He was wearing a gray suit bought in Rome. He walked slowly. The soles of his shoes grew dark with moisture. The trees were huge and without lower branches. They had died and fallen while the crown sought the light. Damp, buried, they broke beneath his feet. He saw the faded flag of a surveyor’s stake; further on, forgotten, a children’s fort. Nearby was a hammer, rusted, its handle eaten by worms. Every step he took bristled with the sound of twigs and branches, the debris of years. He tried the hammer, the handle snapped. In the silence birds were calling. There were tiny flies in the air. Above, in the far sunlight, the roar of airliners bound for Europe.
The fort had fallen, the children were gone. They had hidden in these woods, had lain among the small wild flowers. Hadji had rolled in the snow, bathing in it, squirming on his back and pausing, fragrant beast, eyes dark as coffee, smiling mouth. Those afternoons that would never vanish, all ended. He, resettled. His daughters, gone.
An old man in the woods, his thoughts flashed forward as quickly as they had gone back. He walked with slow, careful steps, his gaze to the ground. He saw something then, domed and wondrous. He stopped in disbelief. How it had escaped the cars, the keen eyes of children, of dogs, he could not understand, but somehow it had. It was the tortoise. It had not seen him, he watched it going its way, rustling the leaves as it walked. He bent and picked it up. The reptilian face, impassive, wise, acknowledged nothing; the pale eye, clear as a bead, seemed anxious to look away. The powerful legs were curving their strokes at his fingers, but in vain. Finally it withdrew into its shell on which, faint as weathered writing on a board, the initials were scratched. He could barely make them out. He wet a finger and rubbed; miraculously they became plain. He put the tortoise down, he was reluctant to. He watched it for a while. It did not move.
It seemed the woods were breathing, that they had recognized him, made him their own. He sensed the change. He was moved as if deeply grateful. The blood sprang within him, rushed from his head.
He walks toward the river, placing his feet carefully. His suit is too warm and tight. He reaches the water’s edge. There is the dock, unused now, with its flaking paint and rotten boards, its underpilings drenched in green. Here at the great, dark river, here on the bank.
It happens in an instant. It is all one long day, one endless afternoon, friends leave, we stand on the shore.
Yes, he thought, I am ready, I have always been ready, I am ready at last.
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
POSSESSION
by A. S. Byatt
An intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets.
“Gorgeously written … a tour de force.”
—The New York Times Book Review
Winner of the Booker Prize
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73590-9
THE STRANGER
by Albert Camus
Through the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder, Camus explores what he termed “the nakedness of man faced with the absurd.”
Fiction/Literature/0-679-72020-0
INVISIBLE MAN
by Ralph Ellison
This searing record of a black man’s journey through contemporary America reveals, in Ralph Ellison’s words, “the sheer rhetorical challenge involved in communicating across our barriers of race and religion, class, color and region.”
“The greatest American novel in the second half of the twentieth century … the classic representation of American black experience.”
—R.W. B. Lewis
Fiction/Literature/0-679-72313-7
THE REMAINS OF THE DAY
by Kazuo Ishiguro
A profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world in postwar England.
“One of the best books of the year.”
—The New York Times Book Review
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73172-5
ALL THE PRETTY HORSES
by Cormac McCarthy
At sixteen, John Grady Cole finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
“A book of remarkable beauty and strength, the work of a master in perfect command of his medium.”
—Washington Post Book World
Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74439-8
BUDDENBROOKS
THE DECLINE OF A FAMILY
by Thomas Mann
Translated by John E. Woods
This masterpiece is an utterly absorbing chronicle of four generations of a German mercantile family. As Thomas Mann charts the Buddenbrooks’ decline, he creates a world of exuberant vitality and almost Rabelaisian earthiness.
“Wonderfully fresh and elegant … bound to become the definitive English version.”
—Los Angeles Times
Fiction/Literature/0-679-75260-9
LOLITA
by Vladimir Nabokov
The famous and controversial novel that tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.
“The only convincing love story of our century.”
—Vanity Fair
Fiction/Literature/0-679-72316-1
THE ENGLISH PATIENT
by Michael Ondaatje
During the final moments of World War II, four damaged people come together in a deserted Italian villa. As their stories unfold, a complex tapestry of image and emotion, recollection and observation is woven.
“It seduces and beguiles us with its many-layered mysteries, its brilliantly taut and lyrical prose, its tender regard for its characters.”
—Newsday
Winner of the Booker Prize
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74520-3
OPERATION SHYLOCK
by Philip Roth
In this tour de force of fact and fiction, Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring the State of Israel, promoting a bizarre exodus in reverse, and it is up to Roth to stop him—even if that means impersonating his impersonator.
“A diabolically clever, engaging work …the result is a kind of dizzying exhilaration.”
—Boston Globe
Fiction/Literature/0-679-75029-0
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AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE, OR CALL TOLL-FREE TO ORDER: 1-800-793-2665 (CREDIT CARDS ONLY).
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part Three
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Four
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
C
hapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part Five
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11