Peter Harris is a New Yorker, owner of a modern art gallery and apartment in one of the most prestigious areas of the city. It would seem that life is a success, but - Peter's everyday life is not like Klimt's paintings; they have neither brilliance nor energy. He is in his early forties, he has a wife, an adult daughter and an identity crisis. He promotes young artists in whom he does not believe, and sometimes does not even see a spark of talent.
About the author: Michael Cunningham is an American writer, living classic. 1999 Pulitzer Prize laureate for the novel "The Watch".
And the saddest thing: Peter is increasingly feeling phantom pain in that part of the soul where people usually have hopes for the future.
“The night begins” is a stream of consciousness of a man in his forties, thinking about a midlife crisis, when you are surprised to notice graying in your hair, excess fat on your waist, and thoughts about the proximity of death in your head; when simple nausea arouses suspicion of possible stomach cancer, and the wife's silence is about extinct love (after all, people, according to Proust, are divided into those who kiss and those who are kissed); in other words: the fortieth anniversary, according to Cunningham, is the age of exacerbated hypochondria.
In addition to the obvious reference to Mannov's "Death in Venice", "Night ..." has other twin novels - for example, intonationally the book resembles "Remains of the Day" by Kazuo Ishiguro (even the names overlap) - here the motives of senseless duty and melancholy are gradually gaining force as the text moves. Yesterday you thought you were changing the world, but today you are like Damien Hirst's installation: a dead shark in a formaldehyde aquarium. You have teeth, but you never learned to bite. And all you can do is entertain collectors - those same eccentrics who are ready to pay millions for things that cost twenty bucks, and sometimes even less - cheaper than the material from which they are made.
One of Peter's familiar artists casts antique-style amphoras from bronze, but as a pattern on them he uses obscene words, photos from porn magazines or the names of people who died in the African War of Independence. And the other one wraps the mannequins in thick paper, ties them with ropes and pours them in paraffin.
And they call it art ...
How not to be sad here?
They say the people get the government they deserve. What if it's the same with art?
Cunningham gives the reader the opportunity to look at the world through the eyes of such a person who sells "modernity" every day, and is preserved in it as in formaldehyde; yearning for real beauty and looking for this beauty in the little things - in the night city, in the reflection of neon signs in puddles, in the branching veins on the hands of a boy or in the facial features of a casual passer-by. A person who has lost control of his life - and is so entangled in himself that he has an inexplicable attraction to his wife's younger brother; and often - he is afraid to call his own daughter, because he does not know at all what to talk to her about. A person who desperately wants to feel something, anything, or even fall in love again? - no matter who or what - just not to think about this damn shark in the formaldehyde aquarium.
You can get «By Nightfall» at Amazon.
This article was sponsored by Edwina Murphy.
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