• Complain

Herve Le Tellier - Electrico W

Here you can read online Herve Le Tellier - Electrico W full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2013, publisher: Other Press, genre: Prose. 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.

Herve Le Tellier Electrico W
  • Book:
    Electrico W
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Other Press
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2013
  • ISBN:
    9781590515341
  • Rating:
    4 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 80
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Electrico W: summary, description and annotation

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

By the celebrated Oulipo writer, this brilliant and witty novel set in Lisbon explores love, relationships, and the strange balance between literature and life. Journalist, writer, and translator Vincent Balmer moves to Lisbon to escape from a failing affair. During his first assignment there, he teams up with Antonio a photographer who has just returned to the city after a ten-year absence to report for a French newspaper on an infamous serial killers trial. While walking around the city together to take notes and photos for the article, they visit the places of Antonios childhood, swap stories from their pasts, and confide in each other. But the more they learn about each other, the more their lives become inextricably intertwined. With a structure that parallels Homers recounts their nine days together and the adventures that proliferate to form a constellation of successive ephemeral connections and relationships.

Herve Le Tellier: author's other books


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

Electrico W — 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 "Electrico W" 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

Herv Le Tellier

Electrico W

If I can stop one heart from breaking

I shall not live in vain

If I can ease one life the aching

Or cool one pain

Or help one fainting robin

Unto his nest again

I shall not live in vain.

EMILY DICKINSON

When I tried taking off the mask,

It stuck to my face.

When I pulled it off and looked in the mirror,

Id grown older.

FERNANDO PESSOA

PROLOGUE OF SORTS

We were heading toward Rossio in a taxi the color of olives, green and black, an ancient Mercedes 220, one of those rounded sedans from the sixties. It was still summer but a gray Atlantic rain was falling and the sky was pewter-colored. Lisbon did not look itself, but the setting may not matter very much. Water streamed over the car window, Antonio gazed out at the city, not concentrating on anything for long. I thought he seemed transparent, absent and present all at the same time a watermark in the weft of a sheet of paper.

As the taxi slowed to turn into the square by Eduardo VII Park, Antonio took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and struck a match. He inhaled, sucking in his cheeks, and wound down the window to blow out a scroll of smoke snatched away as we sped along. I mention these insignificant details, not much more than snapshots, because they struck me so emphatically, as did the suffocating smell of sulfur and tobacco.

It felt as if time had taken a step to one side, a divergence as fine as a crack in the glaze on porcelain. Something unfamiliar had insinuated itself inside me. I can think of no other way of putting it: I no longer saw a thirty-year-old man in flesh and blood sitting beside me on that seat with its cracked leather, but a character, a character from a book.

That same evening I made the decision to write it. I didnt let my ignorance of the plot or framework hold me back. I had no Ariadnes thread, I just took my big black notebook from my bag and wrote these few sentences, in the past tense, exactly as they appear here, I have left them unchanged.

People will suspect some sort of imposture, a feeble writers strategy. They would be wrong: there was actually nothing extraordinary, fascinating, or, in a nutshell, bookworthy about Antonio Flores. Physically he was ordinary, although his brown, almost curly hair tended toward auburn. His dark eyes were mischievous without being playful, and cutting down his forehead between his thick eyebrows he had two vertical lines that gave him an alert expression. His legs looked too short to me, and he seemed more elegant sitting than standing. If he had to walk quickly, a childhood injury made him limp. And yet he had indisputable charm, his own particular way of occupying space, what people call magnetism.

There was nothing predictable or expected about Antonio Flores. Never, in the nine days I spent with him, was I so much as a comma ahead of the sentences that his presence provoked. Never, right up until the collapse, did I guess where Antonio was taking me. He himself knew nothing about this extraordinary phenomenon. His every move conformed to some invisible scheme, and certain silences dictated the beginning of a new paragraph.

So here begins the book. I have revised it very little, to be honest as I typed it up. I altered some turns of phrase because they no longer conveyed the exact feeling of the moment in which they were conceived. It was 1985, nearly twenty-seven years ago. At the time I didnt feel like showing it to publishers. I did give it a title, though, and this morning, with the sun taking its time coming up, it is still called Elctrico W, the name of a tramline in Lisbon. But that has been a provisional title for so long.

This paragraph is added in because, according to the computer, the manuscript comprised 53,278 words. I wanted it to be a prime number. Out of some superstition. So I added an adjective here, an adverb there, I dont even remember where. And this is where the notebook starts again.

DAY ONE: ANTONIO

Picture 1

Just as we reached Rossio Square along the Avenida da Liberdade, it stopped raining, and the Mercedes dropped us at the terrace of a bistro. The chairs were soaked, the table too; we carelessly put our two suitcases down in puddles. As the waiter took our orders, he glanced at our luggage in dismay, or simply indifference.

Antonio and I had never worked together but we had come across each other several times. His photos had illustrated my investigation into the garimpeiros, destitute gold miners in the Orinoco Basin; Id written a piece to go with his reportage on the tribes of Botswanas Okavango Delta. When he decided to go back to Lisbon for this particular series of articles, it was his idea to suggest me to his editors. He thought I was still living in Paris, and when he learned that I was now the newspapers Portuguese correspondent, he said these words (so odd that they were relayed to me): I knew his fate would bring him to Lisbon at some point.

I had only been here a few months. I had wanted to leave Paris, to avoid the risk of bumping into Irene in the corridors of the editorial department, to recover from my absurd love for this girl with her outdated name, this girl who didnt want me. My fathers death in late June, his suicide why not use the word had made up my mind. My brother and I had sold the apartment on the rue Lecourbe, and with my share of the proceeds I had decided to buy a one-bedroom apartment in either the Castelo quarter or Santa Justa, where my mother was born and where I had spent a few holidays as a child. In the meantime, I had rented a studio in So Paulo, right next to the goods port. It was a huge room which afforded few comforts but it was whitewashed and sunny, at the top of a three-story building. It was the views more than anything that had attracted me. From one window you could look out over the roofs, from the other you could see the Tagus. The bed was new and comfortable, and there was a phone line connected. There was a small open-plan kitchen and a shower, but the toilet was in the hallway. For substantial things , the landlady had explained, then, gesturing toward the sink, she chuckled, but for anything else, okay? In her view, a refrigerator and two hotplates justified the label studio. The compressor on the fridge made more noise than a factory press, and I soon had to settle for unplugging it at night.

I had hung my only picture on the wall, and that was just a dog-eared, yellowed copy of a late-nineteenth-century map of the Okavango Delta. I had set up my desk in a corner, which was blocked on one side. I put my fax on it and this cube-shaped computer with its small black-and-white screen, whose successors I could never have imagined. Sitting there, I could look through the window to my right and see the docks. On nights when I couldnt sleep, in other words almost every night, I found their rumblings comforting. I left one window open and listened to the thunder of heavy diesel engines and fuel pumps, and the workers cries and laughter. Sometimes I got up before dawn and wandered through the steely sadness of static and traveling cranes. Living in the entrails of a port felt nostalgic and reassuring, like those English paintings of industrial landscapes, all in grays and blues. And Lisbon, a capital open to the seas, seemed to blend exoticism with civilization.

I had set myself two tasks for the imminent autumn: to finish the novel about Pescheux dHerbinville for which I had only written a few pages and chosen a title (The Clearing), then to translate Jaime Montestrelas Contos aquosos, the collection of bizarre short stories that he subtitled Atlas inutilis. Montestrela was far from well known, but at a secondhand bookstall in the Alfama neighborhood I had stumbled across a copy of his

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Electrico W»

Look at similar books to Electrico W. 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 «Electrico W»

Discussion, reviews of the book Electrico W 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.