• Complain

Edward Aubyn - At Last

Here you can read online Edward Aubyn - At Last full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2012, publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 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.

Edward Aubyn At Last
  • Book:
    At Last
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2012
  • Rating:
    3 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 60
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

At Last: summary, description and annotation

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

A Notable Book of 2012 One of s Best Fiction Books 2011 One of s Best Books of 2012 One of s Top 10 Fiction Books of 2012 Here, from the writer described by as our purest living prose stylist and whom Alan Hollinghurst has called the most brilliant English novelist of his generation, is a work of glittering social comedy, profound emotional truth, and acute verbal wit. is also the stunning culmination of one of the great fiction enterprises of the past two decades in the life of the English novel. As readers of Edward St. Aubyns extraordinary earlier works- and the Man Booker Prize finalist are well aware, for Patrick Melrose, family has always been a double-edged sword. begins as friends, relatives, and foes trickle in to pay final respects to his mother, Eleanor. An American heiress, Eleanor married into the British aristocracy, giving up the grandeur of her upbringing for good works freely bestowed on everyone but her own son, who finds himself questioning whether his transition to a life without parents will indeed be the liberation he had so long imagined. The service ends, and family and friends gather for a final party. Amid the social niceties and social horrors, Patrick begins to sense the prospect of release from the extremes of his childhood, and at the end of the day, alone in his room, the promise some form of safety. . .

Edward Aubyn: author's other books


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

At Last — 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 "At Last" 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

Edward St. Aubyn

At Last

For Bo

1

Surprised to see me? said Nicholas Pratt, planting his walking stick on the crematorium carpet and fixing Patrick with a look of slightly aimless defiance, a habit no longer useful but too late to change. Ive become rather a memorial-creeper. Ones bound to at my age. Its no use sitting at home guffawing over the ignorant mistakes of juvenile obituarists, or giving in to the rather monotonous pleasure of counting the daily quota of extinct contemporaries. No! One has to celebrate the life: there goes the school tart. They say he had a good war, but I know better! that sort of thing, put the whole achievement in perspective. Mind you, Im not saying it isnt all very moving. Theres a sort of swelling orchestra effect to these last days. And plenty of horror, of course. Padding about on my daily rounds from hospital bed to memorial pew and back again, Im reminded of those oil tankers that used to dash themselves onto the rocks every other week and the flocks of birds dying on the beaches with their wings stuck together and their bewildered yellow eyes blinking.

Nicholas glanced into the room. Thinly attended, he murmured, as if preparing a description for someone else. Are those people your mothers religious friends? Too extraordinary. What colour would you call that suit? Aubergine? Aubergine la crme doursin? I must go to Huntsman and get one knocked up. What do you mean, you have no Aubergine? Everyone was wearing it at Eleanor Melroses. Order a mile of it straight away!

I suppose your aunt will be here soon. Shell be an all too familiar face amidst the Aubergines. I saw her last week in New York and Im pleased to say I was the first to tell her the tragic news about your mother. She burst into tears and ordered a croque monsieur to swallow with her second helping of diet pills. I felt sorry for her and got her asked to dinner with the Blands. Do you know Freddie Bland? Hes the smallest billionaire alive. His parents were practically dwarfs, into the room with a tremendous fanfare and then like General and Mrs. Tom Thumb. They used to come disappear under a console table. Baby Bland has taken to being serious, the way some people do in their senile twilight. Shes decided to write a book about Cubism, of all ridiculous subjects. I think its really part of her being a perfect wife. She knows what a state Freddie used to get into over her birthday, but thanks to her new hobby, all he has to do now is get Sothebys to wrap up a revolting painting of a woman with a face like a slice of watermelon by that arch fake Picasso, and he knows shell be over the moon. Do you know what Baby said to me? At breakfast, if you please, when I was almost defenceless. Nicholas put on a simpering voice:

Those divine birds in late Braque are really just an excuse for the sky.

Such a good excuse, I said, choking on my first sip of coffee, so much better than a lawn mower or a pair of clogs. It shows he was in complete control of his material.

Serious, you see. Its a fate I shall resist with every last scrap of my intelligence, unless Herr Doktor Alzheimer takes over, in which case Ill have to write a book about Islamic art to show that the towel-heads have always been much more civilized than us, or a fat volume on how little we know about Shakespeares mother and her top-secret Catholicism. Something serious.

Anyhow, Im afraid Aunt Nancy rather bombed with the Blands. It must be hard to be exclusively social and entirely friendless at the same time. Poor thing. But do you know what struck me, apart from Nancys vibrant self-pity, which she had the nerve to pretend was grief, what struck me about those two girls, your mother and your aunt, was that they are, were my life is spent wobbling between tenses completely American. Their fathers connection with the Highlands was, lets face it, entirely liquid and after your grandmother sacked him he was hardly ever around. He spent the war with those dimwits the Windsors in Nassau; Monte Carlo after the war, and finally foundered in the bar of Whites. Of the tribe who are blind drunk every day of their lives from lunch until bedtime, he was by far the most charming, but frustrating I think as a father. At that level of drunkenness ones essentially trying to embrace a drowning man. The odd eruption of sentimentality for the twenty minutes the drink took him that way was no substitute for the steady flow of self-sacrificing kindness that has always inspired my own efforts as a father. With what I admit have been mixed results. As Im sure you know, Amanda hasnt spoken to me for the last fifteen years. I blame her psychoanalyst, filling her never very brilliant little head with Freudian ideas about her doting Papa.

Nicholass rotund style of delivery was fading into an increasingly urgent whisper, and the knuckles of his blue-veined hands were white from the effort of holding himself upright. Well, my dear, well have another little chat after the ceremony. Its been marvellous finding you on such good form. My condolences and all that, although if ever there was a merciful release, it was in the case of your poor mother. Ive become something of a Florence Nightingale in my old age, but even the Lady with the Lamp had to beat a retreat in the face of that terrifying ruin. Its bound to act as a brake on the rush to get me canonized but I prefer to pay visits to people who can still enjoy a bitchy remark and a glass of champagne.

He seemed about to leave but then turned back. Try not to be bitter about the money. One or two friends of mine whove made a mess of that side of things have ended up dying in National Health wards and I must say Ive been very impressed by the humanity of the mostly foreign staff. Mind you, what is there to do with money except spend it when youve got it or be bitter about it when you havent? Its a very limited commodity in which people invest the most extraordinary emotions. What I suppose I really mean is do be bitter about the money; its one of the few things it can do: siphon off some bitterness. Do-gooders have sometimes complained that I have too many btes noires, but I need my btes noires to get the noire out of me and into the btes. Besides, that side of your family has had a good run. What is it now? Six generations with every single descendant, not just the eldest son, essentially idle. They may have taken on the camouflage of work, especially in America where everyone has to have an office, if only to swivel about with their shoes on the desk for half an hour before lunch, but theres been no necessity. It must be rather thrilling, although I cant speak from experience, for you and your children, after this long exemption from competition, to get stuck in. God knows what I would have made of my life if I hadnt divided my time between town and country, between home and abroad, between wives and mistresses. I have divided time and now doth time divide me, what? I must take a closer look at these religious fanatics your mother surrounded herself with.

Nicholas hobbled off with no pretence that he expected any response other than silent fascination.

When Patrick looked back on the way that illness and dying had torn apart Eleanors flimsy shamanic fantasies, Nicholass religious fanatics seemed to him more like credulous draft-dodgers. At the end of her life Eleanor had been thrown into a merciless crash-course in self-knowledge, with only a power animal in one hand and a rattle in the other. She had been left with the steepest practice of all: no speech, no movement, no sex, no drugs, no travel, no spending, hardly any food; just alone in silent contemplation of her thoughts. If contemplation was the word. Perhaps she felt that her thoughts were contemplating her, like hungry predators.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «At Last»

Look at similar books to At Last. 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 «At Last»

Discussion, reviews of the book At Last 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.