The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party - Couverture rigide

Anderson, M.T.

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0763624020 ISBN 13 : 9780763624026

Editeur : Candlewick, 2006

Synopsis

Book by Anderson MT

A propos du livre

Extrait :

CHAPTER ONE
THE TRANSIT OF VENUS

I was raised in a gaunt house with a garden; my earliest recollections are of floating lights in the apple-trees.

I recall, in the orchard behind the house, orbs of flames rising through the black boughs and branches; they climbed, spirit-ous, and flickered out; my mother squeezed my hand with delight. We stood near the door to the ice-chamber.

By the well, servants lit bubbles of gas on fire, clad in frock-coats of asbestos.

Around the orchard and gardens stood a wall of some height, designed to repel the glance of idle curiosity and to keep us all from slipping away and running for freedom; though that, of course, I did not yet understand.

How doth all that seeks to rise burn itself to nothing.

The men who raised me were lords of matter, and in the dim chambers I watched as they traced the spinning of bodies celestial in vast, iron courses, and bid sparks to dance upon their hands; they read the bodies of fish as if each dying trout or shad was a fresh Biblical Testament, the wet and twitching volume of a new-born Pentateuch. They burned holes in the air, wrote poems of love, sucked the venom from sores, painted landscapes of gloom, and made metal sing; they dissected fire like newts.

I did not find it strange that I was raised with no one father, nor did I marvel at the singularity of any other article in my upbringing. It is ever the lot of children to accept their circumstances as universal, and their articularities as general.

So I did not ask why I was raised in a house by many men, none of whom claimed blood relation to me. I thought not to inquire why my mother stayed in this house, or why we alone were given names - mine, Octavian; hers, Cassiopeia - when all the others in the house were designated by number.

The owner of the house, Mr. Gitney, or as he styled himself, 03-01, had a large head and little hair and a dollop of a nose. He rarely dressed if he did not have to go out, but shuffled most of the time through his mansion in a banyan-robe and undress cap, shaking out his hands as if he'd washed them newly. He did not see to my instruction directly, but required that the others spend some hours a day teaching me my Latin and Greek, my mathematics, scraps of botany, and the science of music, which grew to be my first love.

The other men came and went. They did not live in the house, but came of an afternoon, or stayed there often for some weeks to perform their virtuosic experiments, and then leave. Most were philosophers, and inquired into the workings of time and memory, natural history, the properties of light, heat, and petrifaction. There were musicians among them as well, and painters and poets.

My mother, being of great beauty, was often painted. Once, she and I were clad as Venus, goddess of love, and her son Cupid, and we reclined in a bower. At other times, they made portraits of her dressed in the finest silks of the age, smiling behind a fan, or leaning on a pillar; and on another occasion, when she was sixteen, they drew her nude, for an engraving, with lines and letters that identified places upon her body.

The house was large and commodious, though often drafty. In its many rooms, the men read their odes, or played the violin, or performed their philosophical exercises. They combined chemical compounds and stirred them. They cut apart birds to trace the structure of the avian skeleton, and, masked in leather hoods, they dissected a skunk. They kept cages full of fireflies. They coaxed reptiles with mice. From the uppermost story of the house, they surveyed the city and the bay through spy-glasses, and noted the ships that arrived from far corners of the Empire, the direction of winds and the migration of clouds across the waters and, on its tawny isle, spotted with shadow, the Castle.

Amidst their many experimental chambers, there was one door that I was not allowed to pass. One of the painters sketched a little skull-and-crossbones on paper, endowed not with a skull, but with my face, my mouth open in a gasp; and this warning they hung upon that interdicted door as a reminder. They meant it doubtless as a jest, but to me, the door was terrible, as ghastly in its secrets as legendary Bluebeard's door, behind which his dead, white wives sat at table, streaked with blood from their slit throats.

We did not venture much out of the house and its grounds into the city that surrounded us. In the garden, we could hear its bustle, the horseshoes on stone cobbles and dirt, the conversation of sailors, the crying of onions and oysters in passageways. The men of that house feared that too much interaction with the world would corrupt me, and so I was, in the main, hidden away for my earliest years, as the infant Jove, snatched out of the gullet of Time, was reared by his horned nurse on Mount Ida in profoundest secrecy.

When we did go abroad, Mr. 03-01 warned me that I should not lean out at the window of the carriage, and should not show my face. He told me that, should I ever run away into the city, I would not return, but would be snatched up by evil men who would take me forever away from my mother. This was, I know now, but a half-lie.

_______

Revue de presse :

Anderson’s imaginative and highly intelligent exploration of the horrors of human experimentation and the ambiguous history of America’s origins will leave readers impatient for the promised sequel.
—New York Times Book Review

The story’s scope is immense, in both its technical challenges and underlying intellectual and moral questions. . . . Readers will marvel at Anderson’s ability to maintain this high-wire act of elegant, archaic language and shifting voices.
—Booklist (starred review)

Fascinating and eye-opening... this powerful novel will resonate with contemporary readers.
—School Library Journal (starred review)

Octavian's narration...quickly draws readers into its almost musical flow, and the relentless action and plot turns are powerful motivators.
—Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (starred review)

A historical novel of prodigious scope, power and insight...This is the Revolutionary War seen at its intersection with slavery through a disturbingly original lens.
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Anderson (Whales on Stilts) once again shows the breadth of his talents with this stunningly well-researched novel.
—Publishers Weekly

A brilliantly complex interrogation of our basic American assumptions. Anderson has created an alternative narrative of our national mythology, one that fascinates, appalls, condemns — and enthralls.
—Horn Book, The

Historically grounded, emotionally and philosophically complex, Octavian Nothing will compel readers to think differently about history and its echoes in the contemporary world.
—BookPage

It’s probably the best young-adult novel in American history, top 10 for sure.
—TIME Magazine

A brilliant, passionate book that is flat-out unforgettable, a virtuoso exercise in voice that in no way distances the reader from the narrator and an experience of deeply felt empathy that his slowly emerging understanding of the nature of his existence engenders.
—Michael Cart, “Carte Blanche," Booklist

Imaginative and important.
—Wall Street Journal

Gripping, thought-provoking and occasionally horrifying ...this is first-class literature, a deserved winner of this year's National Book Award for young readers.
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Presents a unique vision of this nation's infancy, one to which young-adult readers with sophisticated tastes are likely to respond with enthusiasm.
—San Francisco Chronicle

The most daring and demanding of the fall books... Even more extraordinary is Anderson's powerful, nuanced revelation of the deep hypocrisies, the pernicious relationship between "rational" inquiry and cruelty; political expediency and the god of "reason"; ideas of democracy and true "Observation" of evidence.
—Toronto Star

A brilliant novel of war and race and the madness of slavery, Octavian has stayed with me for years.
—John Green

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Candlewick
• Date d'édition: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0763624020
• ISBN 13: 9780763624026
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 368