Carry Me - Couverture rigide

Behrens, Peter

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1101870494 ISBN 13 : 9781101870495

Editeur : Pantheon Books, 1900

Synopsis

A devastating novel of war, love, and escape from the award-winning author of The Law of Dreams and The O’Briens
 
During childhood summers on the sunstruck Isle of Wight in the years before the First World War, Billy is entranced by Karin, the elusive daughter of a German-Jewish industrialist. Reunited on a Frankfurt estate in that war’s hungry aftermath, Karin and Billy become fascinated with tribal rituals found in the Wild West stories of Karl May, whose Winnetou tales are among the most popular books published in Germany. Coming of age in Frankfurt and Berlin, Karin and Billy share a passion for speed, jazz, and nightclubs. They also share a fantasy of escape—from darkening Germany, from history—to El Llano Estacado, the high plains of Texas and New Mexico, vividly reimagined in May’s fiction.
 
Intriguing characters braid this intricate and harrowing story together, from golden Edwardian summers to London under Zeppelin attack, Ireland on the brink of its War of Independence, and Germany collapsing into the Hitler era. As a society loses its civic and moral bearings, a childhood friendship deepens into a love affair with extraordinarily high stakes. Brilliantly conceived and elegantly written, Carry Me is an epic for grown-ups, an unusual love story, and a lucid meditation on Europe’s violent twentieth century.

A propos du livre

Extrait

This will become the story of a young woman, Karin Weinbrenner. Her story is not mine, but sometimes her story feels like the armature my life has wound itself around. I am telling it, so this story is also about me.
 
I was born 27 May 1909 on the Isle of Wight, in a house, Sanssouci, named after Frederick the Great’s summer palace at Potsdam. I was baptized Hermann Lange but for most of my life have been called Billy.
 
Sanssouci still sits on a cliff overlooking the English Channel, which on a fair day spreads out below like blue butter. The house is now a small, expensive “boutique” hotel and no longer called Sanssouci. The management offers weekend-getaway packages for anxious Londoners who desire sea views, the scent of roses, and shadowy island lanes drip­ping with fuchsia.
 
Before the First World War the house belonged to Karin’s father, Baron Hermann von Weinbrenner. He was a chemist and colorist and very rich: half the cotton shirts in the world were dyed with aniline colors he’d created. The kaiser had first given Weinbrenner his von, then raised him to the lowest rank of nobility after he married Karin’s mother, daughter of an Irish peer.
 
Baron Hermann von Weinbrenner was the second Jewish member of the Royal Yacht Squadron at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight—Lord Rothschild was the first. Weinbrenner kept a pair of very fast gaff-rigged schooners, Hermione and Hermione II, and my father, Heinrich “Buck” Lange, was his racing skipper and trusted friend. Which is why my parents were living at Sanssouci and why I was born there.
 
Birthplaces, nationality—such details have consequences in this story.
 
My grandfather—also Heinrich Lange, but known in the family as Captain Jack—was a professional sea captain out of Hamburg. The Lange family had been traders and merchants (mostly in the Baltic) for a couple of hundred years before Captain Jack persuaded a syndi­cate of uncles and cousins to speculate in the California grain trade. Which meant purchasing San Joaquin Valley wheat at Port Costa, on San Francisco Bay, and transporting the cargo to Europe aboard their own three-masted bark, Lilith, to sell on the Hamburg exchange.
 
Risky business.
 
After some very rough weather on her westward passage round Cape Horn, Lilith was one hundred and seventy-one days out of Hamburg and a thousand miles off Acapulco when my grandmother Constance, who was Irish, went into labor. A couple of hours later my father was born in the master’s cabin, the delivery assisted by Captain Jack and by Joseph the Negro cook, who cried out, “Oh, the fine fellow! He is a bucko seaman!”
 
Christened Heinrich after his father and grandfather my father was known ever after as Buck.
 
Ten days later—six months out from Hamburg––Lilith dropped anchor at Yerba Buena Cove, and Heinrich/Buck was rowed ashore and registered as a loyal subject of the German emperor by Dr. Godeffroy, the consul at San Francisco.
 
The trouble starts there. Our story would have been quite different if, instead of being born on a German ship on the high seas, Buck had waited a few weeks to be born in a comfortable San Francisco hotel room.
 
Buck Lange an American citizen? How much simpler everything might have been.
But you can’t operate on history that way. An American Buck might have joined the American Expeditionary Force in 1917. I can see him answering the call to colors. He’d have been shipped to France and killed in one of the ugly, costly battles the AEF fought in 1918—
 
I don’t want to lose you over tedious genealogy and history that must be very dim to you. This is a story of real people who lived and died, about their times and what went wrong. I shall try to be hon­est even when it’s apparent I am making things up, delivering scenes I couldn’t have witnessed.
 
I know the truth in my bones. And that’s what I shall give you.
 
I’ll include documents—newspaper clippings, telegrams, even a film poster—from the Lange family archive, which McGill University has generously agreed to house. Calling it an archive is vainglorious. A few boxes on a library shelf are all it amounts to.
 
There are entries from Karin’s journal, her Kinds of Light book. When I read them I hear her voice. Even when her entries are merely extracts from her reading, I still feel her mind at work in the process of selection.
 
You’ll find letters here, from Karin, from others. I want you to hear the voices.
 
Otherwise they are all dead, aren’t they? Otherwise, no one remembers.

Revue de presse

"Carry Me is a moving meditation on identity and belonging, and a love story to get happily lost in." —Montreal Gazette

"Behrens captures his narrator’s naïveté and the casual anti-Semitism of the times with great skill and intelligence . . . as true an observation about human nature as there is." —Dennis Bock, The New York Times Book Review

"Peter Behrens is a powerful stylist . . . if exile is Behrens’s obsession, he’s still making it work in his fiction." —The Globe and Mail

Carry Me is "staggeringly epic." —Toronto Star

“[CARRY ME] is both poetry and cartography. . . . Behrens has mined truths so skillfully that in reading they can slip by unnoticed; they’re never glaring or contrived. They leave the reader with a feeling Billy describes as he’s driving across Germany. . . . Great writing keeps readers on this threshold, in liminal space, wanting to know and understand more than literature or life will allow, anxious for the next big lesson. CARRY ME is full of this kind of searching, characters looking for a way to map their lives against war and love and change.”
 —Heidi Sistare, Portland Press Herald
 
"Behrens is a beautiful, lyric writer. His understanding of the age and command of it, moment to moment, is impressive . . . everything is beautiful in the details, in the smallness of personal moments even as we know that no matter how calm, how peaceful the moment, it will not last."
—Jason Sheehan, NPR
 
“Carry Me's perspective on war's tragedies is beautifully composed, and heartbreakingly credible.”
—Shelf Awareness
 
“Behrens is so fine at both sweeping and granular evocations of history, so good at vividly and economically painting his minor players...[his] prose thrills to the indelible and irrevocable.”
—Washington Post
 
“Make[s] the past feel stunningly close at hand.”
—Vogue.com
 
“Stunning imagery and fully realized characters...Timely in its depiction of North America as the mythical land of hope for so many, and timeless in its exploration of the effects of bigotry and the power of love...a brilliant and entertaining read.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
 
“The story's essence is the relationship between kindred spirits Karin and Billy, but its fascination lies in the backdrop of Europe's upheaval. Set in England and Germany and moving between World War I and the rise of the Nazis, the book tracks the way allegiances shift during wartime and the devastating impact of being ‘othered,’ and not just its impact on Jews...The tension and the expertly drawn portrait of Europe at war make this novel a winner.”
—Now Magazine
 
“Vividly imagined . . . This ambitious novel provides a panoramic view of a continent and a microscopic view of two individuals hovering precariously between the two World Wars . . . Moving seamlessly back and forth between times and countries, Behrens paints a stunningly intimate portrait in wide, universal strokes.” 
—Booklist

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Pantheon Books
• Date d'édition: 1900
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1101870494
• ISBN 13: 9781101870495
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 443
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible