Отрывок из книги
This book is for my father.
I have the key to happiness: remember, be profoundly, profoundly, totally conscious that you are. I myself, sorry to say, hardly ever use this key. I keep losing it.
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2) Cut between the fragmentary paragraphs of the two fictional plots, Breckenridge inserts a brutal, sad memoir of his father dying: stark and beautiful and full of our common humanity; pity, love, kindness, stubbornness, squalor and valor. Here again there are two narratives: one works back and forth over the story of a life, two lives, father and son, and the father’s declining days; the other, more mysterious, follows Breckenridge to a diner, the subway, the train station. We get detailed accounts of conversations with the diner owner. We oscillate between donuts and staph infections, but by the genius of construction and understatement, horror and hopelessness accumulate. The word “love” isn’t thrown around, but the son patiently bandaging dabbing medication on those awful sores tells you more than words. You are fascinated, cannot turn away.
Curiously, embedded in the memoir we find a scene in which Breckenridge tells his father about the suicide of a woman who lived in an apartment above him and how, he is sure, that one day he encountered her ghost in the stairwell. (The reader himself encounters a frisson of what Nabokov’s fictional poet John Shade calls combinatorial delight.)
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