Landscape of Farewell E-Book

Alex Miller

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Landscape of Farewell is the story of Max Otto, an elderly German academic. After the death of his much-loved wife and his recognition that he will never write the great study of history that was to be his life's crowning work, Max believes his life is all but over. Everything changes, though, when his valedictory lecture is challenged by Professor Vita McLelland, a feisty young Australian Aboriginal academic visiting Germany. Their meeting and growing friendship sets Max on a journey that would have seemed unthinkable just a few short weeks earlier. When, at Vita's invitation, Max travels to Australia, he forms a deep friendship with her uncle, Aboriginal elder Dougald Gnapun. It is a friendship that not only gives new meaning and purpose to Max, but which teaches him the profound importance of truth-telling in reconciliation with his own and his country's past.

Leseprobe

ALEX MILLER

LANDSCAPE of FAREWELL

Also by Alex Miller

Prochownik’s Dream

Journey to the Stone Country

Conditions of Faith

The Sitters

The Ancestor Game

The Tivington Nott

Watching the Climbers on the Mountain

For Stephanie& for my friend Frank Budby, elder of the Barada

First published in 2007

Copyright © Alex Miller 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory board.

Allen & Unwin83 Alexander StreetCrows Nest NSW 2065AustraliaPhone: (61 2) 8425 0100Fax: [phone]Email: [email protected]: www.allenandunwin.com/uk

National Library of AustraliaCataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Miller, Alex, 1936–.  Landscape of farewell.  E-book ISBN 978 1 92557 612 2  I. Title.  A823.3

Set in 11.5/17.5 pt Fairfield Light by Midland Typesetters, Maryborough, Victoria Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

From where rises the high tide of desire, of expectation, of an obsession with sheer being defiant of pain, of the treadmill of enslavement and injustice, of the massacres that are history?

George Steiner

Hamburg Autumn 2004

1

Agamemnon’s edict

On examining my reflection in the hallstand mirror before leaving for the conference that morning, it was not my imminent death nor the poor quality of my paper that concerned me, but that I was in need of a haircut and had once again forgotten to shave. Winifred would have run her fingers along the back of my neck and reproved me, You need tidying up! As if I were a neglected room in her house. Winifred never had a house of her own, but in the ideal life of her imagination I am confident she had lived in one. For all the forthrightness of her modern feminist spirit, there was something immovably old-fashioned in Winifred’s secret longings and I am sure she saw herself, in this life of her interior fantasies, as the broad-hipped, bosomy mistress of a grand establishment with a vast brood of noisy and unruly children and large dogs. We never talked about it. I just knew it, the way I knew her mood before she came into a room. Could that be where she had gone? Not to nothingness, but teleported to her true home when the summons came? Although I am an unbeliever, I devoutly wished such a blessing on her. For she was a woman who deserved to meet her true—indeed her ideal and imaginary—self one day. Which I cannot say of everyone I meet.

She seemed to stand behind me that morning as I examined my reflection in the mirror, unhappy that her husband, Professor Max Otto, for whom she once possessed ambitions, was not to cut a distinguished figure in front of his colleagues on the occasion of his last appearance before them, but was to be remembered by them at the end as a dishevelled, grieving, defeated old man. But perhaps that is too harsh. I am of average height and a little stooped these days, owing to the persistent pain of a mildly arthritic spine, and my hair, which in my youth was glossy and abundant, floats about at the back of my head like a luminous nimbus. My eyes too have faded—I had not expected this. Once a lustrous amber of great depth and clarity, my eyes are now a pale mud colour and are inclined to water, as if I am forever on the point of weeping—as I should be—or have been peeling onions. And speaking of onions, the skin of my face and neck has become thin and papery, and several of those darkly discoloured patches have appeared on my forehead. I resent this deterioration in my appearance more even than the daily allotment of pain. Until well into my middle years I enjoyed an unblemished complexion, which I no doubt owed to a distant Barbary ancestor. I took this blessing for granted as something that was mine for life, as if it were the unearned due of class or breeding. Absurd vanity! I am able to detect only the faintest remains of that glorious past today. Now I look on a landscape arid and deserted, where once a gay society flourished amid ripening pomegranates and purple grapes, the splash of fountains and cool sounds of laughter from the grove on summer evenings, from where the erotic imploring of the oud aroused our lusts …