ISBN: 9781628973464
Editorial: Dalkey Archive Press
Autor: Õnnepalu, Tõnu
Año de edición: 2020
N° Paginas: 296
Tipo de pasta: Pasta blanda
Descripción: About the AuthorTõnu Õnnepalu (b. 1962) writes autobiographically influenced fiction under a variety of pen names, including, in the case of Exercises, Anton Nigov. He received the Baltic Assembly Prize. He lives in Tallinn and on the Estonian island of Hiiumaa.Adam Cullen (b. 1986) is a translator of Estonian prose, poetry, and drama into English. His latest translations include Tõnu Õnnepalu’s Exercises (2019), Eno Raud’s The Gothamites (2019), and Kai Aareleid’s Burning Cities (2018, long-listed for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award). Originally from Minnesota, he has lived in Estonia for over a decade.Written under the name of his literary alter ego Anton Nigov, Tõnu Õnnepalu's Exercises is an unclassifiable work, part searingly honest confession, part keen-eyed journal of everyday reality in a foreign land, part writer's unsparing dialogue with himself as he stands on the threshold of two worlds: the cosmopolitan but alienating Paris he is about to depart and the "small culture" of his native Estonia.Family histories and narratives of wartime and Soviet Estonia alternate with meditations on writing, reading, fiction, poetry and poets major and minor, personal and cultural geographies, time and the irremediable, life as the history of one's physical traumas, the islands where the author has lived and those which he dreams of visiting, and above all the existential condition of coming from a small country, whose melancholy landscapes and abandoned villages form the very cartography of the writer's self.Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.I don’t want changes, don’t want anything in my life to change. Change nothing. May everything remain the same. Everything around me can change―that keeps things interesting. I find it fascinating to observe reforms, catastrophes, revolutions, wars. But from a distance. That has been my greatest mistake: imagining that I want my life to change. Why should life change? It’s troublesome even in unaltered form. I have a hard-enough time grasping things, already.Routine is the greatest blessing and, thanklessly, I’ve regarded it to be the source of my woes. Even so, I’ve instinctively pursued nothing but stability―to make life so repetitive that it extinguishes; that it extinguishes itself; that it no longer disrupts the scene.Just as on all weekdays, so today did I ride to the Notre-Dame des Champs Métro station at late lunchtime, near two o’clock. One has to change trains to get there, but it goes fast. I have the stops memorized. I know which end of each train is most convenient to board and which comes after which. Rue du Bac, Sèvres-Babylone, Rennes, Notre-Dame des Champs.There’s a little sandwich bar I discovered last summer when there was an exhibition at the Luxembourg Gardens. Prices are cheap: the full lunch special for 35 francs. It includes a grilled panini (chicken curry or turkey and Swiss), an iced tea (hot beverages aren’t included), and a flan, which is an extremely ugly, even repulsive-looking cake that I nevertheless enjoy because it reminds me of some egg-based dessert or casserole from childhood. I always pretend to take time making my selection and announce my choices to the woman or man presently at the counter with measured pauses. It is my daily act of socialization; my interaction with this city. I have no desire to nurture warmer relations with the bartenders. I’m even irritated that they recognize me and are accustomed to me coming every day. If it were up to me they would forget me every day, and every day, I would be able to enter randomly as I walked by.Yet more importantly, the sandwich bar offers no surprises. The panini and the cake always taste the same. The flavor of the iced tea depends on whether I can be bothered to say citron; otherwise, they always give me pêche, peach. Still, it doesn’t make much of a difference. Today I decided to add some variety for some reason and ordered the apple p
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