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Chapter One
After many years of believing that I never dream of anything, I dreamed of Africa. It happened on a late-August night here at the farm in Keene Valley, about as far from Africa as I have been able to situate myself. I couldn't recall the dream's story, although I knew that it was in Africa, the country of Liberia, and my home in Monrovia, and that somehow the chimps had played a role, for there were round, brown, masklike faces still afloat in my mind when I awoke, safe in my bed in this old house in the middle of the Adirondack Mountains, and found myself overflowing with the knowledge that I would soon return there.
It wasn't a conscious decision to return. More a presentiment is all it was, a foreboding perhaps, advancing from the blackest part of my mind at the same rate as the images of Liberia drifted there and broke and dissolved in those dark waters where I've stored most of my memories of Africa. Memories of Africa and of the terrible years before. When you have kept as many secrets as I have for as long as I have, you end up keeping them from yourself as well. So, yes, into my cache of forgotten memories of Liberia and the years that led me there — that's where the dream went. As if it were someone else's secret and were meant to be kept from me, especially.
And in its place was this knowledge that I would soon be going back — foreknowledge, really, because I didn't make the decision until later that day, when Anthea and I had finished killing the chickens and were wrapping them in paper and plastic bags for delivery and pickup.
It was at the end of summer, the beginning of an early autumn, and though barely a year ago, it feels like a decade, so much was altered in that year. The decade here: now, that seems like a few days and nights is all, because nothing except the same thing has happened here day after day, season after season, year after year.No new or old returning lovers, no marriages or divorces, no births or deaths, at least among the humans. Just the farm and the world that nourishes and sustains it. Timeless, it has seemed.
The farm is a commercial operation, inasmuch as I sell most of what I grow, but in truth it's more like an old-fashioned family farm, and to run it I've had to give over my personal clock. I've had to abandon all my urban ways of measuring time and replace them with the farm's clock, which is marked off by the needs and demands of livestock and the crops, by the requirements of soil and the surge and flux of weather. It's no wonder that farmers in the old days were obsessed with the motions of the planets and the waxing and waning of the moon, as if their farms were the bodies of women. I sometimes think it's because I am a woman — or maybe it's merely because I lived all those years in Liberia, adapted to African time — that I was able to adapt so easily to the pace and patterns and rhythmic repetitions of nature's clock and calendar.
It was as usual, then, on that August morning, with the darkness just beginning to pull back from the broad river valley to the forests and the mountains looming behind the house, that I woke at five-thirty and came downstairs wearing my flannel nightgown and slippers against the pre-dawn chill, with the dogs clattering behind me, checked the temperature by the moon-faced thermometer outside the kitchen window (still no frost,which was good, because we'd neglected to cover the tomatoes), and put the dogs out. I made coffee for Anthea, who comes in at six and says she can't do a thing until after her second cup, and the other girls, who come in at seven. I lingered for a few moments in the kitchen while the coffee brewed, enjoying the dark smell of it. I never drink coffee, having been raised on tea, a habit I took from my father as soon as he'd let me, but I do love the smell of it when it's brewing and buy organic Colombian beans from a mail-order catalogue and grind them freshly for each pot, just for the aroma.
For a few moments, as I always do, I stood by the window and watched the dogs.They are Border collies, father and daughter, Baylor and Winnie, and when they have done their business, the first thing they do every morning is patrol the property, reclaiming their territory and making sure that during the night nothing untoward has happened. Usually I watch them work and think of them as working for me. But this morning they looked weirdly different to me, as if during the night one of us, they or I, had changed allegiances. They looked like ghost dogs,moving swiftly across the side yard in the gray pre-dawn light, disappearing into shadows cast by the house and oak trees, darting low to the ground into the garage, then reappearing and moving on.Today they worked for no one but themselves; that's how I saw them.Their gait was halfway between a trot and a run — fast, effortless, smooth, and silent, their ears cocked forward, plumed tails straight back — and they seemed more like small wolves than carefully trained and utterly domesticated herding animals.
For a moment they scared me. I saw the primeval wildness in them, their radical independence and selfishness, the ferocity of their strictly canine needs. Perhaps it was the thin, silvery half-light and that I viewed them mostly in silhouette as they zigged and zagged across the yard, and when they'd checked the garage, an open shed, actually, where I park the pickup truck and my Honda, they moved on to the barn and from there to the henhouse, where the rooster crowed, and then loped all the way to the pond in the front field, where they woke the ducks and geese, never stopping, running in tandem, a pair of single-minded predators sifting their territory at peak efficiency.
From the Hardcover edition.
Biographie de l'auteur :
After many years of believing that I never dream of anything, I dreamed of Africa. It happened on a late-August night here at the farm in Keene Valley, about as far from Africa as I have been able to situate myself. I couldn't recall the dream's story, although I knew that it was in Africa, the country of Liberia, and my home in Monrovia, and that somehow the chimps had played a role, for there were round, brown, masklike faces still afloat in my mind when I awoke, safe in my bed in this old house in the middle of the Adirondack Mountains, and found myself overflowing with the knowledge that I would soon return there.
It wasn't a conscious decision to return. More a presentiment is all it was, a foreboding perhaps, advancing from the blackest part of my mind at the same rate as the images of Liberia drifted there and broke and dissolved in those dark waters where I've stored most of my memories of Africa. Memories of Africa and of the terrible years before. When you have kept as many secrets as I have for as long as I have, you end up keeping them from yourself as well. So, yes, into my cache of forgotten memories of Liberia and the years that led me there — that's where the dream went. As if it were someone else's secret and were meant to be kept from me, especially.
And in its place was this knowledge that I would soon be going back — foreknowledge, really, because I didn't make the decision until later that day, when Anthea and I had finished killing the chickens and were wrapping them in paper and plastic bags for delivery and pickup.
It was at the end of summer, the beginning of an early autumn, and though barely a year ago, it feels like a decade, so much was altered in that year. The decade here: now, that seems like a few days and nights is all, because nothing except the same thing has happened here day after day, season after season, year after year.No new or old returning lovers, no marriages or divorces, no births or deaths, at least among the humans. Just the farm and the world that nourishes and sustains it. Timeless, it has seemed.
The farm is a commercial operation, inasmuch as I sell most of what I grow, but in truth it's more like an old-fashioned family farm, and to run it I've had to give over my personal clock. I've had to abandon all my urban ways of measuring time and replace them with the farm's clock, which is marked off by the needs and demands of livestock and the crops, by the requirements of soil and the surge and flux of weather. It's no wonder that farmers in the old days were obsessed with the motions of the planets and the waxing and waning of the moon, as if their farms were the bodies of women. I sometimes think it's because I am a woman — or maybe it's merely because I lived all those years in Liberia, adapted to African time — that I was able to adapt so easily to the pace and patterns and rhythmic repetitions of nature's clock and calendar.
It was as usual, then, on that August morning, with the darkness just beginning to pull back from the broad river valley to the forests and the mountains looming behind the house, that I woke at five-thirty and came downstairs wearing my flannel nightgown and slippers against the pre-dawn chill, with the dogs clattering behind me, checked the temperature by the moon-faced thermometer outside the kitchen window (still no frost,which was good, because we'd neglected to cover the tomatoes), and put the dogs out. I made coffee for Anthea, who comes in at six and says she can't do a thing until after her second cup, and the other girls, who come in at seven. I lingered for a few moments in the kitchen while the coffee brewed, enjoying the dark smell of it. I never drink coffee, having been raised on tea, a habit I took from my father as soon as he'd let me, but I do love the smell of it when it's brewing and buy organic Colombian beans from a mail-order catalogue and grind them freshly for each pot, just for the aroma.
For a few moments, as I always do, I stood by the window and watched the dogs.They are Border collies, father and daughter, Baylor and Winnie, and when they have done their business, the first thing they do every morning is patrol the property, reclaiming their territory and making sure that during the night nothing untoward has happened. Usually I watch them work and think of them as working for me. But this morning they looked weirdly different to me, as if during the night one of us, they or I, had changed allegiances. They looked like ghost dogs,moving swiftly across the side yard in the gray pre-dawn light, disappearing into shadows cast by the house and oak trees, darting low to the ground into the garage, then reappearing and moving on.Today they worked for no one but themselves; that's how I saw them.Their gait was halfway between a trot and a run — fast, effortless, smooth, and silent, their ears cocked forward, plumed tails straight back — and they seemed more like small wolves than carefully trained and utterly domesticated herding animals.
For a moment they scared me. I saw the primeval wildness in them, their radical independence and selfishness, the ferocity of their strictly canine needs. Perhaps it was the thin, silvery half-light and that I viewed them mostly in silhouette as they zigged and zagged across the yard, and when they'd checked the garage, an open shed, actually, where I park the pickup truck and my Honda, they moved on to the barn and from there to the henhouse, where the rooster crowed, and then loped all the way to the pond in the front field, where they woke the ducks and geese, never stopping, running in tandem, a pair of single-minded predators sifting their territory at peak efficiency.
From the Hardcover edition.
“The way I feel about every book is this: you don’t finish it, you abandon it. All of my books have in some sense failed, otherwise I wouldn’t write another one. If I wrote the perfect book, I wouldn’t have to write again, and I wouldn’t want to. That’s not true for everyone, but it’s true for me. I could walk away then. But so far I haven’t managed to do it.” –Russell Banks
Russell Banks’ books include Searching for Survivors, Family Life, Hamilton Stark, The New World, Book of Jamaica, Trailerpark, The Relation of My Imprisonment, Continental Drift, Success Stories, Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, and The Angel On The Roof, a collection of short stories. He has also contributed poems, stories and essays to Vanity Fair, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Harper’s, and many other publications.
Mr. Banks was raised in New Hampshire and eastern Massachusetts and is the eldest of four children. He grew up in a working-class environment – a major influence on his writing – and was the first member of his family to go to college. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he worked as a plumber, shoe salesman and window cleaner. More recently he has taught in the writing programs at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Alabama, New England College, New York University and Princeton University.
Acclaimed as “the most important living white American male on the official literary map” by The Village Voice, Banks has been praised for his empathy, his compassion for his characters, and his attempts to grapple with the moral ambiguities of contemporary life. He has also been repeatedly recognized for his ability to evoke the texture of ordinary American lives and the humanity he brings to what are often dark and brutal tales of poverty, violence, hard living and domestic abuse.
Mr. Banks has received several prizes and awards for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, Ingram Merrill Award, The St. Lawrence Award for Short Fiction, O. Henry and Best American Short Story Award, The John Dos Passos Prize, and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Continental Drift and Cloudsplitter were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and 1998 respectively. Affliction was short listed for both the PEN/Faulkner Fiction Prize and the Irish International Prize.
His works have been widely translated and published in Europe and Asia. Two of his novels have been adapted for feature-length films, The Sweet Hereafter (directed by Atom Egoyan, winner of the Grand Prix and International Critics Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival) and Affliction (directed by Paul Schrader, starring Nick Nolte, Willem Dafoe, Sissy Spacek, and James Coburn). He is the screenwriter of a film adaptation of Continental Drift.
Russell Banks lives in upstate New York. He is married to the poet Chase Twichell, and is the father of four grown daughters.
From the Hardcover edition.
Russell Banks’ books include Searching for Survivors, Family Life, Hamilton Stark, The New World, Book of Jamaica, Trailerpark, The Relation of My Imprisonment, Continental Drift, Success Stories, Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, and The Angel On The Roof, a collection of short stories. He has also contributed poems, stories and essays to Vanity Fair, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Harper’s, and many other publications.
Mr. Banks was raised in New Hampshire and eastern Massachusetts and is the eldest of four children. He grew up in a working-class environment – a major influence on his writing – and was the first member of his family to go to college. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he worked as a plumber, shoe salesman and window cleaner. More recently he has taught in the writing programs at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Alabama, New England College, New York University and Princeton University.
Acclaimed as “the most important living white American male on the official literary map” by The Village Voice, Banks has been praised for his empathy, his compassion for his characters, and his attempts to grapple with the moral ambiguities of contemporary life. He has also been repeatedly recognized for his ability to evoke the texture of ordinary American lives and the humanity he brings to what are often dark and brutal tales of poverty, violence, hard living and domestic abuse.
Mr. Banks has received several prizes and awards for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, Ingram Merrill Award, The St. Lawrence Award for Short Fiction, O. Henry and Best American Short Story Award, The John Dos Passos Prize, and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Continental Drift and Cloudsplitter were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and 1998 respectively. Affliction was short listed for both the PEN/Faulkner Fiction Prize and the Irish International Prize.
His works have been widely translated and published in Europe and Asia. Two of his novels have been adapted for feature-length films, The Sweet Hereafter (directed by Atom Egoyan, winner of the Grand Prix and International Critics Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival) and Affliction (directed by Paul Schrader, starring Nick Nolte, Willem Dafoe, Sissy Spacek, and James Coburn). He is the screenwriter of a film adaptation of Continental Drift.
Russell Banks lives in upstate New York. He is married to the poet Chase Twichell, and is the father of four grown daughters.
From the Hardcover edition.
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- ÉditeurChivers Sound Library
- Date d'édition2004
- ISBN 10 0792733371
- ISBN 13 9780792733379
- ReliureCD
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The Darling
Edité par
Sound Library, U.S.A.
(2004)
ISBN 10 : 0792733371
ISBN 13 : 9780792733379
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Description du livre Audio CDs. Etat : Good. No Jacket. Ex-library copy in a library clamshell case. 12 audio CDs Unabridged. fiction. Ex-Library. N° de réf. du vendeur 68314
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