            —Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
 “Karen Russell casts another spell with her otherworldly collection of stories . . . Is she a Southern Gothicist? A parabolist? A moralist? Do her stories expand upon old histories, or create new, fantastical explanations for them? But the stories, without ever confining themselves to one genre or tradition, speak for themselves.”
            —Bullett Magazine
 
“Wildly imaginative . . . gorgeous . . . Russell has once again mapped the dark country between our everyday and more primal selves.”
           —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
 
“Delightfully bizarre . . . bone-chilling . . . fantasy and horror underlined with social commentary.”
            —People
 
“Dazzlingly strange . . . Vacillating between horror and humor, Russell’s writing recalls both George Saunders and vintage Stephen King, sometimes simultaneously. The unifying factor is Russell’s blend of the real and supernatural, mundane and extraordinary—her magical realism is at times unsettling, but often darkly funny, too.”
            —Time Out Chicago
 
“Another madcap ride down the rabbit hole. Each of the eight tales here is wildly inventive, some fiendishly bizarre . . . Russell’s imagination routinely runs riot.
            —The National
 
“Nearly flawless . . . Russell’s best work manages to both create a fascinating, surreal world and coax meaning out of it . . . This book covers war, gender issues, puberty, marriage, and death with such flair and delight that it’s still surprising to realize this is only Russell’s second story collection.”
            —The Onion (Grade: A-)
 
“It’s difficult to think of another writer working today who has Russell’s talent for gorgeous, risky prose and a seemingly endless arsenal of odd, inventive narratives. Give her a setting and she’ll grow beautiful monsters in its brilliantly described ecosystem . . . Russell has created eight new theme parks in her stories; eight new cages of horror and heart and winding metamorphoses that would take a normal writer a lifetime to dream into being.”
            —Interview Magazine
 
“The stories in Karen Russell’s wonderful collection embrace the monstrous, the mutant, the mysterious . . . Set at the intersection of destiny and free will, nature and the supernatural, light and dark, the stories—even the frothiest—are sea deep, scary smart, richly inventive, highly illuminating, and gorgeously written.”
            —More Magazine
 
“In pieces that range from diverting frolics to ominous, cautionary tales, the author uplifts underdogs and rattles the willfully ignorant . . . Russell knows to ground her fancies with human fragility. This, and the ideas at play, is what sticks around.”
            —Time Out New York
 
“Macabre, surprising, sympathetic, and in the end deeply empowering . . . At her best, Russell converts your doubts about her narrative audacity into a hard-won revelation of the truth in her prose. As she gracefully unspools the interior of her best realized characters, you forget that her stories could ever feel unnatural.”
            —Oxford American 

“Excellent . . . Vampires earns its darkness, amounting to an update on E.T.A. Hoffman’s tales . . . It’s a strange compliment, but a genuine one, to say that Russell’s imagination really is capable of inducing nausea and terror.”
            —Barnes and Noble Review
 
“A darkly surreal treat.”
            —Wired.com
 
“Magical . . . All of the stories collected in Vampires in the Lemon Grove are exceptional. Many writers attempt magical realism, but few succeed the way Karen Russell can. Her writing is tight, her characters are instantly lovable, and, most importantly, her stories are believable.”
            —Portland Book Review 

“Russell has the wonderful ability for mixing the magical with the mundane to create stories that are not only fun to read but kind of kick you in your heart at the same time . . . She’s clever as hell.”
            —Book Riot
 
“Vampires in the Lemon Grove brings together eight stories of transmutation, transmigration, and transgression for a collection that enchants and beguiles throughout.”
            —PopMatters
 
“If you liked Russell’s novel Swamplandia, you’ll love her stories . . . I needed something truly wonderful to read, and I got lucky, finding the book I have most admired since the beginning of 2013, and that’s saying quite a bit!”
            —Weekend Local Reader
 
“Russell sparkles . . . Vampires in the Lemon Grove illustrates this universally lauded, still-young writer’s undiminished mastery.”
            —Publisher’s Weekly
 
“Consistently arresting . . . startling . . . profound . . . Even more impressive than Russell’s critically acclaimed novel.” 
           —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
“Russell doesn’t work small. She’s a world builder, and the stranger the better . . . Russell’s great gift—along with her antic imagination—is her ability to create whole landscapes and lifetimes of strangeness within the confines of a short story.”
            —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“Russell returns to the story form with renewed daring, leading us again into uncharted terrain, though as fantastic as the predicaments she imagines are, the emotions couldn’t be truer to life . . . Mind-blowing, mythic, macabre, hilarious.”
            —Booklist (starred review)
 
“The offbeat lusciousness of [Swamplandia] seems to be repeated in Russell’s new story collection . . . Don’t miss.” 
           —Library Journal

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Date d'édition: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0307957233
• ISBN 13: 9780307957238
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 243