Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress Of Solitude

VIP免费

2024-12-19 0 0 914.5KB 426 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

The Fortress of Solitude

Doubleday

new york

london

toronto

sydney

auckland

the Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Jonathan%20Lethem%20-%20The%20Fortress%20Of%20Solitude.html (1 of 426)3-2-2007 15:20:50

The Fortress of Solitude

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

part one

Underberg

chapter 1

chapter 2

chapter 3

chapter 4

chapter 5

chapter 6

chapter 7

chapter 8

chapter 9

chapter 10

chapter 11

chapter 12

chapter 13

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Jonathan%20Lethem%20-%20The%20Fortress%20Of%20Solitude.html (2 of 426)3-2-2007 15:20:50

The Fortress of Solitude

chapter 14

chapter 15

chapter 16

chapter 17

chapter 18

part two

Liner Note

part three

Prisonaires

chapter 1

chapter 2

chapter 3

chapter 4

chapter 5

chapter 6

chapter 7

chapter 8

chapter 9

chapter 10

chapter 11

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Jonathan%20Lethem%20-%20The%20Fortress%20Of%20Solitude.html (3 of 426)3-2-2007 15:20:50

The Fortress of Solitude

chapter 12

chapter 13

chapter 14

chapter 15

chapter 16

Acknowledgments

Also by Jonathan Lethem

For Mara Faye

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Jonathan%20Lethem%20-%20The%20Fortress%20Of%20Solitude.html (4 of 426)3-2-2007 15:20:50

The Fortress of Solitude

part one Underberg

chapter 1

Like a match struck in a darkened room:

Two white girls in flannel nightgowns and red vinyl roller skates with white laces, tracing tentative

circles on a cracked blue slate sidewalk at seven o’clock on an evening in July.

The girls murmured rhymes, were murmured rhymes, their gauzy, sky-pink hair streaming like it had

never once been cut. The girls’ parents had permitted them back onto the street after dinner, only first

changing into the gowns and brushing their teeth for bed, to bask in the orange-pink summer dusk, the

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Jonathan%20Lethem%20-%20The%20Fortress%20Of%20Solitude.html (5 of 426)3-2-2007 15:20:50

The Fortress of Solitude

air and light which hung over the street, over all of Gowanus like the palm of a hand or the inner surface

of a seashell. The Puerto Rican men seated on milk crates in front of the bodega on the corner grunted at

the apparition, not sure of what they were seeing. They widened their lips to show one another their

teeth, a display to mark patience, wordless enduring. The street strewn with bottle caps half-pushed into

the softened tar, Yoo-Hoo, Rheingold, Manhattan Special.

The girls, Thea and Ana Solver, shone like a new-struck flame.

An old white woman had arrived on the block before the Solvers, to reclaim one of the abused buildings,

one which had been a rooming house, replacing fifteen men with only herself and her crated belongings.

She was actually the first. But Isabel Vendle only lurked like a rumor, like an apostrophe inside her

brownstone, where at this moment she crept with a cane between the basement apartment and her

bedroom in the old parlor on the first floor, to that room where she read and slept under the crumbled,

unrestored plaster ceiling. Isabel Vendle was a knuckle, her body curled around the gristle of old

injuries. Isabel Vendle remembered a day in a packet boat on Lake George, she scratched letters with a

pen dipped in ink, she pushed stamps against a sponge in a dish. Her desktop was cork. Isabel Vendle

had money but her basement rooms stank of rinds, damp newspaper.

The girls on wheels were the new thing, spotlit to start the show: white people were returning to Dean

Street. A few.

Under the ailanthus tree in the backyard Dylan Ebdus at five accidentally killed a kitten. The Ebduses’

tenants in the basement apartment had a litter of them, five, six, seven. They squirmed on the ground

there, in that upright cage of brick walls, among the rubble and fresh-planted vines and the musky

ailanthus sheddings, where Dylan played and explored alone while his mother turned over ground with a

small trident or sat smoking while the couple downstairs sang together, one strumming a peace-sign-

stickered, untuned guitar. Dylan danced with the tiny, razor-sharp, bug-eyed cats, chased them into the

slug-infested brick pile, and on the second day, backpedaling from one of the cats, crushed another with

his sneakered foot.

Those basement tenants took the kitten away broken but alive while Dylan, crying, was hustled off by

his parents. But Dylan understood that the kitten was mercifully finished somehow, smothered or

drowned. Somehow. He asked, but the subject was smothered too. The adults tipped their hand only in

that instant of discovery, letting Dylan glimpse their queasy anger, then muted it away. Dylan was too

young to understand what he’d done, except he wasn’t; they hoped he’d forget, except he didn’t. He’d

later pretend to forget, protecting the adults from what he was sure they couldn’t handle: his

remembering entirely.

Possibly the dead kitten was the insoluble lozenge of guilt he’d swallowed.

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Jonathan%20Lethem%20-%20The%20Fortress%20Of%20Solitude.html (6 of 426)3-2-2007 15:20:50

The Fortress of Solitude

Or possibly it was this: his mother told him someone wanted to play with him, on the sidewalk across

the street. Out front. It would be his first time to go out on the block, to play out front instead of in the

brick-moldy backyard.

“Who?”

“A little girl,” said his mother. “Go see, Dylan.”

Maybe it was the white girls, Ana and Thea in their nightgowns and skates. He’d seen them from the

window, now they were calling to him.

Instead it was a black girl, Marilla, who waited on the sidewalk. Dylan at six recognized a setup when he

saw one, felt his mother’s city craftiness, her native’s knowledge. Rachel Ebdus was working the block,

matchmaking for him.

Marilla was older. Marilla had a hoop and some chalk. The walk in front of Marilla’s gate—her share of

the irregular slate path was her zone—marked. This was Dylan’s first knowledge of the system that

organized the space of the block. He would never step into Marilla’s house, though he didn’t know that

now. The slate was her parlor. He had his own, though he hadn’t marked it yet.

“You moved here?” said Marilla when she was sure Dylan’s mother had gone inside.

Dylan nodded.

“You live in that whole house?”

“Tenants downstairs.”

“You got an apartment?”

Dylan nodded again, confused.

“You got a brother or sister?”

“No.”

“What your father does?”

“He’s an artist,” said Dylan. “He’s making a film.” He offered it with maximum gravity. It didn’t make

much of an impression on Marilla.

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Jonathan%20Lethem%20-%20The%20Fortress%20Of%20Solitude.html (7 of 426)3-2-2007 15:20:50

The Fortress of Solitude

“You got a spaldeen?” she said. “That’s a ball, if you don’t understand.”

“No.”

“You got any money on you?”

“No.”

“I want to buy some candy. I could buy you a spaldeen. Could you ask your mother for some money?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know skully?”

Dylan shook his head. Was skully a person or another kind of ball or candy? He couldn’t know. He felt

that Marilla might begin to pity him.

“We could make skully caps. You could make them with gum or wax. You got a candle in your house?”

“I don’t know.”

“We could buy one but you got no money.”

Dylan shrugged defensively.

“Your mother told me to cross the street with you. You can’t do it yourself.” Her tone was philosophical.

“I’m six.”

“You’re a baby. What kind of a name is Dylan?”

“Like Bob Dylan.”

“Who?”

“A singer. My parents like him.”

“You like the Jackson Five? You know how to dance?” Marilla laced herself with her hoop, buckled her

knees and elbows at once, balled her fists, gritted her teeth, angled her ass. The hoop swung. She grinned

and jutted her chin at Dylan in time with her hips, as though she could have swirled another hoop around

her neck.

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Jonathan%20Lethem%20-%20The%20Fortress%20Of%20Solitude.html (8 of 426)3-2-2007 15:20:50

The Fortress of Solitude

When it was Dylan’s turn the hoop clattered to the slate. He was still fat, podlike, Tweedledee. There

was no edge on his shape for the hoop to lodge. He could barely span it with his arms. He couldn’t duck

his knees, instead scuffed sideways, stepping. He couldn’t dance.

That was how they played, Dylan dropping the plastic hoop to the ground a thousand times. Marilla sang

encouragement, Oh, baby give me one more chance, I want you back. She punched the air. And Dylan

wondered guiltily why the white girls on skates hadn’t called to him instead. Knowledge of this heretical

wish was his second wound. It wasn’t like the dead kitten: this time no one would judge whether Dylan

had understood in the first place, whether he had forgotten after. Only himself. It was between Dylan

and himself to consider forever whether to grasp that he’d felt a yearning preference already then, that

before the years of seasons, the years of hours to come on the street, before Robert Woolfolk or Mingus

Rude, before “Play That Funky Music, White Boy,” before Intermediate School 293 or anything else,

he’d wished, against his mother’s vision, for the Solver girls to sweep him away into an ecstasy of

blondness and matching outfits, tightened laces, their wheels barely touching the slate, or only marking

it with arrows pointing elsewhere, jet trails of escape.

Marilla whirled in place, singing When I had you to myself I didn’t want you around, those pretty faces

always seemed to stand out in a crowd —

Isabel Vendle found the name in a tattered, leather-bound volume at the Brooklyn Historical Society:

Boerum. As in the Boer War. A Dutch family, farmers, landowners. The Boerums kept their wealth in

Bedford-Stuyvesant, had actually come nowhere near Gowanus, none except a wayward, probably

drunken son, named Simon Boerum, who built a house on Schermerhorn Street and died in it. He’d been

exiled here, perhaps, a prodigal, a black sheep sleeping off a long bender. Anyway, he’d lend his name—

he wasn’t about to say no!—to the band of streets laced between Park Slope and Cobble Hill, because

Gowanus wouldn’t do. Gowanus was a canal and a housing project. Isabel Vendle needed to distinguish

her encampment from the Gowanus Houses, from Wyckoff Gardens, that other housing project which

hemmed in her new paradise, distinguish it from the canal, from Red Hook, Flatbush, from downtown

Brooklyn, where the Brooklyn House of Detention loomed, the monolith on Atlantic Avenue, ringed

with barbed wire. She was explicating a link to the Heights, the Slope. So, Boerum Hill, though there

wasn’t any hill. Isabel Vendle wrote it and so it was made and so they would come to live in the new

place which was inked into reality by her hand, her crabbed hand which scuttled from past to future,

Simon Boerum and Gowanus unruly parents giving birth to Boerum Hill, a respectable child.

The houses here were sick. The Dutch-style row houses had been chopped into pieces and misused as

rooming houses for men with hot plates and ashtrays and racing forms, or floor-through apartments,

where sprawling families of cousins were crammed into each level, their yards and stoops teeming with

uncountable children. The houses had been slathered with linoleum and pressed tin, the linoleum and tin

had later been painted, the paint painted again. It was like a coating on the tongue and teeth and roof of a

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Jonathan%20Lethem%20-%20The%20Fortress%20Of%20Solitude.html (9 of 426)3-2-2007 15:20:50

The Fortress of Solitude

mouth. The lines of the rooms, the fine moldings, had been broken by slapdash walls to make hallways,

the bathrooms had had Sears Roebuck shower stalls wedged into them, the closets had been turned into

kitchens. The hallways had been pissed. These brownstones, these upright Dutch houses, were bodies,

bodies abused, but Isabel would make them well again, she’d fill them with couples, renovators who’d

replaster the ornate ceilings, refurbish the marble hearths. She’d already lured a few. The first renovators

were motley, truth be told. Disappointing to her, the beatniks who came, the hippies making communes

little better than rooming houses. But someone had to be first. They were Isabel’s ragged first recruits,

not good, only good enough.

For instance Abraham and Rachel Ebdus. The encountered reality of a marriage was always wearying to

Isabel. She, Rachel, was wild-eyed, chain-smoking, too young, too Brooklyn, actually. Isabel had seen

her talking Spanish to the men on the crates on the corner. That wasn’t going to solve anything. And he,

Abraham, was a painter, splendid—but need the walls of the house be filled top-to-bottom with nude

portraits of his wife? Need the paintings in the front parlor sometimes be visible from the corner of Dean

and Nevins, scumbled flesh beaming past half-drawn curtains?

Wife supported husband, working half days at a desk at the Department of Motor Vehicles on

Schermerhorn Street. Talking Spanish to the undershirts who polished cars in front of rooming houses.

While the husband stayed home and painted.

They had a boy.

Isable tore a thread of smoked turkey from the periphery of her dry sandwich and draped it across the

orange cat’s incurious nose, until the doltish thing fathomed what was offered and engaged it with

clacking, machinelike teeth.

There were two worlds. In one his father paced upstairs, creaked chairs, painting at his tiny light box,

making his incomprehensible progress, his mother downstairs played records, ran water over dishes,

laughed on the telephone, her voice trailing up the curve of the long stair, the backyard ailanthus brushed

his bedroom windows, dappling the sun into tropical, liquid blobs of light against the wallpaper which

itself depicted a forest full of monkeys and tigers and giraffes, while Dylan read and reread Scrambled

Eggs Super and Oobleck and If I Ran the Zoo or pushed his Matchbox car, #11, dreamily with one finger

down its single length of orange track or exposed the inadequacy of the Etch A Sketch and the

Spirograph again, the stiffness of the knobs, the recalcitrance of the silvery ingredient behind the Etch A

Sketch’s smeared window, the untrustworthiness of the Spirograph’s pins, the way they invariably bent

at perihelion when the pressure of the drawing pen grew too much, so that every deliciously scientific

orbit blooped and bent at the crucial moment into a ragged absurdity, a head with a nose, a pickle with a

wart. If the Etch A Sketch and the Spirograph had really worked they would probably be machines, not

toys, they would be part of the way the adult universe operated, and be mounted onto the instrument

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Jonathan%20Lethem%20-%20The%20Fortress%20Of%20Solitude.html (10 of 426)3-2-2007 15:20:50

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

TheFortressofSolitudeDoubledaynewyorklondontorontosydneyaucklandtheFortressofSolitudebyJonathanLethemfile:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Jonathan%20Lethem%20-%20The%20Fortress%20Of%20Solitude.html(1of426)3-2-200715:20:50TheFortressofSolitudeContentsTitlePageDedicationpartoneUnderbergchapter1chapter2chapter3c...

展开>> 收起<<

Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress Of Solitude.pdf

共426页,预览86页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress Of Solitude

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: