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Zusatztext “Baricco has inventiveness in spades! and his freaks have the capacity to chill the blood or warm the heart.” -- Los Angeles Times Book Review “Filled with wild invention and lyrical prose . . . Conventional characters and superheroes alike behave with the wild abandon we have come to recognize in the novels of Thomas Pynchon! Don De Lillo and Robert Coover. City is simultaneously hilarious and profoundly sad.” -- The Washington Post Book World “An imaginative! surprisingly poignant Italian reinvention of what has become a staple of American teen fiction: the saga of marginalized members of society who find comfort in each other.”-- Booklist “Along with flashes of love it reveals for old-fashioned storytelling! City boldly displays its futurist credentials…Baricco’s narrative virtuosity continues to astonish.” --The Independent (London) Informationen zum Autor Alessandro Baricco Klappentext The author of the international bestseller Silk now delivers a ravishing and wildly inventive novel about friendship, genius and its discontents, and the redemptive power of narrative. Somewhere in America lives a brilliant boy named Gould, an intellectual guided missile aimed at the Nobel Prize. His only companions are an imaginary giant and an imaginary mute. Improbably—and yet with impeccable logic--he falls into the care of Shatzy Shell, a young woman whose life up till that point has been equally devoid of human connection . Theirs is a relationship of stories and of stories within stories: of Gould's evolving saga of an underdog boxer and the violent Western that Shatzy has been dictating into a tape recorder since the age of six. Out of these stories, Alessandro Baricco creates a masterpiece of metaphysical pulp fiction that recalls both Scheherazade and Italo Calvino. By turns exhilarating and deeply moving, City is irresistible. Leseprobe Prologue "So, Mr. Klauser, should Mami Jane die?" "Screw them all." "Is that a yes or a no?" "What do you think?" In October of 1987, CRB--the company that for twenty-two years had published the adventures of the mythical Ballon Mac--decided to take a poll of its readers to determine whether Mami Jane ought to die. Ballon Mac was a blind superhero who worked as a dentist by day and at night battled Evil, using the special powers of his saliva. Mami Jane was his mother. The readers were, in general, very fond of her: she collected Indian scalps and at night she performed as a bassist in a blues band whose other members were black. She was white. The idea of killing her off had come from the sales manager of CRB--a placid man who had a single passion: toy trains. He maintained that at this point Ballon Mac was on a dead-end track and needed new inspiration. The death of his mother--hit by a train as she fled a paranoid switchman--would transform him into a lethal mixture of rage and grief, that is, the exact image of his average reader. The idea was idiotic. But then so was the average reader of Ballon Mac. So, in October of 1987, CRB cleared out a room on the second floor and set up eight young women there to answer the telephones and tabulate readers' opinions. The question was: Should Mami Jane die? Of the eight young women, four were employees of CRB, two had been sent by the unemployment office, and one was the granddaughter of the company president. The last, a woman of about thirty, from Pomona, was there because she'd won an internship by getting the correct answer on a radio quiz ("What is the thing that Ballon Mac hates most in the world?" "Scraping off tartar"). She had a small tape recorder that she always carried with her. Every so often she turned it on and said something into it. Her name was Shatzy Shell. At 10:45 on the twelfth day of the voting--when the death of Mam...
