The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick (ereader for comics .txt) 📗

Praise for Cynthia Ozick’s

The Messiah of Stockholm

“Brilliant…A complex and fascinating meditation on the nature of writing and the responsibilities of those who choose to create—or judge—tales.”

—Harold Bloom, front page,

The New York Times Book Review

“A quick, quirky and stimulating book [that] joins Henry James’ The Aspern Papers, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and, more recently, Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot.”

—Wall Street Journal

“Stunning.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“Ozick is a gorgeous writer…but the pyrotechnics are only a part of her grand cabalistic scheme. The Messiah of Stockholm fairly bursts with ideas about imagination as a kind of possession as well as salvation; about worshipping art and appropriating talent; about genealogy and history…a brilliant testament.”

—Vogue

“[Ozick] has magical gifts as a storyteller, [as well as] a distinctive and utterly original voice. She possesses an ability to mix up the surreal and the realistic, juxtapose Kafkaesque abstractions with Waugh-like comedy. Bizarre images…float, like figures in a Chagall painting, above precisely observed, naturalistic tableaux; and seemingly ordinary people suddenly become visionaries capable of madness or magic. The result is fiction that has the power to delight us—and to make us think.”

—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

First Vintage Books Edition, March 1988

Copyright © 1987 by Cynthia Ozick

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1987.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ozick, Cynthia.

The Messiah of Stockholm.

1. Schulz, Bruno, 1892–1942,

in fiction, drama, poetry, etc.

I. Title.

ps3565.z5m4     1988     813′.54     87-45911

ISBN 978-0-394-75694-3 (pbk.)

Ebook ISBN 9780593313213

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Contents

Cover

Frontispiece

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

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

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

About the Author

My father never tired of glorifying this extraordinary element—matter.

“There is no dead matter,” he taught us, “lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life. The range of these forms is infinite and their shades and nuances limitless. The Demiurge was in possession of important and interesting creative recipes. Thanks to them, he created a multiplicity of species which renew themselves by their own devices. No one knows whether these recipes will ever be reconstructed. But this is unnecessary, because even if the classical methods of creation should prove inaccessible for evermore, there still remain some illegal methods, an infinity of heretical and criminal methods.”

Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles

Jag är stjärnan som speglar sig i dig.

—

Din själ är mitt hem. Jag har inget annat.

I am the star that mirrors itself in you.

—

Your soul is my home. I have no other.

Pär Lagerkvist, Aftonland

 (Translated by W. H. Auden and Leif Sjöberg)

1

at three in the afternoon—the hour when, all over the world, the literary stewpot boils over, when gossip in the book-reviewing departments of newspapers is most untamed and swarming, and when the autumn sky over Stockholm begins to draw down a translucent dusk (an eggshell shielding a blue-black yolk) across the spired and watery town—at this lachrymose yet exalted hour, Lars Andemening could be found in bed, napping. Not that there was anyone to look for him there. He had no wife; his apartment was no bigger than a crack in the wall, and any visitor a biennial event; and the quilt, heaped on itself in large knots, was a risen tangle that might or might not have hinted at the presence of Lars under it. As it happened, he was there nearly every afternoon from November to early in a certain bare and harrowing March, when he gave it up; but no one knew.

He lived a ten-minute walk from the Morgontörn, his employer—a relatively young newspaper of unsettled character, in competition for the morning trade with the majestic old Dagens Nyheter and the respectable Svenska Dagbladet. Lars himself was, at least in appearance, relatively young; he was forty-two and looked much younger, probably because he was spare and showed bone, and had no belly at all under his belt buckle. But also there was something in his face that opened into unripeness—a tentativeness, an unfinished tone. The hand of an indifferent maker had smeared his mouth and chin and Adam’s apple. He was often dealt with as if he were just starting out, heaving his greening masculine forces against life.

The truth was he had been married not once but twice, and both times had lived, a decade all told, in a presentable flat with proper furniture: a crystal chandelier with the first wife, a sleigh-bed with the second, and, with both, scattered low candles in glass balls lit and pulsing at dusk. He had behind him much of the ordinary bourgeois predicament, and had lost it not through intention but through attrition. Neither wife had liked him for long. Birgitta complained that there was something irregular—undigested—in his spirit. Ulrika fought him and stole their daughter from him; he heard from the doleful woman who had been his mother-in-law that they had gone to America. His ex-mother-in-law had no anger for him—she thought him a kind of orphan.

Ulrika’s mother was not intelligent, but she was not far wrong. Lars Andemening believed himself to be an arrested soul: someone who has been pushed off a track. He belonged elsewhere. His name was his own fabrication. He had told almost no one—not his wives during all those years, and none of his colleagues at the Morgontörn, where he was a once-a-week reviewer—what he understood about himself: that he was the son of a murdered man, a man shot down in the streets over forty years ago, in Poland, while the son was still in the mother’s womb. It was a thing he knew and kept buried. There was something dangerous in it,