Everybody Dies in this Novel E-Book

Beka Adamashvili

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Dedalus Europe
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 224

Beschreibung

One day Memento Mori realises that he is a character in a book who has the power to travel from one book to another. He decides to strike against evil writers who sentence their characters to death. He persuades Romeo and Juliet that suicide is not the best solution and that when they are adults they will remember these days with laughter. To save many others from an untimely death he travels to the Reichenbach Falls to push Professor Moriarty to his death. Memento Mori's efforts to save more characters from their authors is interrupted when he learns that his author plans to kill off a character. He has no information about who the intended victim is, so with the help of H. G. Wells' time-machine he takes all the characters to a different dimension where they have a better chance of survival. Everyone Dies in This Novel is a delightful postmodern comedy which has found a worldwide audience.

Leseprobe

Dedalus Europe

General Editor: Timothy Lane

EVERYBODYDIESIN THIS NOVEL

This book is published with the support of the Writers’ House of Georgia and Arts Council England.

Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited

24-26, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE

[email protected]    www.dedalusbooks.com

ISBN printed book 978 1 912868 82 7

ISBN ebook 978 1 915568 19 9

Dedalus is distributed in the USA & Canada by SCB Distributors

15608 South New Century Drive, Gardena, CA 90248

[email protected]    www.scbdistributors.com

Dedalus is distributed in Australia by Peribo Pty Ltd

58, Beaumont Road, Mount Kuring-gai, N.S.W. 2080

[email protected]

First published by Dedalus in 2023

Everybody dies in this Novel copyright © Bakur Sulakauri 2018

Translation copyright © Tamar Japaridze 2023

The right of Beka Adamashvili to be identified as the author & Tamar Japaridze as the translator of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays, Elcograf S.p.A.

Typeset by Marie Lane

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The Author

Beka Adamashvili

Born in 1990, Beka Adamashvili is a postmodern Georgian author, blogger, screenwriter, and Creative Director at an advertising agency. In 2011 he graduated from Caucasus School of Media at Caucasus University with a BA in Journalism and Social Sciences.

In 2014 his first novel Bestseller was published. It became a real bestseller in Georgia and was on the shortlist for the best debut novel at the SABA Literary Awards and as the best novel at the Tsinandali Awards. It also received a special prize at the Iliauni Literary Awards.

In 2018 Beka Adamashvili published his second postmodern book Everybody Dies in this Novel, which won an EU prize. Both books have been published in English by Dedalus.

The Translator

Tamar Japaridze

Tamar Japaridze is a highly acclaimed Georgian translator and academic. She was the winner of the SABA Literary Prize in 2016 for the best translation of the year.

She has translated over thirty literary works from English into Georgian, including authors such as William Shakespeare, Rudyard Kipling, Harold Pinter, John Fowles, Henry Miller, Arundati Roy, Irvine Welsh, Bernardine Evaristo, Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro.

She has translated Bestseller and Everybody Dies in this Novel, for Dedalus.

Contents

Prologue

Another Prologue

Sorry, You are Condemned to Death!

Literary Apocalypse

Brief Survey of the Planet Kimkardash

Travelling in Time and Genres

Even Briefer Survey of the Planet Kimkardash

In Search of Lost Leah

A Bit More about the Planet Kimkardash

Recommended Reading

13456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657585960616263646566676869707172737475767778798081828384858687888990919293949596979899100101102103104105106107108109110111112113114115116117118119120121122123124125126127128129130131132133134135136137138139140141142143144145146147148149150151152153154155156157158159160161162167168169170171172173174175176177178179183

Prologue

Death set his alarm clock for 4:33am.

He had been counting everything since insomnia became his vigilant adversary. First he counted the sheep (ten thousand one hundred and ten!), then the sleepless nights (seven thousand seven hundred and seven!), then the seconds spent on counting the sheep and the sleepless nights (eighteen thousand and three!), then the seconds spent on counting the seconds spent on counting the sheep and the sleepless nights… suddenly, it struck him that there were six hundred and twenty(!) other ways of falling asleep besides this futile counting, and he decided to try something else.

He thought, he’d better think about nothing, but then realised that thinking of thinking about nothing was already a thought, and felt a persistent ache in his cranium. Next, he turned to a volume by Proust hoping to fall asleep from boredom, but soon reckoned that it wasn’t worth his while, as he didn’t want to be in search of lost time later. Neither closing his eyes to all injustice nor imagining the public reading of the Tokyo telephone directory was of any help. In the end, he waved his wrist bones and finger phalanges despairingly, stared at the wall opposite, and tried to calm himself down by the fact that, all in all, his state was far better than that of the Devil who had never once slept in all his days…

…The opposite wall represented a part of Death’s cozy but pretty dead office. On the left there was a door with a huge poster of Jim Morrison – his favorite lead vocalist, a worthy member of his precious collection that was still incomplete. He wanted his collection to consist of twenty-seven unique specimens. When all the twenty-seven were there, he would create the best music band of all time, with big names, equally big performers, and the sequels (such as “Also Like, Haha and Wow” or “Five more months, please”.1) to hits of different epochs. But the valuable specimens had to be selected with the accuracy of a jeweler, since the increasing number of willing applicants threatened the quality of the future band.

From the corner of the room, right where two walls met, there started an exhibition of myriad wonderful photos (eight thousand seven hundred and forty-five in total number!). All of them depicted him, and the whole thing represented a sort of a summary or rather a chronicle of ‘Death at work’. The remarks inscribed on the edges of the pictures gave a detailed account of his lifetime activities – A Time to Live and a Time to Die:

A huge scythe hung on the third wall. It hung diagonally, on two nails. After new technologies had been introduced, Death scarcely utilised it as intended; he mostly used it as a selfie stick or a prop (he was always depicted holding the scythe, you know, and he didn’t want to deceive the expectation of mortals). He was no longer a kid, so to speak, and was tired to death from carrying the scythe on his shoulders. However, he had a scythe-shaped cursor on the monitor of his special device from the company ATROPOS, in which he kept numerous (seven thousand four hundred and twenty!) subfolders (‘War’, ‘Cataclysm’, ‘Disease’, ‘Accident’, ‘Old Age’, ‘Terrorism’, ‘Crucifixion’, ‘Darwin Awards’, etc.) and seven billion eight hundred million five hundred thousand three hundred and twenty files (fancy that!) in a huge folder named ‘Humankind’. His job was to distribute continuously updated files into subfolders and delete some of them from time to time.

Over the ‘ATROPOS’ there were shelves full of Terry Pratchett books. To Death’s mind, Terry Pratchett used to write unforgettable books, until he had to be sent to the ‘Alzheimer’ subfolder. Some other novels, too, were written very skillfully by famous Authors: Mann, Zusak, Saramago, Christie and many others who tried to acquire immortality by writing about Death, and hence helped to revive his narcissistic library.

Death rubbed his eye sockets (which were staring at the wall) with the thumb and index finger phalanges. His insomnia was caused entirely by psychological factors. He was afraid to fall asleep with fatigue so hard that even the alarm clock could not wake him up. “I must consult a psychotherapist ASAP”, he decided. The last one he visited in 1939 was Freud. But he didn’t consult him, it was just his duty visit, since the file ‘Sigmund Freud – 1856’ had long been in the subfolder of ‘Severely Sick,’ and it was already the poor man himself who was lying on the couch. “Never mind”, Death calmed himself down. “He was good at discussing sleep, not sleeplessness”. Then he recalled that his insomnia occurred much earlier than his visit to Freud, namely after one occasion when he had to be very vigilant but fell asleep, and the world’s entire history changed dramatically.

Alois was to die during coitus. By all means! Otherwise, the experiment would fail, and Death would be strictly accused of inefficiency by his creators.

That evening Alois drank everything but deadly poison. Acutely intoxicated by alcohol, he even suffered from diplopia: one finger seemed to be two to him, those two seemed four, and four seemed eight. Eventually, it resulted in such an anatomic abnormality, that the poor man had to close his eyes and shake his head to come back to reality. For the same reason, upon returning home, he (having at last found one real door out of sixteen) first saw one Klara, then two, then four, and then eight respectively. So, he closed his eyes, shook his head, and before his wife multiplied again, he took her to the bedroom to multiply the number of his family members.

Their coitus was nothing like the sex in romantic movies; it was more like the act of reproduction in documentaries from the series ‘Animal Planet’: Alois puffed like a train in the movies by the Lumiere brothers, and Klara was as silent as the same films.

The lethal heart attack should have started at that very moment.

But alas! Death fell asleep.

A fatal misfortune indeed!

Several minutes later, the act was over and Alois, panting heavily, climbed down from Klara to the bed. At first glance, this was an ordinary night like one thousand and one other nights, but it turned out to be fabulous: wee Adolf defeated his enemies using the blitzkrieg tactics and headed towards his mother’s ovum at the speed of light…

…The unpleasant memory not only kept Death fully awake but also made him lose the desire to think about sleep whatsoever. He stood up, took off his cloak, and examined himself thoroughly in the mirror. “I need to gain weight, I am nothing but bones”, he concluded. Having hung his cloak over the electric chair, he began to think about coveted holidays. He really deserved a good rest after millions of years without a single day off. “Of course, He doesn’t care… He himself rests on Sundays, anyway”, Death grumbled, and suddenly spotted someone in the dark… damned hallucinations! He rubbed his eye sockets with his finger phalanges and scrutinised the darkness in front of him. This time he saw no one there. So, he chilled out, lay down and continued to meditate. Time flew quickly indeed! He remembered Abel very well, as if they met just a century ago. Death was a simple intern those days, and it was too difficult for him to get used to his job… aw, and how he sweated while chasing Methuselah… then there came that Great Flood. He worked forty days in a row, but one tippler – a carpenter – spoiled his every effort. Recalling the Flood reminded him of the “Titanic”. It was awfully cold that night and Death was chilled to the bone… brrr… he shivered. Once he witnessed a devastating heat in London: September of that autumn was so hot as if it was on fire… when the image of the blazing fire submerged into the fluid of his subconscious, some new images emerged from it by the principle of buoyancy… Archimedes… a hot bath… together with Marat… the warm water felt very pleasant… the sudden feeling of pleasure thrilled the whole of his skeleton. He relaxed.

“I must not sleep!” he thought, and fell asleep almost instantly.

It was about four in the morning.

1    The sequels to the hits “All You Need Is Love” and “Wake Me up When September Ends”.

Another Prologue

As Memento Mori awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he discovered that he was a fictional character, and that he remembered only three things about himself:

1.He had a strange name – “Memento Mori”;

2.He was a fictional character;

3.He remembered only three things about himself.

It’s difficult indeed to be a character in such an odd situation, especially when you appear right in the prologue from nowhere, knowing nothing about your past or future, and being able to say only a few words in three short phrases about your present. You are surrounded by strange void spaces: if you go to the window and look out of it, you might see vast emptiness. Moreover, you won’t be able to spot the window at all, if the Author doesn’t say that the room, in which you happen to be, has four large windows with a wonderful view on the rye field over the crazy cliff, and that the whole of this spot is especially beautiful in the late autumn, when the tree branches resemble gigantic brushes, while leaves look like the drops of coloured paints. The author should also say something like ‘it’s a wonderful experience to watch heffalumps and woozles floating by the south window’, and so on and so forth. But the thing is that Memento Mori won’t go to the window, as he thinks that description of the nature is always pretty unnatural. By and large, he thinks that one living tree is much more important than the whole forest described on many pages for which the very tree has been cut down. Anyway, let me remind you that Memento Mori still doesn’t know anything about what he knows or thinks apart from what has already been said about him. Neither does he know what will be said further.

And yet, unlike him, the majority of characters usually never realise that they are characters, and that even their simple decisions, such as what to have for supper, for instance, come from another person’s mind. There is nothing extraordinary in such naivety. Imagine a stranger coming up to you and asserting that actually the Earth is nothing but a fictional planet from a book by an inhabitant of the planet Kimkardash,2 and that in reality you, too, don’t exist either. Would you believe it? You wouldn’t, of course.

As for Memento Mori, he first found out that he was just a fictional character and only after that he believed it. In the world where a human being can turn into an enormous insect in his sleep, or where a huge black cat walking on two legs can ride a tram hanging on it, nothing is impossible. “However,” Memento Mori thought, “if the Author always directs the character’s thoughts, then it might be his decision as well to make me think that I can act independently. Therefore, my sense of senselessness of such a character might also be dictated by him”… well, well. What’s the use of worrying about such trifles when by accepting the idea that you are a fictional character, you acquire a great literary power: you can make the other characters rebel against the Author, completely ignore his words, or just travel from book to book. So, tell me, for goodness’ sake, who cares whether it all happens at the will of the Author or not? No one does! Neither will Memento Mori. The Author has died! And the literary critic who first asserted this fact died as well. So, Long Live the New Character!

***

Three asterisks in a row usually stand for the phrase ‘time has passed’. That is to say, nothing important happened in Memento Mori’s life between the last line of the previous paragraph and the first line of the following one. He only slept and ate. As nobody feels like reading about the characters that are only sleeping and eating, Memento Mori decided to exchange his laziness and drowsiness for something more impressive. He had an exclusive superpower, let alone everything else, and ignoring this fact (especially in the world full of cruel Authors who could kill their characters with one simple sentence) was the same as to forget the password of your own WI-FI. Such an unfair situation needs one superhero at least – Supermento! Mementomori-man! Termimentomori!!!!

Or let it be Memento Mori again.

For several years (which might sound a long period of time, but it can be described in fifteen letters, as you see) he had been reading various books from ‘The Sense of an Ending’ to ‘The Neverending Story’. Then he started skipping from book to book making an effort to save protagonists: he tried to assure Romeo and Juliet that there was no need to turn every problem into a tragedy, because later their problem might seem merely a sweet memory of the past. He also tried to offer the first aid to Ostap Bender while Ippolit Matveyevich was drowning in a river (Bolivar Cannot Carry Double).3 At times, when the magic penicillin had been already invented, he even visited the Davos sanatorium in secret. Sometimes he managed to triumph over the Authors, but some other times the length of the book created a serious obstacle for him, and struggling through its pages he missed the train of the protagonist. Once he even tried his luck with War and Peace, but surrendered in no time. He wasn’t able to save the Lisbon girls from The Virgin Suicides, neither could he succeed with ***Spoiler Alert***4… what could he do? He was dealing with a million other characters all alone. Little wonder he couldn’t manage to save them all, (and there was no need of doing it by the way). He even pushed Moriarty himself at the Reichenbach Fall, and still remembered the bewildered face of Sherlock whose razorsharp mind could not guess from where this deus ex machina came.

Frankly speaking, travelling through the books didn’t prove to be exciting either. True, it was much better than a continuous process of eating and sleeping, but several more paragraphs, and the reader (fed up with so many literary allusions) might close the book with such a sound and fury that Memento Mori would be crushed between its pages. The only way to avoid such a terrible misfortune was to start telling a new story… at that very moment, Memento Mori found out something that saved him from the Sword of Damocles: while he was concerned with other problems, someone’s murder had been planned in his own book. The murder had to take place in the morning, at 4:33 sharp!… yeah, everything was written clearly in the prologue, except one detail:

Who was to be murdered?

2    Kimkardash – a fictional planet in a book by an inhabitant of the planet Earth.

3    Bolivar Cannot Carry Double – the purpose of this insert is to indirectly demonstrate that the Author knows one of the stories by O. Henry. Therefore, do not pay attention to this footnote, despite the fact that this comment is in the second part of the statement.

4    I mean Randle McMurphy, whom Memento Mori couldn’t save, although (unlike Ken Kesey) he at least tried to.

Sorry, You are Condemned to Death!

Spoiler # 1: Ernest Hemingway is a Murderer

“Close your eyes and imagine that you’ve been given a superpower to eliminate one person from world history. Who could it possibly be whose absence would thoroughly change everything?” Professor Arno took his eyeglasses out of his shirt pocket and set them on the desk instead of on his nose. “As a rule, it’s Adolf Hitler who comes to one’s mind, isn’t it?… if anyone has other candidates, we can discuss them straightaway.”

The audience obviously had some other candidates, but had no desire to discuss them. So, the Professor concluded that the majority shared his opinion and went on more boldly:

“I wonder why Hitler became a figure in world history – was it really because of his remarkable moustache or due to his famous gesture, which is now used solely for hailing a taxi? Maybe the swastika proved to be the perfect logo? Or should we blame his charisma for everything that first caused a storm of changes and then a powerful hurricane of armed conflict hitting the entirety of Europe?”

“Maybe because of the large numbers of those killed,” suggested a ‘Mr. Know-all’ from the depth of the auditorium.

“Not likely! If we measured someone’s greatness by the number of their victims, then a monument to Mao Zedong would have been erected on a pedestal greater than the Great Wall of China! 50 million more people fell victim during his regime, but I don’t remember any discussions about how world history would have changed if some time-traveller had gone to the small Chinese village and killed newborn Mao…” Professor Arno took the glasses from the desk and (as the description of characters’ actions and movements between phrases seemed to him a meaningless obstacle to the unhindered flow of narrative) decided to stand still till the end of the lecture. “… whereas various story plots of the kind have been invented about Hitler. In one of them a Holocaust survivor, a Jewish scientist invents the time machine to kill baby Adolf; in some others the mature Adolf is liquidated, but a new leader replacing him conquers the entirety of Europe; still in others the alternative development of history is determined by Hitler’s victory itself, or simply he is not rejected from the Academy of Fine Arts and persists in painting the rest of his life, creating canvases of ‘no artistic value’ instead of the disastrous prospects for mankind.”

“And would the war still have broken out if Hitler hadn’t been born? I mean, can the situational factors cause more changes in history than certain individuals?” asked a male in a Che Guevara T-shirt sitting in the front row.

“Much has been said and written about this matter”, Professor Arno admitted pausing to fit his glasses. “Let’s put it this way: if the Führer was merely the individual who happened to be in a certain place at a certain time, how come that when Hitler, and for instance, Franz Ferdinand5 or Gavrilo Princip6 are described in books, only the identities of the last two need clarification in the footnotes? Is their conscious or unconscious role in starting World War I less important? No, of course not, at any rate at first glance. But the difference still lies in ‘situational factors’ and ‘certain individuals’: if Gavrilo Princip hadn’t been born, someone else would have killed Franz Ferdinand or his substitute… that’s to say, the situation in Europe of those days was pretty tense, and declaring war was always going to happen even without Princip. As for World War II, frankly speaking, I can’t imagine it without Hitler. His role as a specific individual in changing the history of mankind is almost indispensable…”

Professor Arno, who was ‘Arnold’ in his passport and referred to as Mr. Arnold at his bank, had been dreaming of changing history since his childhood, but the only thing he managed to change was his dream. He chose the profession of archaeologist, and all his youth he was a chaser… umm… chasing after the skulls and skeletons of HOMO-SOMETHINGs with a couple of remaining teeth and the frames that were not attractive at all. He had been digging for twenty years in a row, but his most important discovery was the fact that everything of great importance had already been discovered. As a result, he buried his dream deep in the ground and was spending his remaining days searching for alternative ways of getting into history.

To put it more expressively, infiltration into history became his idée fixe.

“Actually, humans cannot change history; they simply make it. If you want to change it, you should either become a historian…” Professor Arno adjusted his glasses recalling the words similar to those of a certain French writer: “… or travel back by time machine and, for instance, force Hitler to give up his Kampf.”

“Yes, but…” someone protested, and having already uttered the phrase ‘yes, but’ was obliged to go on: “… haven’t the scientists already proved that it is physically impossible to travel back in time?”

“And I can prove right away that any scientist can be wrong!” Professor Arno didn’t know what else to do with his glasses that wouldn’t seem too hackneyed; he was already fed up with fishing around for rare verbs describing his movements. “Years will pass, and it will be impossible for humans even to imagine what might be impossible for them.”

From his own experience he knew that the trite device of repeating one and the same word – ‘I’m confused that nothing can confuse me’, ‘I apologise for apologising very rarely’, ‘I’m afraid of only my own fearlessness’, and the like – was the simplest way to prove himself witty, and never missed a convenient moment to resort to it.

“Moreover, are you sure that the period of time we find ourselves in right now – this public lecture, I mean – is not already history? Are you certain that we are the first in this time-space continuum? That no one has come before us, and that “tomorrow” has not arrived yet?

Someone shrugged his shoulders but no one, including himself, noticed it.