{"id":279176,"date":"2010-07-28T16:52:50","date_gmt":"2010-07-28T16:52:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2010\/07\/28\/zone-an-excerpt-of-a-sentence\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:31:55","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:31:55","slug":"zone-an-excerpt-of-a-sentence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2010\/07\/28\/zone-an-excerpt-of-a-sentence\/","title":{"rendered":""Zone": An Excerpt of a Sentence"},"content":{"rendered":"

In some ways, the books we publish are like having children—the newest one always smells the best, is the most EXCITING<\/span> THING<\/span> EVER<\/span>, and is that much more aesthetically refined, er, more adorable, or whatever. But seriously, when I read our titles for the final proof, I frequently fall in love all over again, getting all exciting about sections I want to talk about with my friends, which, well, isn’t quite possible in the traditional sense, seeing that I’m reading books that haven’t been published yet . . . Which is why this whole blogging thing is fricking awesome.<\/em><\/p>\n

Zone<\/a> is due out in December, but has already been written about by the<\/em> Chicago Tribune<\/em><\/a> (an article that also featured the dumbest quote I’ve ever given a reporter) and in<\/em> The Quarterly Conversation.<\/a> Yes, this book is kinda sorta a 517-page sentence, but that’s not really the point. This book is fucking good. It’s aesthetically daring, ambition, important, artistic, impressive, erudite, and a host of other words that could be capitalized.<\/em><\/p>\n

Anyway, here’s a spectacular bit I came across last night. Not that you need a lot of set-up, but Francis Servain Mirkovic, who fought for the Croatians in the Yugoslav war, is on a train headed to Rome to sell a briefcase of info he’s gathered over his years as part of the French Intelligence Service. Enjoy!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Chapter VIII<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

the landscape of the Po plain is very dark also, little fireflies of farms and factories are disturbing ghosts, in Venice at the Santa Lucia station I had wondered for a while about going back to Paris, another night train was going south at around the same time, headed for Sicily, terminus Syracuse, a journey of almost twenty-four hours, I should have taken it, if there had been someone on the platform to guide me, a demiurge, or an oracle I would have taken the train to Syracuse to settle on the rocky island on the slopes of Etna home of Hephaestus the lame, who often sprinkles lava onto the peasants and Mafiosi taking cover in the countryside, maybe it\u2019s because of that volcano that Malcolm Lowry settled in Taormina in 1954, in that village that looks so pretty it seems fake, he had written Under the Volcano<\/em> ten years earlier, maybe it was his wife Margerie who chose the destination, a change of air, Lowry the drunkard had definite need for a change of air, he joined the contingent of Anglo-Saxons who peopled the Zone, Joyce, Durrell, Hemingway, Pound the fascist and Burroughs the visionary, Malcolm didn\u2019t let go of his bottle as he watched the swordfish gleam in the Bay of Naxos, he got drunk morning to night with a serious steadfastness, their little flower-covered house is too beautiful for him, he says, it\u2019s all too beautiful, too brilliant, too luminous, he can\u2019t manage to write, not even a letter, his eyes dazzled by the too-blue Mediterranean, Margerie is happy, she goes for walks all day long, she visits the archeological sites, the steep inlets, she returns home to find Malcolm drunk, drunk and desperate, holding a copy of Ulysses<\/em> or Finnegans Wake<\/em> that he can\u2019t manage to read, even drink doesn\u2019t console him, the pages of his notebooks remain desperately blank, life remains empty, Margerie, fed up, decides to lock up all the alcohol in the house, so Lowry goes out to stroll through the little streets, he climbs up to the ruins of the Greek amphitheater and watches the spectacle of the stars on the sea beyond the stage wall, he feels a powerful hatred, he wants to drink, he wants to drink, everything is closed, he almost knocks on the first house he sees to beg for a glass of grappa, one drink, to drink one drink, anything, he goes back home, he\u2019ll try to break open the hutch where his wife has locked up the liquor, he works away at the little wooden door, nothing to be done, he\u2019s too drunk already, he can\u2019t manage it, it\u2019s her fault, it\u2019s his wife\u2019s fault, Margerie\u2019s who\u2019s sleeping after being stupefied by sleeping pills, she\u2019ll give him the key, she\u2019ll pay, Margerie who\u2019s pumping all the talent out of him, who\u2019s preventing him from writing, Lowry goes into the bedroom, his wife is stretched out on her back, her eyes closed, Malcolm goes over to her to touch her, he\u2019s standing up, he\u2019s thirsty, with an infinite thirst, an infinite rage, he stammers out insults, she doesn\u2019t wake up, he feels as if he\u2019s shouting though, the bitch is sleeping and he\u2019s dying of thirst, she\u2019ll see, he puts his hands around her neck, his thumbs against her Adam\u2019s apple and he squeezes, Margerie instantly opens her eyes, she fights Lowry, presses harder and harder, he squeezes, he squeezes the carotids and the trachea, he\u2019ll kill her, the more he squeezes the weaker he feels, he looks at Margerie\u2019s eyes rolling in terror, her arms thumping him weakly, he is strangling Margerie and he\u2019s the one who is out of breath, the harder he presses the more he observes his wife\u2019s face becoming purplish-blue the more he feels sick, he doesn\u2019t loosen his grip, despite her pummeling him with her fists and knees, he\u2019s the one he\u2019s in the process of killing, it\u2019s no longer Margerie\u2019s neck he has in his hands but his own, his own face as in a mirror, he is asphyxiated, he is asphyxiating himself, his fingers let go, his fingers let go little by little and he collapses on the floor, unconscious, while Margerie tries to cry and get her breath, in the saffron-yellow dawn that\u2019s showing through the Persian blinds: in Sicily deadly island Lowry and his wife lived eight months of hell under the shadow of their second volcano, every other day the villagers were obliged to carry Malcolm home on their back, when the fishermen discovered him, at dawn, collapsed in a street, conquered by the steep slope and by sleep, in the end maybe I did well not to take the train to Syracuse, who would I have strangled in the Sicilian night, grappling with the bottle and my savagery\u2014my father, whenever, as a child, I broke something or mistreated Leda my sister, always said to me you\u2019re a savage, and my mother intervened then to chide him, no your son isn\u2019t a savage, he\u2019s your son, and now a little closer to the end of a world I wonder if the great thin man my pater wasn\u2019t right, as the train is approaching Reggio capital of Emilia with the gentle name, I am a savage, brutal and coarse, who despite all the civilized threads that all the books I\u2019ve read have clothed me in remains a wild primitive capable of slitting an innocent person\u2019s throat of strangling a female and eating with my hands,<\/p>\n

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In some ways, the books we publish are like having children—the newest one always smells the best, is the most EXCITING THING EVER, and is that much more aesthetically refined, er, more adorable, or whatever. But seriously, when I read our titles for the final proof, I frequently fall in love all over again, getting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[15316,3426,16976,16966],"class_list":["post-279176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-charlotte-mandell","tag-french-literature","tag-mathias-enard","tag-zone"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279176"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":347786,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279176\/revisions\/347786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}