The Vulnerables

Informationen zum Autor Sigrid Nunez is the author of the novels A Feather on the Breath of God , The Last of Her Kind , The Friend , and What Are You Going Through , among others. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag . She has been the recipient of several awards, including the National Book Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Guggenheim. Her books have been translated into thirty languages. She lives in New York City. Klappentext "Sigrid Nunez's ninth novel, The Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past"-- Leseprobe "It was an uncertain spring." I had read the book a long time ago, and, except for this sentence, I remembered almost nothing about it. I could not have told you about the people who appeared in the book or what happened to them. I could not have told you (until later, after I'd looked it up) that the book began in the year 1880. Not that it mattered. Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described. They should teach you this in school, but they don't. Always instead the emphasis is on what you remembered. Otherwise, how could you write a critique? How could you pass an exam? How could you ever get a degree in literature? I like the novelist who confessed that the only thing to have stayed with him after reading Anna Karenina was the detail of a picnic basket holding a jar of honey. What stayed with me all this time after reading The Years was how it opened, with that first sentence, followed by a description of the weather. Never open a book with the weather is one of the first rules of writing. I have never understood why not. "Implacable November weather" is the third sentence of Bleak House . After which Dickens famously goes on a lot about fog. "It was a dark and stormy night." I have never understood why this phrase has been universally acknowledged to be the worst way for (I forget who: something else to look up) to begin a novel. Scorned for being both unexciting and, at the same time, too melodramatic. (Edward Bulwer-Lytton, originally. In a book called Paul Clifford, in 1830. Others thereafter, in mockery, most memorably Ray Bradbury, Madeleine L'Engle, and Snoopy.) Unimaginative was the word Oscar Wilde used to describe people for whom weather is a topic of conversation. Of course, in his day, weatherEnglish weather in particularwas boring. Not the far more erratic, often apocalyptic event people all over the world obsess about today. Important to point out, however, that it wasn't normal fogcondensed vapor, a low cloudthat Dickens was talking about, but a miasma caused by London's appalling industrial pollution. It was an uncertain spring. Early each morning I went for a walk. It was my chief pleasure in a dearth of pleasures, observing day by day the arrival of a new season: the magnolias putting out their petals andso poignantly soon, as it seemed to me every year, but never more so than the spring of 2020shedding their petals. The cherry blossoms, even lovelierloveliest, agreedbut likewise short-lived. The daffodils and the narcissusnarcisusses? narcissi?and the gaudy tulips that seemed almost like wild mouths screaming for attention. "Too excitable" is how Sylvia Plath once saw a vase of "too red" ones. Like Rilke's roses "standing up and shouting red." To Elizabeth Bishop, the spots on the tips of the dogwood petals...

Autorentext
Sigrid Nunez is the author of the novels A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, The Friend, and What Are You Going Through, among others. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. She has been the recipient of several awards, including the National Book Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Guggenheim. Her books have been translated into thirty languages. She lives in New York City.

Klappentext
NATIONAL BESTSELLER 

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR, HARPER'S BAZAAR AND KIRKUS REVIEWS

The New York Times–bestselling, National Book Award–winning author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through brings her singular voice to a story about modern life and connection

“I am committed, until one of us dies, to Nunez’s novels. I find them ideal. They are short, wise, provocative, funny — good and strong company.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“With the intimacy and humor of a great conversation, this novel makes you feel smarter and more alive.” —People Magazine

“An ode to our basic need to connect with other beings, be they human or animal, even in a global crisis that told us to stay apart.” —NPR


Elegy plus comedy is the only way to express how we live in the world today, says a character in Sigrid Nunez’s ninth novel. The Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past.

Humor, to be sure, is a priceless refuge. Equally vital is connection with others, who here include an adrift member of Gen Z and a spirited parrot named Eureka. The Vulnerables reveals what happens when strangers are willing to open their hearts to each other and how far even small acts of caring can go to ease another’s distress. A search for understanding about some of the most critical matters of our time, Nunez’s new novel is also an inquiry into the nature and purpose of writing itself.