The Woodcutter and his Family E-Book

Frank McGuinness

• Herausgeber: Brandon
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

My son betrayed me. It is a family tradition. Didn't I do the same to my father? The World War intensifies in Europe. In Zurich a writer breathes his last imagining his life till now from his childhood in Dublin. The voices of his family circling him – wife, son, daughter – carry him to his end as he hears each separate chapter chronicling the power of their passion for their famous father, their love, their hate, their need, their sorrows and joys, their strangeness. And James Joyce has saved for them one last story to delight and defy them: The Woodcutter And His Children ...

Leseprobe

FOR PHILIP TILLING

Contents

Title PageDedicationChapter One: Son, Archie; Zurich, SwitzerlandChapter Two: Wife, Bertha; Galway, IrelandChapter Three: Daughter, Beatrice; Ivar, FranceChapter Four: Father, Himself; BedChapter Five: The Woodcutter and His FamilyAbout the Author About Arimathea, also by Frank McGuinness Copyright

Chapter One

Son

Archie

Zurich, Switzerland

On the day I was born my father set himself the task of learning to lip-read. Why a man so prodigiously talented in the acquisition of the earth’s languages should undertake such a challenge has always and ever baffled me. Perhaps it baffled himself. Who can say?

He never spoke of it again, so it fell to my mother to confess this strange feat many years after he had committed himself to this pursuit. There was no necessity for it. None of us was deaf, and neither was any of his family dumb. Did he wish us to be?

Could that be what he was looking for, silence? The great man of letters, celebrated the globe over, did he above all else wish to escape from our chattering and retreat where nothing could trouble him but his meanderings and motives, known only to his own sweet self? I cannot tell you an answer to that, for I failed to ask him when he was hale and hearty enough to reply. It was one of many failures which he forgave me. Indeed he forgave us all without complaint, no matter how many times we had let him down – in thought, in word, and in deed. The most benevolent of famous men, Papa.

He forgave that I was born too early. Poor Mama had such a fright. She’d firmly maintained I would not arrive until the end of August. Even September. When she started to feel sore and sick in her stomach, she cursed what she’d had for breakfast. I blame the Famine, the Irish Famine, she said, I blame it for everything that afflicts us as a race, but more than anything I blame it because I can never ever waste a morsel of food, and the consequence is I have nearly poisoned myself on numerous occasions, forcing down rancid meat a rat would not digest, and that’s what I did this morning, choosing not to throw into the bin a slice of ham but instead smothered it in butter between two bits of bread and convinced myself it was fit to eat. Look at me now, poisoned – all my own fault, don’t pity me.