The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History

Оглавление

Jonathan Franzen. The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History

Contents

House for Sale

Two Ponies

Then Joy Breaks Through

Centrally Located

The Foreign Language

My Bird Problem

If you enjoyed The Discomfort Zone, check out these other great Jonathan Franzen titles

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Отрывок из книги

JONATHAN FRANZEN

The Discomfort Zone

.....

Things had been going well for me in the years since my mother’s death. Instead of being in debt and living at the mercy of the city’s rent-control laws, I now owned a nice apartment on East Eighty-first Street. Walking in the door, after two months in California, I had the sensation of walking into somebody else’s apartment. The guy who lived here was apparently a prosperous middle-aged Manhattanite with the sort of life I’d spent my thirties envying from afar, vaguely disdaining, and finally being defeated in my attempts to imagine my way into. How odd that I now had keys to this guy’s apartment.

My housesitter had left the place clean and neat. I’d always favored bare floors and minimal furniture—had had my fill of Traditional when I was growing up—and I’d taken very few things from my mother’s house after she died. Kitchenware, photo albums, some pillows. A tool chest that my great grandfather had made. A painting of a ship that could have been the Dawn Treader. An assortment of small objects that I held on to out of loyalty to my mother: an onyx banana, a Wedgwood candy dish, a pewter candlesnuffer, a brass niello-handled letter opener, with matching scissors, in a green leather sheath.

.....