The New Confessions

  I ponder all the possibilities that come with being human. Good and evil, happiness and misery, achievement and failure, love and isolation—everything that goes into being the particular person you are in your particular social and historical setting. That’s a lot, isn’t it? My God, that’s some menu! I smile to myself, with faint pride, I suppose, but with some wry resignation too. Yes, I’ve done that human being business pretty thoroughly, thank you very much. I’ve participated in the human drama, all right. You—yes, you—can testify on my behalf that I’ve hunkered down in the mulch of the phenomenal world. Boy, haven’t I just!… But then, so have you, I daresay. We all do that, don’t we—all of us. Like it or not.

  As I stand here on my modest beach, waiting for my future, watching the waves roll in, I feel a strange, light-headed elation. After all, this is the Age of Uncertainty and Incompleteness. John James Todd, I say to myself, at last you are in tune with the universe.

  ALSO BY WILLIAM BOYD

  ARMADILLO

  The life of Lorimer Black, insurance adjustor, is about to be turned upside down. The elements at play: a beautiful actress with whom he is falling in love; an odd associate whose hiring, firing, and rehiring make little sense; a rock musician whose loss—in this case of his mind—may be “adjusted” by the insurance company. Black uncovers a web of fraud involving virtually everyone he knows, and in which he becomes increasingly entangled.

  Fiction/Literature/0-375-70216-4

  AN ICE-CREAM WAR

  William Boyd brilliantly evokes the private dramas of a generation swept up by the winds of war. As the sons of the world match wits and weapons, desperation makes bedfellows of enemies—and traitors of friends and family. An Ice-Cream War deftly renders lives capsized by violence, chance, and the irrepressible human capacity for love.

  Fiction/Literature/0-375-70502-3

  THE BLUE AFTERNOON

  Sprawling across three continents and two eras, this atmospheric novel opens in Los Angeles in 1936, when architect Kay Fischer is approached by an elderly man named Salvador Carriscant, who claims to be her father—and who insists she accompany him to Lisbon in search of the great lost love of his life.

  Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction Fiction/Literature/0-679-77260-X

  THE DESTINY OF NATHALIE X

  A tourist stranded in the Dordogne valley in the 1920s finds a French countess waiting amorously in his hotel room. A widowed Englishwoman and a Portuguese poet meet every Christmas in 1930s Lisbon to share an erotic delirium before parting for another year. These and nine more stories chart the euphoria of love, the anguish of loss, and the gnawings of ambition.

  Fiction/Short Stories/0-679-76784-3

  VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL

  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

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Contents

  Epigraph

  1 - Beginnings

  2 - A Sentimental Education

  3 - “L’homme de l’extrême gauche”

  4 - New Geometries, New Worlds

  5 - WOCC

  6 - The Confessions

  7 - Superb-Imperial

  8 - Julie

  9 - Passions

  10 - Comrades

  11 - The Confessions: Part 1

  12 - End of an Era

  13 - The End of the Affair

  14 - Dog Days

  15 - Pacific Palisades

  16 - The Kid

  17 - The Invasion of St.-Tropez

  18 - Berlin, Year Zero

  19 - The Hollywood One

  20 - The Last Walk of Jean Jacques Rousseau

  21 - John James Todd on the Beach