All the Living - Couverture souple

Morgan, C. E.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0312429320 ISBN 13 : 9780312429324

Editeur : Picador, 2010

Synopsis

A first novel by the most significant new American writer to have emerged in years. Aloma is a young woman who has put aside her life - as well as her dreams of becoming a pianist - to move in with her lover, Orren. His family has recently been killed in an accident. Stricken with grief and overwhelmingly burdened by the shape that his life has taken, Orren is desperate to keep the tobacco farm running. There is a drought, and he needs it to rain. As he toils with the land, Aloma finds that Orren has become more remote than she could ever have imagined, and that silence has taken hold of their relationship. When she begins to play the piano for the local church, she meets the local preacher, and feels a dangerous attraction for him. As events unfold over this single summer, C.E. Morgan takes us on a journey which describes the journey of our own lives. This novel is about every single relationship between a man and a woman - past, present and future - and about the distance between the lives we lead and the lives we imagine for ourselves.

A propos du livre

Extrait :

She had never lived in a house and now, seeing the thing, she was no longer sure she wanted to. It was the right house, she knew it was. It was as he had described. She shielded her eyes as she drove the long slope, her truck jolting and bucking as she approached. The bottomland yawned into view and she saw the fields where the young tobacco faltered on the drybeat earth, the ridge beyond. All around the soil had leached to chalky dust under the sun. She looked for the newer, smaller house that Orren had told her of, but she did not see it, only the old listing structure before her and the fields and the slope of tall grasses that fronted the house. She parked her truck and stared, her tongue troubled the inside of her teeth. The house cast no shadow in the bare noon light.

The ragged porch clung weakly to the wall of the building, its floorboards lining out from the door, their splintering gray now naked to the elements that first undressed them. When she tested a board with one foot, the wood ached and sounded under her, but did not move. She picked her way around a mudspattered posthole digger and a length of chicken wire to reach the door where she found a paper heart taped to the wood. The shape of the thing gave her pause. She read the note without touching it.

Aloma,
If you come when I’m gone, the tractor busted and I went to Hansonville for parts. Go on in. I will come back soon,
Orren

In this house, she thought, or the new one? She straightened up and hesitated. Over her head a porch fan hung spinless, trailing its cobwebs like old hair, its spiders gone. She turned to peer behind her down the gravel drive. Displaced dust still hung close behind the fender of her truck, loath to lie down in boredom again. It was quiet, both on the buckling blacktop road where not a single car had passed since she’d driven up, and here on the porch where the breezeless day was silent. A few midday insects spoke and that was all. She turned around and walked into the house.

If it was abandoned, it was not empty. Curtains hung bleached to gray and tattered rugs scattered across the floor. Against one wall, nestled under the rise of a staircase and a high landing, stood an old upright piano. One sulling eyebrow rose. Orren had told her of a piano on the property, one she could practice on, but it could not be this. Aloma edged past its sunken frame, leaving it untouched, and walked back through a dining room washed in south light past a table papered with bills and letters, into the kitchen. The ceiling here was high and white. It seemed clean mostly because it was empty – spacious and empty as a church. She circled the room, tugged open drawers and cabinets, but her eyes stared at their contents unseeing, her mind wheeling backward. She turned on her heel and stalked to the first room. She tossed back the fallboard and reached her fingers to the ivory. The keys stuttered to the bed, fractionally apart beneath her fingers, and it was no more, no less than she had expected. The sound was spoiled like a meat. She slapped the fallboard down, wood on wood clapped out into the echoing house in cracking waves, and then it was gone. She turned away with the air of someone halfheartedly resigned to endure, but as she turned, she started and stopped. A wall of faces stood before her, photographs in frames armied around a blackened mantel, eyes from floor to ceiling. She studied them without stepping closer. They gazed back.

She left the room as quick as she had come, retraced her steps to the kitchen where she had spied a door that led outside. She opened it wide to the June day. From where she stood, she claimed a long view of the back property. A field of tobacco began down a slope a hundred yards from the house and a fallow field neighbored close by, its beds risen like new graves. There a black curing barn stood and from its rafters a bit of tobacco hung like browned bird wings, pinions down, too early and out of season, she could not say why. To her left another barn, this one red, with a large gated pen and a gallery on one side. The pasture was empty. The cows had all wandered up a hillside to a stand of brazen green trees and stood blackly on the fringe of its shade gazing out, their bodies in the cloaking dark but their heads shined to a high gloss like black pennies in the sunlight. Far below their unmoving faces the newer house pointed south, no larger than a doublewide, no taller, no prettier. It banked the barbed edge of the cows’ pasture. But none of this held Aloma’s gaze for more than a moment. Instead, she looked out into the distance where, because she could not will them away or otherwise erase them from the earth, the spiny ridges of the mountains stood. She laughed a laugh without humor. All her hopes, and there they were. Had they been any closer, she’d have suffered to hear them laughing back.
When he came, she saw the sun flashes between the farthest trees where the road ran out of the north and she stepped forward and waited. Her eyes worried the spot where the treeline ended. Then when the truck shot free from the last trees and she knew that it was his, she took another step forward and her hands came together of their own accord, but she did not leave the porch. His truck, as familiar to her as a face, turned in the drive, the glass glinted. Her eyes followed his progress up the hill, the dust rolling and sweeping low to the ground in blond curls behind his truck, then flanging and fading to nothing. At first she could see his figure only as a dark shape and the sun firing on the watch on his right arm as he turned the wheel. Then when he was finally before her, braking and leaning in slightly under the shade of the visor to pull the keys from the ignition, she found the broad contours of his face and the color of his skin, much browner than the last time she had seen him, the day after the funeral three weeks ago when he came down to the school and sat beside her and set a question to her. He said, You’ll come up? And she said, Yes, yes. And it don’t matter if it’s all out of order like it is? And she shook her head and took his blanched face in her hands and kissed him, and that had struck her later as an odd reversal, he usually being the one to reach out and pull her to him. But she’d thought of it only later when she recalled how his lips had not made any motion against hers. It aroused a feeling in her like fear, but so slight and quick to fade that she didn’t recognize it for what it was. Now she could not take her eyes from him sitting motionless in the truck watching her as she watched him. She stepped off the porch, hesitant at first, but then half running until she was standing at his door, her hand on the burning chrome of the handle. The tips of his eyelashes were pale as straw now, bleached from the sun so it seemed he had no eyelashes at all, nothing to impede his gaze. She yanked open the door of the truck or he pushed it open and she was half sitting in his lap and they were kissing. She said his name. He said nothing against her mouth. When she pulled away, Aloma saw the hatchings around his eyes were deeper than before. He was drawn, even more so than after the funeral she had not attended because she had to accompany the school’s choir to Grayson, the principal had not given her the day off, she had her commitments. They were not her people, after all.

Orren placed his hand on his own chest flat-palmed and she saw the dark line of dirt under his nails like earthen parentheses. He looked at her directly. He said, You been here long?

No, she said, I only just got here a half hour ago.

He gave her a little shove then so he could ease up out of the cab, and when he did, she saw there was something altered in his body. Sudden age had impressed itself on his frame. With something like embarrassment, she turned slightly to look elsewhere, but found her eyes unwilling to obey, wary of this new thing, and when he slammed the door and stood before her, they both appeared ill at ease for a moment as if sizing up their differences. Then Orren stepped in to close the space between them and kissed her again and she sought after his familiar tobaccoed breath. He took her hand and said, Come on. You seen the house?

Which one? she said, her hand pressed a slight resistance onto his.

The real one, he said and nodded up at the big house.

Yeah, she said slowly, thought to say something more, but desisted. She let him lead her around the side and she peeked at him as he looked up at the height of it, squinting, his thin lips flattening further. He hitched up the waistband of his jeans and he crossed his arms over his chest and she saw clearly she had been mistaken. He had not turned old in three weeks’ time, it was as though someone had come along with a plane and sheered off all the extra that once cushioned him. He was like something corded, every movement curtailed. She had noticed this too that first day after the funeral when he stepped from his truck looking pared as a carving and just as stiff, though he’d felt the same under her hands when she held him. But there was something different in his carriage – he was newly fitted to his skeleton – something that she saw now was a lasting change and not just a momentary trick of grief. This new bounded self had banished the old.

At the rear of the house, Orren steered her down along the rutted path that led to the newer, smaller house. She stepped smart to match his pace, eager to see the inside and maybe show him how much she preferred it to the large and rambling structure behind them. But he stopped abruptly only partway down the path and she stumbled against him and put her hand on his hip to steady herself. Orren raised one arm and pointed out toward the hills.

It’s us all the way to the ridge, right under, he said. From where they stood at the crown of the tobacco field, the whole of the back property spread before them. The tobacco, sallow and tawny too early on its u...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

An astonishing novel that seizes the heart, and sets age-old conflicts against modern life. All the Living has the timeless quality of a parable, evoking a time and place with such beauty and power that it is unforgettable.

It’s a hot, dry summer and a young woman travels to Kentucky with her lover, Orren, to the isolated tobacco farm he has inherited after his family dies in a terrible accident. As he works through the drought, Aloma struggles to find her way in a combative, erotically charged relationship with this taciturn man. Her growing friendship with a local charismatic preacher further complicates her sense of lonely dissatisfaction as she grapples with the eternal question of whether it is better to fight for freedom or submit to desire.

Excerpt:
At first she could see his figure only as a dark shape and the sun firing on the watch on his right arm as he turned the wheel. Then when he was finally before her, braking and leaning in slightly under the shade of the visor to pull the keys from the ignition, she found the broad contours of his face and the color of his skin, much browner than the last time she had seen him, the day after the funeral three weeks ago when he came down to the school and sat beside her and set a question to her. He said, You’ll come up? And she said, Yes, yes. And it don’t matter if it’s all out of order like it is? And she shook her head and took his blanched face in her hands and kissed him, and that had struck her later as an odd reversal, he usually being the one to reach out and pull her to him.

From the Hardcover edition.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Picador
• Date d'édition: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0312429320
• ISBN 13: 9780312429324
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 208