Traveling Sprinkler: A Novel - Couverture souple

Baker, Nicholson

9780399160974: Traveling Sprinkler: A Novel

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0399160973 ISBN 13 : 9780399160974

Editeur : Plume, 2014

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Extrait

One

Roz called to ask me what I wanted for my fifty-fifth birthday. One of her many good qualities is that she remembers people’s birthdays. I thought for a second. I knew what I wanted: I wanted a cheap acoustic guitar. You can get them for about seventy dollars at Best Buy. They come in an exciting cardboard box. I saw two boxes, leaning against a wall, waiting, last time I was there. I almost said that’s what I wanted—I came dangerously close to saying it—but then I didn’t, because you really can’t ask your former girlfriend for a guitar, even a cheap guitar. It’s too momentous a present. It presupposes too much. It puts her in an awkward position. And of course you can’t say, “What I really want is I want you back,” either.

So instead I said, “I think what I really want is an egg salad sandwich.” Roz has a particular way with egg salad— she adds in a rare kind of paprika or tarragon or some elusive spice I don’t understand. “We could meet at Fort McClary,” I said. “I’ll bring the picnic basket and the sliced carrots if you bring the egg salad sandwiches.”

Fort McClary is a place we used to go sometimes to smell the seaweed and look at the boats. I think it’s where the Revolutionary War began, but I’m not sure. There are huge hewn Stonehengeian stones tumbled about in the grass that were going to be part of a defensive wall that never got built. I think Paul Revere rode his poor snorting horse all the way to Fort McClary to warn that the British were coming, which was the beginning of a pointless trade war that didn’t need to happen.

Roz was silent for a moment.

“Or,” I said, “if a picnic is too heavy-duty we could just have lunch at the Friendly Toast.”

“No, no, I can definitely make you an egg salad sandwich,” she said. I could hear her smiling the indulgent smile of someone who once loved somebody a long time ago.

We agreed to meet at Fort McClary and have a birthday picnic.

Early this morning I had a literary dream. Roz was still living with me and I was supposed to review a book of 1S military recipes called Mess: Great Food from Army Kitchens.

Roz and I were testing one of the recipes, which was for octopus-walnut muffins. Roz pulled the tray of muffins out of the oven and I bit into one. “How does it taste?” she asked.

“Not too good,” I said.

“I’m not surprised,” she said. We shook our heads and tried to think of a way I could say something nice about the cookbook.

“Maybe you could praise the walnuts?” Roz said.

I woke up.

I’m parked on Inigo Road, which is my favorite road anywhere. I wish I could write about the phrase “happy phrase,” but there’s no time. Very soon I’m going to be Fifty Fucking Five. The three Fs. The last time I hit three Fs was ten years ago, and this time is definitely worse. Unless you’re Yeats or Merwin you are done as a poet at fifty-five. Dylan Thomas was in the ground for sixteen years at fifty-five. Keats was dead at, what, twenty-six? Riding on horseback with his sad lungs coughing blood. And as for Wilfred Owen.

The first time I read Keats’s sonnet “When I Have Fears,” I was eating a tuna sub. I was an applied music major, with a concentration in bassoon. I’d found the poem in The Norton Anthology of Poetry—the shorter black edition with the Blake watercolor of a griffin on the cover. I propped the Norton open with my brown plastic food tray and I started reading and eating the tuna sub and drinking V8 juice occasionally from a little can.

Keats says: “When I have fears that I may cease to be.” He doesn’t say, “When I have fears that I may,” you know, “drop dead,” or “breathe my last”—no, it’s “cease to be.” I stopped chewing. I was caught by the emptiness and ungraspability in that phrase. And then came the next line, and I made a little hum of amazement: “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” Keats says, “Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain.”

I don’t want to pretend that the cafeteria spun around. It stayed still. I heard the grinding sound of the cash register printing. But I was thinking very hard. I was thinking about a large tortoiseshell that somebody had given me when I was small. There was a sort of fused backbone on the inside of it that ran down the middle. This bony ridge smelled terrible when you sniffed it close-up, although it had no odor from a normal distance. I imagined the tortoiseshell as the top dome of a human skull, and I imagined Keats’s pen gleaning bits of thought flesh from it.

The pen is really the only tool sharp enough to do the job of brain-gleaning properly. Keats knew that. He had medical training. He was supposed to be a doctor. He didn’t like medical school much, but he assisted at surgeries. The idea of the inside of the head as an object that had crevices and hiding places—that it was gleanable—was something that he knew firsthand. And he also knew, because he was a sick man, that his fears were justified. His mother died of consumption. He was a fourteen-year-old boy when he stayed up watching her 1S die. He knew what it meant for a complicated gentle person to simply cease to be. And his brain was teeming with the unwrittenness of what he had to say. He had to hurry. He knew all that.

The rest of the poem isn’t nearly so good, but it ends with a bang: “Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.”

I didn’t bring the list of things I wanted to write about today. Sometimes I note things I want to write about on a folded piece of paper, but I left my piece of paper in my bed. It’s an empty bed. This may be one of the empty-bed birthdays. I’ve had a few.

But a summer birthday is a good thing. On the branch near my car, on every twig that isn’t dead, there has been a lot of activity. The sap is up in these trees, and the leaves have had no choice but to move outward. Billions of buds in each tree, the leaves tremblingly uncurving, squirming outward. It’s a forced migration. The sap is pressurized and the leaves have to flee outward from the very ends of the twigs. What it creates is a fog of green over all of Inigo Road.

I’ve just been waiting for summer, waiting and wanting, and now it’s here. Yesterday was actually hot, and today I’ve put a Post-it note on the corner of my computer screen: NO YUKON JACK TILL YOU FINISH. I need a new drug. Huey Lewis sang that song and then foolishly sued Ray Parker, Jr., claiming that Parker had pinched the bassline for the Ghostbusters theme.

I’m debating whether to buy a can of Skoal smokeless tobacco.

Three quick farewell shots of Yukon Jack. Oh my flipping God. Deep breath now. Hello, my strangely shaped figments, I’m Paul Chowder. I’m here and so are you. We are in the same Minkowski space, shaped like a saddle. You’re in the saddle and I’m in the saddle and we’re not going to fall off Revere’s horse because it doesn’t exist.

My knees are laughing. Is that allowed?

Here’s my tip of the night. Nod. It’s worth nodding at things sometimes. Just give a big nod. That’s the way they are? Okay, nod, yes. Practice nodding.

Thirty-five years ago, when I was twenty, I sold my Heckel bassoon. And that was that. Now I’m supposed to be writing a new book of poetry, which I’m calling Misery Hat. I don’t want to work on it. Today, to get inspired, I dipped into an extremely long poem by Samuel Rogers called Human Life, because I liked the title. It didn’t do much for me, but I remembered that Samuel Rogers was friends with Tennyson and Coleridge, and that made me haul out my old edition of Tennyson and look at his extremely long poem Maud, narrated by an insane person who rambles. Tennyson was very ill if not clinically insane when he wrote parts of Maud, and a lot of it is unreadable. But there is one very nice soaring patch that everyone remembers. It begins, “Come into the garden, Maud, / For the black bat, night, has flown.” There Tennyson has us. Night itself is a black bat. How thrilling and un-Victorian is that? In the same passage there’s a mention of an unusual chamber group that’s apparently been serenading the roses all night long—a flute, a violin, and a bassoon. It’s a bassoon not because Tennyson knew anything about the bassoon, but because he needed an evocative word to rhyme with “tune” and “moon.” And also because he may have been remembering another poetical bassoon passage, from Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner:

The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,
For he heard the loud bassoon.

Coleridge didn’t know much about the bassoon either, or he wouldn’t have said it was loud. The bassoon’s liability as an orchestral instrument is that it is quite soft, much softer in volume than its size would suggest. At a wedding reception in 1797, when Coleridge was working on his poem, it might have been used to double the bassline played by the spinet or the cello. But bassoonists the world over are grateful to Coleridge for including them in his stanza.

Charles Darwin knew slightly more about the bassoon than either Coleridge or Tennyson. When he was old and sad he asked his son to play bassoon for a heap of earthworms, to study their responsiveness to low sounds. He also played a tin whistle for them and pounded on the piano and shouted at them. “They took not the least notice,” Darwin said. There’s also a poem about the vowel...

Revue de presse

Praise for Traveling Sprinkler:
“In sparkling and witty prose, Baker reminds readers why he’s one of the masters of the contemporary novel.”
—Kirkus, STARRED REVIEW

“If you love Nicholson Baker's fiction, Traveling Sprinkler will easily feed your jones.”—Shelf Awareness

“Baker’s endearingly comedic, covertly philosophical love story, spiked with intriguing—even alarming—little-known facts, mischievously celebrates song and silence, steadfastness and loving-kindness”—Booklist

"There are lots of reasons to love Traveling Sprinkler: Baker gets sweeter with each new book, and underneath the sweetness lie witty arguments about poetry and song and taste."—Lorin Stein, The Paris Review

“We’re at the point where saying that Nicholson Baker is one of our truly greatest writers isn’t pure hyperbole...and with [Traveling Sprinkler], which features a return from the main character of 2009's The Anthologist, he’s piling another great book atop his impressive stack.”– Flavorwire, 10 Must-Read Books for September

“Nicholson Baker's utterly charming new novel, Traveling Sprinkler, is discursive, quirky, and consistently engaging....an unmitigated pleasure to read...His characters struggle with grief, regret and existential angst, but they are happy, lucky, warm-hearted people—and we are eager to remain in their company for as long as their author will let us.”—Raina Lipsitz, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Paul [Chowder] is such a figure: idiosyncratic, unashamed of his quirks and ticks and odd obsessions, not unlike the author who created him....an example of the novel as slice of life, full of digressions that are themselves the point.”—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“As always with Baker, the many pages spent discussing the details of a protagonist’s activities and interests can take on a hypnotic allure . . . Baker’s great achievement is to make description and characterization do the work of narration . . . Baker can write pages of transfixing details that end up revealing the emotional workings of his narrators.”
—Ken Tucker, The Daily Beast

“You read [Nicholson Baker] for the way he wields his enviable vocabulary to capture the often hilarious and surprisingly intriguing and endearing mental machinations of his eccentric characters. You read him because, at his best, he makes you sit up and take notice of things you tend to overlook.”—Heller McAlpin, NPR.com

“In Traveling Sprinkler, a sequel of sorts to The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker resurrects the incorrigible procrastinator Paul Chowder...The literary sequel is a rare beast to begin with; Mr. Baker here joins the ranks of D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh and—I suppose if we wanted to go there—John Milton, all writers who dared to pen a follow-up to a masterpiece....Baker is as good a cultural critic as he is a novelist.”
—Michael Miller, The New York Observer

“Lucky for us, the writer's block that poet Paul Chowder battled in the 2009 comic novel The Anthologist is still wreaking havoc with his creative process. His struggles continue in Nicholson Baker's new novel, Traveling Sprinkler, the second to feature Chowder and his wonderfully wry and witty first-person narration....readers fell in love with Baker's lovable but bumbling hero....endlessly fascinating...Chowder's rambling this-is-your-brain on music musings on the bassoon — on Debussy's "The Sunken Cathedral," Paul McCartney's "Blackbird," Tracy Chapman's "Change," even the score for The Bourne Identity — are poetically charged and wonderful to read....a truly harmonious and wonderfully entertaining story.”
—Carol Memmott, Chicago Tribune

“Like the sprinkler, whose journey across a yard may look aimless, by the end of the novel, Paul has managed to nourish almost everyone he comes in contact with, including the reader. . . While his lyrics have a certain deadpan hilarity, Paul’s writing about music and poetry is thoughtful in its clarity. . . . [T]here is a method to Paul’s wooing, and the two dear, quirky people are impossible for a certain kind of reader – this one most definitely included – to resist.”
—Yvonne Zipp, The Christian Science Monitor

“In a sense, he is a modern-day troubadour, working to create a hit number, and by doing so, to earn the love of a lady....Chowder’s devotion to Roz is simple and beautiful, but for me, the best part of “Traveling Sprinkler” is the time he spends thinking about music....his protagonist’s observations are crisp and lively....a passionate book, one that will delight readers who respond to a congenial, if sometimes hapless, speaker describing the many things that enrich his life.”—Tom Zelman, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“[Baker’s protagonist] makes a metaphor for his life from the gardening implement of the book's title....There's a narrative arc to this book, to be sure — it turns out to be a love story. But the real point is the language....[a] narrative with vivid imagery, unexpected juxtapositions and fresh metaphors.”
—Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times

“Impeccable...oddly moving...[Baker] writes eloquently, even adamantly...This is a joyful book, and a melancholy book, and a "political" book not because it talks about drone warfare, but because it is titled Traveling Sprinkler.”
—Theo Schell-Lambert, San Francisco Chronicle

“I know of no other novelist as sweetly charming, so capable of life-affirming gusts of tender prose.”—Jason McBride, Toronto Globe & Mail

“Can be read as a curious coming-of-age novel. And a funny, abundantly textured, warmhearted one.”—Jonathan Miles, New York Times Book Review