The Ravine - Rilegato

Quarrington, Paul

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0307356140 ISBN 13: 9780307356147

Casa editrice: Random House of Canada Ltd, 2008

Riassunto

One morning in Don Mills, Phil and his brother Jay agree to let their friend Norman Kitchen tag along on an adventure down into a ravine — and what happens there at the hands of two pitiless teenagers changes all their lives forever. Years later the horrifying details are still unclear, smothered in layers of deliberate forgetting. Phil doesn’t even remember the names: Ted and Terry? Tom and Tony? It’s only when he descends into a crisis of his own that he comes to realize that perhaps, as he drunkenly tells a crisis line counsellor, “I went down into a ravine, and never really came back out.”

The Ravine is Phil’s book — we read it as he types it, in the basement apartment he’s called home since his wife kicked him out for having an affair with a make-up girl. As he writes, and then corrects what he’s written, we hear how he went from promising young playwright to successful, self-hating TV producer. We listen in on his disastrous late-night phone calls, and watch his brother (once a brilliant classical pianist) weep to himself as he plays Ravel and Waltzing Matilda in a desolate bar. The Ravine tells us all about the influence of The Twilight Zone on Phil’s work and his life — how it helped him meet his wife Veronica and then lose her, and how it led to the bizarre death of his friend, TV star Edward Milligan. Sometimes, when Phil’s drunk, a friend will look at what he’s written so far and call him on it — like when Jay tells Phil that he’s remembered it all wrong: that he was just as good as Phil at tying knots back when they were in the cubs.

Phil’s “ravine” is his attempt to make sense of things, to try to understand how everything went so wrong just as it seemed to be going so right. But The Ravine is also a Paul Quarrington novel, meaning that it’s hilarious and ingenious, quietly working its magic until the reader is at once heartbroken and hopeful. A darkly funny story about loss and redemption, The Ravine is also about how stories are made — how they can pull us out of disasters that seem too much for anyone to bear — and about how, sometimes, what we need to forgive ourselves for is not what we think it is at all.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

The author of ten novels, Paul Quarrington is also a musician (most recently in the band Porkbelly Futures), an award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker, and an acclaimed non-fiction writer.

Paul Quarrington’s last novel, Galveston, was nominated for the Giller Prize; King Leary won the CBC’s 2008 Canada Reads competition and the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal; and Whale Music was awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Recently, Porkbelly Futures’ self-titled second CD has been released to widespread acclaim, and Paul Quarrington’s short film adaptation of The Ravine, entitled Pavane, was featured in the Moving Stories Short Film Festival. Paul Quarrington’s non-fiction writing includes books on some of his favourite pastimes, such as fishing, hockey ,and music. His next book, The Song, is due out from Greystone Books in 2009. A regular contributor of book reviews, travel columns, and journalism to Canada’s national newspapers and magazines, he also teaches writing at Humber College and the University of Toronto.

An (extremely) amateur magician and would-be mariner, Paul Quarrington lives in Toronto.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

“Distress Hotline. Carlos speaking.”

“Carlos? Phil here.”

“Phil! How’s it hanging?”

“How’s it hanging? Is that really an appropriate way to greet callers to a distress centre?”

“Phil, we’ve talked about this. You are not really in distress.”

“Says who?”

“Says all of us. You’re depressed, you’ve got this ­self-­destructive drinking thing going on, but you don’t pose any true threat to yourself or others.”

“I beg to differ. I pose a huge threat to others. Why, look at what I’ve already done to them! And I wasn’t even trying.”

“Phil, some of what you’re going through is just life, you know. I mean, I’ve gone through some of this stuff. My marriage fell apart . . .”

“Really?”

“Big time. Mirella just decided she was in love with somebody else. She decided at, I don’t know, eleven o’clock in the morning, she was out, she was fucking gone, before dinner.”

“Do you have kids?”

“A boy and a girl. Six and three. And now there is this really bitter custody battle, she keeps dragging up all this heroin stuff that is like years old.”

“Hmm. Heroin, you say?”

“I’ve been clean for twelve fucking years. She’s a ruthless bitch to even mention it. And it’s not like she was a fucking Girl Guide. I mean, there’s been some shit in her body, you can bet your ass on that.”

“Uh-­huh.”

“And like this sexuality stuff. I mean, whose goddam business is that?”

“Whose sexuality are we discussing?”

“Mine. There has been a little confusion. A little ambivalence. But who among us is absolutely one hundred per cent hetero?”

“I see. So I take it she’s making a strong case for sole custody.”

“It breaks my fucking heart, Phil. Some days I don’t know how I’m going to go on.”

“Well, you know. Baby steps. Right? One little step after another little step, before you know it, you’ve covered vast distances.”

“Didn’t I say that to you?”

“And you were right.”

“I guess so. Look, Phil, sorry, sorry, I mean, you called me, we should talk about . . . so? What happened tonight that made you pick up the phone?”

“Well . . .”

“Aside from drinking four bottles of wine or whatever it was.”

“I just called to say, um, I won’t be calling any more. I mean, it’s been pleasant getting to know you all, but maybe it’s taken up a little bit too much of my time. And I need time, now, I need lots of it.”

“How come?”

“Because I’m working on a book.”

“Really? A book about what? Your career in television?”

“Well, I might mention that.”

“People find television very interesting.”

“I have noticed. But I think my book is going to be a bit more general.”

“Like about how you screwed around and did all these things which you think are so bad but really aren’t? Things that when you get right down to it are a little bit boring?”

“Yeah. And of course there’ll be quite a bit about my career in television.”

“What are you going to call this book?”

“Umm . . . The Ravine.”

“The Ravine? How come?”

“Because it seems to me, Carlos, that I went down into a ravine, and never really came back out.”

1 | The Ravine

When i was eleven, and jay was ten, we joined the wolf cubs.

I was actually too old to be a ­Cub–­at eleven a lad should be a proper Boy ­Scout–­but there is apparently a kind of apprenticeship that Lord ­Baden-­Powell insisted be undertaken, symbolically represented by placing two little stars in your Cub beanie, which means you then have both eyes open. This has to do with the wolf imagery, you see, the baby cub growing until the ­birth-­gook clears from his eyelids and they pop open with ­self-­realization. I adored all that wolf stuff, I loved sitting around in a circle with the other boys and ­chanting–­praying–­to the plastic wolf’s head that our scoutmaster held mounted on a ­staff.

“Akeyyyy-­la! We’ll do our best! Dib dib dib, dob dob dob!”

Jay and I still do this, after several too many at Birds of a Feather, the hateful bar at which my brother has been resident pianist for lo these many years. At least, we used to do this, but haven’t for months now, because Jay and I aren’t talking. He’s mad at me for screwing up my life. He should talk. But before this estrangement (and often) we used to stumble out onto the street and find a suitable object for our ­veneration–­the moon, a comely hooker, a ­two-­fingered man playing the ­ukulele–­and we’d snap to attention and begin the Grand ­Howl.

“Akeyyyy-­la! We’ll do our best! Dib dib dib, dob dob dob!”

Despite my enthusiasm for the Wolf Cubs, I never did get both eyes opened. I managed a solitary gold star and then quit the organization, or was forced out, I have forgotten exactly what happened. Anyway, one gets one’s eyes opened by achieving badges in various ­disciplines–­arts and crafts, outdoorsmanship, ­map-­reading–­but I was a failure at all these things. The only thing I was ever any good at was ­knot-­tying. For some reason, I was a whiz at tying knots, despite chubby little fingers and spectacularly bad eyesight. (I’m legally blind in my left eye, and my right is only marginally better.) But when the scoutmaster handed me lengths of rope, these handicaps faded away; indeed, they may have been a benefit, my sense receptors overcompensating for the little cocktail sausages that housed them, some inner sense making crystal clear what my eyes rendered indistinct. The scoutmaster always called upon me to demonstrate new knots. I would hold two lengths in front of me, one white, the other darkened (still far away from the ­pitch-­black second strand featured in the manual), and announce the knot–“Garrick’s Bend”–before grabbing a standing end and setting things into ­motion.

Setting out on this novelizing journey, I have some doubts about my visual memory. I read an interview with Alice Munro once (despite my low standing as a television writer, I maintain an interest in such things), who said that when she was shown a ­black-­and-­white photograph of her grade two (or something) class, she could recall the colour of everyone’s blouse, sweater, skirt. Shown a picture of my grade two class, I would be challenged to pick out myself, were it not for the huge clue of my spectacles. However, I can conjure in my mind the sight of Jay in his Wolf Cub uniform. Clothes have always been ­ill-­fitting on Jay, none more so than those huge shorts and green shirt. His legs and arms stuck out like pins in a voodoo doll. Jay was always a small fellow, ­undernourished–­if you saw the two of us together, as children, you might conclude that I had been stealing the food from his plate. (Which may have been true, now that I think of it. He never cared all that much for food.) He was and is a small fellow, except for his hands (which aided in his career as concert, and subsequently cheesy, pianist) and his head (which has since birth seemed too great a weight for him to bear).

There was another Cub, named Norman Kitchen, who desperately wanted to befriend me. I don’t know why, exactly. He attended another school in the district, but even so, I can’t believe he was unaware of my ranker status. After all, he’d seen me several times at the Galaxy Odeon in the company of my brother and Rainie van der Glick. Kitchen was a plump lad, with blond hair that was obviously his mother’s pride and joy, as I can’t believe either nature or a ­ten-­year-­old boy could come up with such an elaborate display of curls. Norman Kitchen had dark, hooded eyes and a nose that seemed to have been carved for a marionette. His lips were thick, and pursed much of the time, as though he lived in constant expectation of having to buss a dowager aunt on the cheek. Norman was quiet, although when he did speak, he spoke very loudly. He tended to draw too near to people, as if wishing to speak conspiratorially, and then open his mouth and blast away. This is an irritating habit, so I rejected his friendship, although I think in retrospect that I spurned Norman Kitchen only to exact a tiny amount of revenge for the way I was treated by most ­people.

Wolf Cub meetings were held twice a week, Wednesday nights and Sunday afternoons. They were held at the Valleyway United Church, which lay across the field from the back of our house, a couple of hundred yards away from the school. The church, I mean the building itself, exerted a strange influence upon me. I never went there to take part in services, because my mother was not a religious soul. I had never been inside the church until I went for Wolf Cubs, but as soon as I entered I felt a strange familiarity creep over me, as though I’d returned to a place that I’d missed very much. At the end of the lobby was a huge ­stained-­glass window, Jesus standing with his hands spread before him, as though he were saying, “The fish was yay big, swear to Dad.” I liked to arrive at the church e...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Random House of Canada Ltd
• Data di pubblicazione: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0307356140
• ISBN 13: 9780307356147
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 291