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A Possible Life: A Novel in Five Love Stories, by Sebastian Faulks
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From the critically acclaimed, bestselling author of Birdsong, new fiction about love and war—five transporting stories and five unforgettable lives, linked across centuries.
In Second World War Poland, a young prisoner closes his eyes and pictures going to bat on a sunlit English cricket ground.
Across the yard of a Victorian poorhouse, a man is too ashamed to acknowledge the son he gave away.
In a 19th-century French village, an old servant understands—suddenly and with awe—the meaning of the Bible story her master is reading to her.
On a summer evening in the Catskills in 1971, a skinny girl steps out of a Chevy with a guitar and with a song that will send shivers through her listeners' skulls.
A few years from now, in Italy, a gifted scientist discovers links between time and the human brain and between her lover's novel and his life.
Throughout the five masterpieces of fiction that make up A Possible Life, exquisitely drawn and unforgettable characters risk their bodies, hearts and minds in pursuit of the manna of human connection. Between soldier and lover, parent and child, servant and master, and artist and muse, important pleasures and pains are born of love, separations and missed opportunities. These interactions—whether successful or not—also affect the long trajectories of characters' lives.
Provocative and profound, Sebastian Faulks's dazzling new novel journeys across continents and centuries not only to entertain with superb old-fashioned storytelling but to show that occasions of understanding between humans are the one thing that defines us—and that those moments, however fluid, are the one thing that endures.
- Sales Rank: #362105 in eBooks
- Published on: 2012-12-11
- Released on: 2012-12-11
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"Both intriguing and unsettling. [Faulks's] versatility as a writer is showcased in A Possible Life" Discover Your History "Most easily appreciated as a series of compelling short stories. Poignant, powerful and tender, they are lined by the pain and passion, hope and hardship, accident and design which make up the drama of an individual life" -- John Koski Mail on Sunday
About the Author
Sebastian Faulks's books include A Possible Life, Human Traces, On Green Dolphin Street, Engleby, Birdsong and the number one bestseller A Week in December.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Part Five
Anya
1971
It was a hot evening in July, and I was sitting on the porch in a chair made from an old car seat. I had a six-string acoustic on my lap and was running my fingers up and down the fret board, gazing into the distance. There was a can of beer open on the deck. We didn’t count alcohol as a drug and American lager almost wasn’t beer. Lowri was inside the farmhouse, and through the closed insect door I could hear her singing. Janis and Grace, the dogs, were rooting around in the yard.
Times like this, I often used to just sit there and stare out towards the woods. And I liked the idea that Lowri would soon be cooking, and that Becky and Suzanne, the stray hitchhikers, would be there too when it got dark.
There was the sound of a car coming up from the village. You could pick it out by the tower of dust as it snaked along the road, vanishing outside the clapboard post office with its tattered flag on a pole, coming into view again on the low-hedged straight beside the apple barns. It was an old Chevy pickup, painted green with a flower stenciled on the door, so I knew who it was before he even pulled over in front of the house: Rick Kohler with his kilo bag of white powder and the body panels of his truck stuffed with grass.
“Hi there, my man.” Rick was a scrawny guy with glasses. His hair always needed washing and the trousers hung off his nonexistent backside. He looked like the chemistry swot from school. He certainly knew a lot about drugs.
I offered him beer, but he waved me away. “I got something special for you, man,” he said.
“Christ, what next?”
Rick looked towards the Chevy. “Come on out, honey!”
The passenger door on the far side opened, and I saw a female head. Round the front of the pickup came a skinny girl about twenty-two years old. She had a floral cotton skirt, sandals and a white peasant blouse. Her dark straight hair was half tied back, secured by shades she’d pushed back on top of her head. She had suspicious brown eyes and she carried a guitar by the neck. Her high cheekbones made me think of a Cheyenne. She paused, unsure, and at that moment the sinking sun came through her hair from behind, through the short sleeves of her blouse, lighting her up. This was my first sight of Anya King.
She climbed the steps to the porch and awkwardly shook hands. Normally at a moment like this, Rick would be talking, rattling on like a typewriter. This time, though, he was as close to quiet as he could be.
Lowri came outside and Rick introduced her to Anya, who stayed kind of reserved.
“I hope you don’t mind,” said Rick. “I asked a few other people to come up later on as well.”
“From the city?” I said.
“Yeah. Some.”
“Sure thing,” said Lowri. I knew she did mind, a little, but would think it wrong to say so.
“Guess they’ll be here about nine,” said Rick.
I suggested we go to Maria’s place to swim first, and Rick said that was cool. With the money from two platinum albums, Maria had bought the biggest house in the neighborhood. A refugee from LA, she spent summers upstate with her husband, John Vintello, who was a lawyer with MPR Records in New York, kind of a straight arrow, not a shyster.
The pool was in the yard with apple trees round it. Maria put a Dave Brubeck record on the outdoor system. Rick came out through the French doors, naked, walked through the hissing sprinklers on the lawn and jumped in the water. Maria came out from the summerhouse at the far end of the pool, also naked, the skin of her breasts shining with suntan oil. I never much liked this communal naked thing, but it was okay once you were in. I looked back to the house, where Anya was sitting on a lounger, sipping a drink. She’d put on a straw hat and looked like she wanted to stay in the shade.
Rick leaned against the side of the pool, threw his arms back over the edge, and talked to Maria. His hair hung over his shoulders and drops of water fell from his mustache. He was getting up to full speed now, yattering away, and I wondered if he’d had a quick snort indoors.
John, Maria’s husband, came back from the city, driving his station wagon up from the railway halt. He was starting a month’s vacation and was in a happy state of mind. MPR had three acts in the Billboard Top 20 and they had six people from A & R out on the road scouting for new talent. John was planning to sail a boat with Maria and a couple of friends from Key West down to the Caribbean. He’d asked a few weeks earlier if Lowri and I would like to come aboard, and we had both pictured storms blowing in from the Gulf of Mexico and Maria’s pill habit in a cramped space. “But you’re a Brit,” said Lowri, “you’re meant to have the sea in your blood.” “And you’re a Yankee girl, you’re meant to be a pioneer.” “Horses, Jack. Covered wagons. We left the sea at Plymouth Rock and never got our feet wet again.” After the two of us had spent an entire evening calculating what might be the longest period between landfalls we knew it wasn’t our scene.
There was no swimming for John. He brought out some beers and a jug of margaritas. The sun was going down and I called Lowri from the phone in the hall. She said two of Rick’s friends had already showed up from New York—Denny Roberts, whose band Blue Ridge Cowboys had had a Top 10 album in the spring (a kind of country rock thing with interesting harmonies), and his folksinger girlfriend, Tommi Fontaine.
We took two cars back to the farm, and I finally got Anya to talk a little. Her voice was rich and low. She told me she’d been playing in a coffee bar in the Village when Rick came up and spoke to her after her set. “I was, like, a little distrustful of this guy coming on to me. I’ve been handling my own material for three years. Making my own bookings.”
“You were still in a coffee bar?”
“Sure. But a New York coffee bar. To a girl from Devils Lake, North Dakota, a Village coffee bar’s as good as Radio City.”
“How long have you been in New York?”
“Two years. I had a job in a kind of songwriting factory for a bit.”
“The Brill Building?”
“Yeah, like that, only worse. In Brooklyn. We were in a row of small cubicles. It was like a musical reform school. A state pen for tunesmiths. I sold two songs. Two B-sides.”
“And you left?”
“Yeah, I’d started hearing songs on albums that weren’t made for commercial radio. Songs with real words. I saw you could write a song about . . . you know, anything.”
“Not just love songs.”
“Sure. And you could write for your own voice, to your own strengths.”
“Are we going to hear you play?”
She smiled—the first time I’d seen her smile. It was a little lopsided. “It’s a long way to bring a guitar and leave it in the trunk.”
“I look forward to it. Rick Kohler has great taste.”
She looked at the floor of the car, then back up at me. “I liked your last record, by the way,” she said. Her eyes were flaring with light, but guarded.
“Thank you. We’ve pretty much broken up. The band, I mean. I didn’t like the production. I thought it was too West Coast.”
Anya focused on rolling a small cigarette with tobacco from a tin in her Mexican shoulder bag, as though she felt she’d given enough of herself for now. She felt no awkwardness in just shutting down. There were no fade-outs, no good-byes.
The farmhouse we lived in had once been little more than a barn and was still only half converted. In the music room at one end of the ground floor, there were a piano, three guitars, various harmonicas, maracas and tambourines, and a double-height window that gave onto the woods. At the other end of the ground floor, Lowri had made a living space with sofas and a kitchen and a brick fireplace, which we seldom used for fear of setting light to the whole building. There were red curtains at the window, cottage furniture and always jars of wildflowers. The two bedrooms were upstairs, in what had once been a hayloft.
Two more friends of Rick’s showed up, plus Becky and Suzanne, and after we’d all eaten we went outside and sat on the grass. Rick and I took guitars and played a bit just to set the atmosphere, which was fairly mellow in any case, with red wine and some fat joints going round. It was still hot. We’d brought out a couple of hurricane lamps and some candles and you could see the moths zooming about crazily.
I remember so well how Rick laid down his guitar and stood up, smirking from ear to ear, like a kid who knows some stupendous news.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, bowing, his red cigarette-end arcing back in the flourish of his hand, “may I present to you something the like of which you have never heard before in your life, the unique . . . Anya King.”
Anya, cross-legged and unsmiling, took up her own guitar and began to finger a few notes, stopping to tune the strings. She had a delicate picking touch with the right hand, and the sound of the instrument was ethereal. It wasn’t the metal six-string tone we were all used to. I wondered whether it was the guitar itself or the tuning.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll sing four songs. This first one’s called ‘Genevieve.’ ”
For a long half minute, the fingers picked with fussy precision, seeming to use the top three strings only. At last the thumb flushed an arpeggio, bringing the lower notes in for the first time, then it was back to the home chords, minor, frosty. And then came the voice. It was high and clear, m...
Most helpful customer reviews
40 of 41 people found the following review helpful.
A Possible Masterpiece
By KasaC
It is unclear at first why this book of 5 disparate stories, set in different times on different continents with varying main characters, has been described as a novel. 'There does not appear to be any communal connection, as in, say Cloud Atlas. Only at the end will all the parts dovetail in surprising ways. The main characters do share certain qualities -- isolation, societal outsiders, content in their solitude. They are not psychopathically xenophobic, and will react to others. But they all seem to carry with themselves a self-sufficiency in which they live their lives. They have the sense they've experienced "this" before, encountered other characters before (Where or When?).
Throughout Faulks writes gorgeous prose, creating evocative images of familiar landscapes that seem even more vibrant in his hands. The scenes in the Nazi work camp, for instance, are more brutal than previously encountered; the orphanages more realistically produced. The reader can almost smell the outer landscape and feel its heat. He is an amazing writer with an original style. Even the placement of the stories, the order in which they are arranged, is intriguing. They are not chronological, but there is a certain logic. As with Kieslowski's Blue, White and Red movies, or even with his Decalogue, there is a sense in the connections of these stories that can only be fully recognized after completion.
48 of 55 people found the following review helpful.
Review of 'A Possible Life' by Sebastian Faulks
By CPHowe
Described by the publisher as a novel, this latest offering by the highly-regarded Sebastian Faulks - the Financial Times says, `Faulks is beyond doubt a master,' - is in fact a collection of five stories. Each story has its own title, but they are also labelled Parts I to V, signalling that they are supposed to form a coherent whole; that they are in some way linked.
A Possible Life reminded me a little of Edward P Jones' two volumes of linked short stories, All Aunt Hagar's Children and Lost In The City. The links between Jones' stories are subtle and curious; a name might re-appear in a different context, or a location will feature again, but at a different time or with different people. The connections between the five stories in A Possible Life are even less obvious, and reflect Faulks' fascination with what makes us human. Science, consciousness, artistic creativity, families, love and the Holocaust all feature. Only once the book is finished is it possible to reflect on the stories as a collection, and try and make sense of them.
Each story traverses the whole of its subject's life, set in different times and places from 18th century France to mid-21st century Italy. The middle three stories struggled to live up to the emotional and heart-breaking narrative of the first - the stoicism and suffering of a man subject to the horrors of the Second World War - or the re-imagining of the love affair between Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash on which the fifth and final story is loosely based. The first story sets such a high standard, although it certainly has flaws, that the rest were always going to be hard-pressed to follow it. Its strength perhaps explains why I felt such disappointment at turning the page and realising that `Part II' was a completely different story.
What is it that makes the middle three stories less satisfactory? Writing about the future, unless you're a top notch science fiction writer, is always a challenge. The knowing nods to the present that make science fiction interesting - the novelty of someone reading printed newspapers instead of screens, or a reference back to the global financial crisis - have to be done extremely well, otherwise they seem a little obvious, a little contrived.
The Victorian workhouse boy who toils his way to a comfortable life, against the odds and with family challenges that test his integrity, seemed too much like a parable. And the 18th century French servant girl who leads a life of drudgery just didn't have enough depth to satisfy me, despite Faulks showing us the families for whom she works, with all their pretensions and shortcomings.
I also had a problem with the way that for just a paragraph or two, in each story, Faulks shifts the point of view away from the protagonist. It is difficult to imagine this is unintentional but when, in fiction, the point of view changes temporarily to another character then shifts back again, it is as if the writer has given up on finding a way to show us what he wants through the eyes of his protagonist. There are lots of great books where the point of view jumps around all over the place - Nicola Barker's Behindlings or The Believers by Zoe Heller - but it is unusual to find examples of what Faulks has done in A Possible Life. Perhaps he's trying to show how human consciousness flickers in and out of focus, how we can't know everything? Perhaps, but the result is unconvincing, and doesn't feel right.
Faulks' decision to put what are, effectively, five novellas into one book makes them feel compressed and constrained, but the first and the last suffer most as a result; it feels as if there are longer, deeper versions waiting to be told; that important insights and events have been skipped over; that words have been sacrificed to make space for the other three stories.
If there is a common theme in A Possible Life, it is universal: life unfolds in many different ways, often we can't control what happens, and love is difficult to find and to cope with. Isn't that what most fiction is about? It could be argued that the middle story, set in the future, about a scientific breakthrough related to consciousness and the mind, is the `answer' to the book's question, but it doesn't do enough to properly fill that role.
By packaging these stories together with the title A Possible Life, Faulks promises something more profound than two strong and three weaker stories linked by only the most tenuous of threads. Rather than judge each on its own merits I was always looking for something more, and disappointment was inevitable. The strength of the first and last stories goes someway towards redeeming the book but, in the end, Faulks does not keep his promise, and we are left with a collection that is not, really, much more than the sum of its parts.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
A Possible LIfe: A Novel in Five Parts
By Gaby at Starting Fresh blog
In A Possible Life: A Novel in Five Parts Sebastian Faulks gives us five separate stories each with a distinct flavor and each a complete whole. The stories are set in different places in Europe and different times with different characters. I'll admit that I may have been a bit distracted while reading stories 2-5 as I kept trying to find connections between the characters and stories. While each story stands on its own, I kept trying to imagine where and how the stories would connect. Unfortunately, I this attempt to pinpoint the connections detracted from enjoying the novel as a whole.
Of the five stories, the first two were my particular favorites. The first tells the story of Geoffrey in 1939, a young man in England who enters the Diplomatic Service before the start of World War II. A linguist by training and an introvert by nature, Geoffrey finds himself working with an old rival to strengthen the French Resistance and eventually lands in a POW. Others found Geoffrey off putting, but I could understand his coldness and found him to be surprisingly sympathetic.
The second tells us about Billy in 1859. Young Billy is the third of five children in a desperately poor family. At seven years of age, BIlly is sold to a work house that sounds bleak and hopeless. Reminiscent of Oliver Twist, Billy endures brutal teachers, constant hunger and cold, "I wasn't alive, I was only breathing. At night in the bed in the floor I slept. I pulled the blanket right up over my head. I didn't have any thoughts. I didn't know anything to think about. And I didn't dream neither." Patience, luck, and constant effort enable Billy to change his circumstances. As Billy prospers, his life grows complicated - and his story develops.
The next three stories are of women. The third is about Elena, a brilliant scientist in futuristic Europe in 2029. The fourth, a poor and illiterate orphan Jeanne who lived and worked in small villages in France 1822. The last tells the story of a young and beautiful musician named Anya in in 1971 as told by someone fast falling in love with her as her career takes flight. The last story is full of hope and heartbreak and the ups and downs of a life devoted to the making of unforgettable music.
A Possible Life is unusual and beautifully written. I recommend them - see which stories speak to you.
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