Kick the Animal Out - Rilegato

Ovalde, Veronique

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1596922028 ISBN 13: 9781596922020

Casa editrice: Macadam Cage Pub, 2007

Riassunto

An imaginative girl constructs a tale of incestuous obsession, teenage love, and willful desertion to explain her mother’s disappearance.

Fifteen-year-old Rose is trying to make sense of her world. Her mother – a beautiful woman with signature stiletto heels, bright clothes, and the synthetic gleam of a blond wig – has vanished, and Rose is convinced that she must be in danger.

Unable to cope with the possibility of having been abandoned, Rose uses her vivid imagination to construct her own explanation for her mother’s sudden disappearance. Her father suspiciously carries on with his life, in no hurry to contact the police. Coupled with Rose’s newfound knowledge that he is not actually the ringleader of a circus, she begins to doubt that he is even her real father.

As Rose pieces together snippets of remembered conversations and the half-truths she is fed by adults, she creates her own romantic narrative about the disappearance – one that is as difficult to accept as the truth.

Su questo libro

L'autore

Véronique Ovaldé is the author of the novels The Sleep of Fishes, All Things Shimmering, and Generally I Like Men. Kick the Animal Out, originally published as Déloger l’animal by Actes Sud in France and Leméac in Canada, is her fourth novel. She lives and works in Paris.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.

It was not long before I thought of Mr. Loyal’s lion.

The only thing I knew for sure about Mr. Loyal’s alleged circus was that it housed a lion who lived a peaceful life behind bars and did nothing much apart from eating, dozing, and pacing around a bit to limber up its pads. The lion was old and asthmatic; it had decaying teeth and it would groan all through the night when its teeth hurt. Mr. Loyal would say, Rufus needs to see the dentist, or Rufus has heartburn–his comments always had something to do with Rufus’s health. Mr. Loyal had always said that he kept Rufus to remind him of the old days (when his circus really was a circus, presumably), because he did not have the heart to get rid of him, even though he cost a fortune to feed–as the sensible Mr. Loyal frequently pointed out to the sentimental Mr. Loyal, the two of them balancing each other out sufficiently for their dialogue to result in an anvil-like inertia.

When Mom was still living with us, the only thing she would agree to say about Mr. Loyal’s circus was that it had an old lion and that she had worked for it a long time ago. If I asked to go and see Mr. Loyal’s circus, she would say, It’s no place for you. Which was a pretty surprising comment in itself, but it also harbored a prohibition which I felt implied something monstrous. If I insisted and said, But I’m fifteen, Mom, she would tell me, You don’t look a day over half that. She would look at me kindly, softening and repeating the words, Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think about it.

So, in my docile way, I had banned myself from thinking about it for a long time.

Which means that if a furtive thought about the circus crept into my head, I would call on all my private guardians and they would block the exits, surrounding the unhealthy thought and suffocating it by sitting on it. Thereby eradicating the evil thought.

Not going to Mr. Loyal’s circus had not bothered me.

Until Mom disappeared.

When I suspected a link between this circus and mom’s absence.

And when I thought of the lion.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Macadam Cage Pub
• Data di pubblicazione: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1596922028
• ISBN 13: 9781596922020
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 212