• Complain

Anderson - Inventory a memoir

Here you can read online Anderson - Inventory a memoir full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: New York;Derry (Northern Ireland);Northern Ireland;Derry, year: 2020, publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, genre: Non-fiction. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

No cover
  • Book:
    Inventory a memoir
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2020
  • City:
    New York;Derry (Northern Ireland);Northern Ireland;Derry
  • Rating:
    5 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 100
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Inventory a memoir: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Inventory a memoir" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Inventoryis a remarkable memoir; a work of auto-archaeology, really, in which Darran Anderson disinters his own and his countrys hard pasts, shaking life, love and loss out of the objects of his youth in Northern Ireland. --Robert Macfarlane, author ofUnderland: A Deep Time Journey
A lyrical memoir and family history told through four generations of fathers and sons in Northern Ireland

Inventory, Darran Andersons searing yet tender memoir, is an interwoven tale of political conflict, trauma, history, family, and resistance. With great rhythm, humor, and sometimes painful detail, Anderson tells the story of his city and family through the objects and memories that define them.
Growing up in Derry, Northern Ireland, amid the unspeakable violence of the Troubles, Anderson was accustomed to poverty and fracture. Avoiding British soldiers, IRA operatives, unexploded bombs, and stray bullets, he and his friends explored their hometown with boundless imagination and innocence despite their dire circumstances. But his parents and extended family, Catholics living in Protestant-controlled Northern Ireland, could not evade the persecution. His father joined the IRA, spent time in prison, and yearned to escape the hellish reality of the Troubles.
Throughout his inventive, evocative memoir, Anderson chronicles the history of Derrys evolution from an island backwater to a crucial Allied naval base during World War II, and the diverging paths of his two grandfathers in the wake of the American militarys arrival: one, an alcoholic army deserter, drowns in the legendary River Foylethe river that will take the life of the grandfathers wife years laterwhile the other, a smuggler, lives off the river, retrieving the bodies of the drowned.
Fifteen years after leaving Derry, Anderson returns to confront the past and its legacy when yet another family member goes missing in the Foyle. InInventory, his gripping attempt to see who, or what, he can salvage from historys shadows, Anderson creates a presence in the shape of an absence, unearthing the buried fates of family, country, and self.

Anderson: author's other books


Who wrote Inventory a memoir? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Inventory a memoir — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Inventory a memoir" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
Contents
Guide
Pagebreaks of the print version
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use - photo 1
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use - photo 2

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

To Caspian

Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare. Make an inventory of your pockets, of your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out.

GEORGES PEREC, Linfra-ordinaire

No, dont! Dont dig up the past! Dwell on the past and youll lose an eye.

But the proverb goes on to say: Forget the past and youll lose both eyes.

ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN, The Gulag Archipelago

I t took months before the full symptoms made themselves known. In the distant frozen north, having abandoned his ship in the ice, Sir John Ross discovered that a scar, from a bayonet thrust through his body in a sea battle off the coast of Bilbao thirty years before, was transforming back into an open wound. Eighty years later, in the distant frozen south, Captain Lawrence Titus Oates, thirty-one and already dying, found that a long-healed gunshot wound to the leg, which hed received a decade earlier in the Boer War, had never truly gone away.

Two million sailors died slowly and terribly of scurvy during the Age of Discovery, without knowing that vitamin C is needed to bind tissue, including scars. Scurvy killed more men on the seas than drowning. Gums rot; the skin ulcers; bones turn black. The circulatory system begins to rupture. Feelings accentuate, including melancholy and a desperate yearning for land. The sickness was even thought to be tied to nostalgia, dreams, ecstasy, terror, and fatigue, as well as diet. Sailors knew when one of them was touched by it and shunned him, lest they, too, fall under its spell. It had its own memory, resurrecting those long-forgotten injuries. It seemed to rise up from each mans past. Sailors died nursing bloody lacerations they had received in their youth, mystified that being healed was somehow just a temporary condition.

How might it be possible to reconstruct a lost person? To thread bone onto soul and muscle onto bone and skin onto muscle without creating a monster or a marionette. To rebuild a human being from photographs, documents, contradictory fragments of memories. The objects and impressions they left behind perhaps form a silhouette of negative space resembling a figure. A presence in the shape of an absence. Perhaps it is also worth establishing what first took people apart. To follow the unwinding thread.

G od knows how long the radio had sat in the rain or where it had come from. My father, a man of few words, admitted it might not work, but we would never know unless we tried. He hauled it into his huge Popeye arms and carried it up the banking from the sodden ditch. I followed, clumsily, behind. We moved through the trees and along the rough trail at the backs of the houses. A dog barked furiously at the bottom of a gate as we passed.

The Glen was a dumping ground, a wilderness that had once marked the edge of town but that the city had grown around, never quite absorbing, it being too steep and marshy to build on. Its wildness never defused.

We turned onto our street, went up the concrete steps and past the railings. I thought my father, sleeves rolled up, veins bulging on his tattooed arms, might stop and place the radio into the discarded shopping trolley. I had watched the older boys swing each other around the car park inside the trolley, in great whooping arcs, but my father just walked on past. The glass glistened on the tarmac as I ran to catch up.

For several days the radio just sat there on the living room floor, in the space where a television might be. I eyed it fearfully, suspecting it might explode or burst into flames when turned on. I knew what a radio was. It was a box with voices inside. A puzzle box. How did the voices get in there? Who did they belong to? How had they become detached from their owners? What if they escaped?

My mother wiped down the wooden cabinet with a towel Your fathers always bringing bloody junk into this housethen dried out the speaker with a hair dryer, filling the room with a hot, artificial smell. Then it sat there. Mute. Goading me into flicking the switch. I closed my eyes and braced myself.

It started to life with a hum.

The lid lifted slowly, almost hydraulically, and a series of colored lights blinked on, as if part of a control panel from a science-fiction film. It felt delicate, like a prized artifact and not a piece of junk that had been discarded. Somehow simultaneously futuristic and ancient, as if belonging to some advanced alien civilization that had long since died out.

The dial creaked and then gave, gliding a red line along mysterious numbers and hieroglyphs. A horizontal bandwidth of places with unearthly sounds between each channel. I would tell my little sister, half-believing it myself, that they were transmissions from other galaxies, ones that I would later try to point out to her in my booksthe spiral Andromeda, the starburst M82, the Magellanic Cloudswhile she ignored me, busy rehearsing dance routines and reenacting musicals to invisible audiences.

I had to steady my hand to tune in. There was always the garbled, disintegrating echo of a voice or music just before I could lock onto the signal precisely. Then, just as quickly, I would lose it. The slightest movement, a tremble, could knock it off.

The marker moved along, through Paris, Cairo, Leningrad, Bombay, Peking. Some cities were out of reach, but occasionally I would catch a glimpse of the other side of the planet: the night side of the world, or the day side when we were enveloped in darkness. The slightest fragments of voices and melodies would conjure up images Id seen in booksstave churches, karst forests, Hong Kong junks, torii gates, the shimmer of neon lights on rain-drenched streetsall appeared holographically in front of me, until my mothers call from another room broke my hypnosis.

Id always return to the radio. First thing in the morning before school, last thing before bed. If I could unlock its secrets, everything in the world would surely make sense. Below the names of the cities were the transmitter stations, which sounded even more fascinatingly unreal: Petropavlovsk, Bchar, Motala, Dalanzadgad. It made me wonder which places were real and which were notGotham, Timbuktu, Transylvania, Atlantisand what distinguished one from the other.

There was something illicit about listening in. I felt like a secret agent prying into distant lands, where language sounded like verse, incantations, ciphers. Even the Eastern European football teams, some behind the Iron Curtain (which I imagined as a literal mountainous wall of rusting metal), had names that sounded impossibly enigmatic: Red Star Belgrade, Rapid Bucureti, Dynamo Kyiv. By contrast, there was little mystery to be found on the BBC channels. It was always gardening, mirthless comedy, interest rates, the ruminations of vicars full of dust and spiders. Except, that is, for the shipping forecast. There the mystery seeped in, almost despite itself. It was too late to listen most nights, but one evening while lying ill with a blazing fever on the sofa, a damp cloth on my brow, I had been allowed to stay up and had heard it. I would, from then on, at opportune moments, sneak downstairs when everyone else in the house was sleeping and listen with my ear pressed against a whispering speaker. And the radio would conjure up before me in the half-light night ships in Viking, Hebrides, Finisterre, setting course for Venice, Valparaso, Yokohama.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Inventory a memoir»

Look at similar books to Inventory a memoir. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Inventory a memoir»

Discussion, reviews of the book Inventory a memoir and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.