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Isabelle es una mujer viuda que vive en un pueblecito cerca de Boston con su única hija, Amy, de 16 años. La relación entre madre e hija es tensa y la comunicación prácticamente inexistente. Cuando un nuevo profesor de matemáticas llega al pueblo, la vida de Amy da un giro radical: el profesor y la alumna empiezan una relación que despierta la sexualidad de Amy. Y, poco a poco, Amy descubre un mundo diferente, que no tiene nada que ver con el ambiente claustrofóbico que vive con su madre. Cuando Isabelle descubre que su hija mantiene una relación con el profesor, se siente humillada y traicionada, rompe con su hija y, a la vez, se sumerge en sus frustraciones y se arrepiente de no haber vivido su vida.
Isabelle es una mujer viuda que vive en un pueblecito cerca de Boston con su única hija, Amy, de 16 años. La relación entre madre e hija es tensa y la comunicación prácticamente inexistente. Cuando un nuevo profesor de matemáticas llega al pueblo, la vida de Amy da un giro radical: el profesor y la alumna empiezan una relación que despierta la sexualidad de Amy. Y, poco a poco, Amy descubre un mundo diferente, que no tiene nada que ver con el ambiente claustrofóbico que vive con su madre. Cuando Isabelle descubre que su hija mantiene una relación con el profesor, se siente humillada y traicionada, rompe con su hija y, a la vez, se sumerge en sus frustraciones y se arrepiente de no haber vivido su vida.
Mutter-Tochter-Romane laufen schnell Gefahr, ins Triviale abzudriften, aber Strout gelingt es, diese Klippen zu umschiffen, indem sie sich nicht klaustrophobisch auf ihre Hauptfiguren konzentriert, sondern zugleich das Porträt einer Kleinstadt entwirft, deren Bewohner mit den vielfältigsten, ganz eigenen Stolpersteinen des Lebens umzugehen haben.
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
For Zarina
Primeras palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
It was terribly hot that summer Mr. Robertson left town, and for a long while the river seemed dead.
Citas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Some thought the world might be coming to an end, and even those women not inclined to go that far had to admit it might not have been a good idea sending men into space, that we had no business, really, walking around up there on the moon.
But the heat was relentless and the fans rattling in the windows seemed to be doing nothing at all, and eventually the women ran out of steam, sitting at their big wooden desks with their legs slightly apart, lifting their hair from the back of their necks.
"I can't shut up for five minutes," she said, and Amy, keeping an eye on the clock one day, found this to be true.
Here was something new to fear—her daughter's pity for her ignorance.
What followed was something that Isabelle would speak of only once, years later, when her life had become a very different one. Amy, on the other hand, would later in her adulthood tell a number of people, until she realized finally that it was one story in a million and ultimately didn't matter to anyone.
So for Amy and Isabelle—their lives had changed completely. When they spoke to one another, their words seemed pushed through the air like blocks of wood.
Isabelle, lying on her bed in the summer darkness, a darkness that seemed porous and soft and something you could almost put your hand into, found it necessary, as she did on some of these nights, to go over it all once more in her head, as though this dreadful and wearying process of repetition was the only way she could absorb her—and her daughter's—present state.
The rain began during the night. It began softly, so softly that at first it did not seem to be falling from the sky as much as simply appearing in the darkened air.
It was like she had done a murder—it was like that.
Someone separate, Isabelle thought again, touching tentatively a lock of hair that fell across Amy's cheek.
Lives, flimsy as fabric, could be snipped capriciously with the shears of random moments of self-interest.
But what could you do? Only keep going. People kept going; they had been doing it for thousands of years. You took the kindness offered, letting it seep as far in as it could go, and the remaining dark crevices you carried around with you, knowing that over time they might change into something almost bearable.
"We've destroyed your living room," Fat Bev said to Isabelle. "We might as well make pancakes and wreck your kitchen."
Bewildering that you could harm a child without even knowing, thinking all the while you were being careful, conscientious.
All the love in the world couldn't prevent the awful truth: You passed on who you were.
'What we do matters' is a thought Isabelle had again and again, as though just now, well into adult years, she was figuring this out.
She would pray, "Oh please, God. Help us to be merciful to ourselves."
But why, thought Peg Dunlap, rushing down the street, should love be so hard?
Most of them did the best they could.
And not Isabelle Goodrow either, who, in spite of moments of coherence and hope, watched her daughter's anxious face in the evenings and knew that she had failed the girl in numerous ways; who, in driving to a small cemetery in Hennecock and hunting out a small girl's grave, knew that she was placing flowers there not only for the murdered child, but somehow for her own child, too, and for the mother of Debby Kay Dorne, who Isabelle imagined was living her own lifetime of private, ravaging regrets.
Always in her memory the leaves would be golden, the turnpike lined with golden-leaved trees, showered in the sunlight of morning, stiff with autumn.
Amy raised both eyebrows and drew her breath in sharply as she smiled, as though to say, "Okay, let's go," and for a moment they were united, as if they had both agreed to blast off in a rocket and it was countdown time. For years Isabelle would remember that moment and wish she had spoken, had told the girl she loved her and always would, because for Isabelle, as she pulled out onto the highway, it began to feel more and more that it was Amy who was blasting off, Amy who was leaving forever, that Isabelle was only there now to pilot the ship, deliver the girl into the lap of her family, of siblings, of relatives who were hers, not Isabelle's.
It marked for her the endless days of Amy's solitary childhood, and those endless hot days of that terrible summer. All that had once been endless would by then have ended, and Isabelle, at different places and moments in the years to come, would sometimes be surrounded by silence and find in herself on the repeated word "Amy."
Últimas palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
"Amy," she would think, "Amy," remembering this day's chilly golden air.
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