Day in Day Out

by Mora, Terezia

• ISBN13: 9780060832643
• ISBN10: 0060832649
• Format: Paperback
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

In a scruffy park of a West European metropolis, a man in an ill-fitting trench coat is found hanging by the feet, half-dead.This is Abel Nema, the enigmatic yet fascinating protagonist of Ter_zia Mora's internationally acclaimed novel, a linguistic phenomenon who can speak ten languages flawlessly but whose grip on reality is slowly slipping away. Since his self-imposed exile from his Balkan homeland ten years earlier, he has been making a life among fellow refugees: a group of bohemian jazz musicians, an eccentric student of ancient history, and a gang of young Gypsies. His acquaintances among the locals include a neighbor who claims to have visited heaven (and introduces Abel to hallucinogens), the sordid characters who frequent the neighborhood sex bar, and a wonderfully zany family he joins when, desperate to extend his residency permit, he enters into a fictive marriage. Yet through it all he remains strangely hollow: for all his languages he has little humanity to put into words.Day In Day Out, Ter_zia Mora's fierce and beautiful debut novel, is at once an evocation of the newly multicultural Europe and an exploration of a deeply disturbed individual. It is a prose labyrinth of rare poetic force that marks its author as a major new voice in contemporary fiction.

Excerpts

Day In Day Out
A Novel

Chapter One

Birds

Let us call the time now; let us call the place here. Let us describe both as follows.

A city, a district somewhat east of the center. Brown streets, warehouses empty or full of no one quite knows what, and jam-packed human residences zigzagging along the railway line, running into brick walls in sudden cul-de-sacs. A Saturday morning, autumn in the air. No park, just a tiny, desolate triangle of so-called green space left over when two streets came together in a point. An empty corner of land. Sudden gusts of early-morning wind resulting from the cleft-like layout of the streets—what you might call a social bite—rattle a playground carousel, an old or merely old-looking wooden toy at the edge of the green space. There is a ring nearby, the kind used to pull litter bins, but free-floating, with no bin attached; there is litter strewn over the nearby undergrowth, which tries to shake it off in attacks of the shivers, but what comes off are mostly leaves whooshing onto cement, sand, glass, and well-worn greenery. Two women and shortly thereafter another on their way to or from work. Taking a short cut, treading the trodden path that cuts the green into two triangles. One of them, corpulent, tugs at the edge of the wooden carousel with two fingers as she passes. The stand it rests on gives a squawk. It sounds like a bird's cry, or maybe it was in fact a bird, one of the hundreds streaming across the sky. Starlings. The carousel twists and staggers.

The man looked something like a bird to us, or a bat, a giant bat hanging there, his black coattails fluttering now and then in the wind. At first they thought—they later said as much—that someone had merely left his coat behind on that carpet-beating frame or whatever it was, jungle gym. But then they saw there were hands hanging out, white hands, the tips of the bent fingers nearly touching the ground.

On an early autumn Saturday morning in a neglected playground not far from the railway station three women found the translator Abel Nema dangling from a jungle gym: feet wound round with silver tape, a long, black trench coat covering the head, swinging slightly in the morning breeze.

Height: approximately . . . (very tall). Weight: approximately . . . (very light). Arms, legs, torso, head: slender. Skin: white. Hair: black. Face: elongated. Cheeks: elongated. Eyes: small. Lachrymal sacs: incipient. Forehead: high. Hairline: heart-shaped. Eyebrow, left: drooping. Eyebrow, right: rising. A face that had grown increasingly asymmetrical with the years, the right side alert, the left side asleep. Not a bad-looking man. But good—that's something else again. A number of older, healing wounds plus a half dozen fresh ones. Yet apart from all that:

Something is different now, thought his wife Mercedes when she was summoned to the hospital. Though maybe it's just that I'm seeing him asleep for the first time.

Not quite, said the doctor. We've put him into an artificial coma. Until we know what's happening with his brain.

And since it was classified as a violent crime—no one, no matter how skillful, could work himself into that position—they had been asking questions. When the last time was the wife had seen the husband.

Mercedes looked long and hard at the face.

I nearly said, Now that I think of it: never.

But instead she said, The last time was . . . It was at the divorce.

Day In Day Out
A Novel. Copyright © by Terezia Mora. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from Day in Day Out by Terezia Mora
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