Barbery A Strange Country

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-379-1
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 334 Seiten

From the acclaimed author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, A Strange Country, the sequel to The Life of Elves and described as a 'strange and poetic fantasy similar to the work of Tolkien' by the San Francisco Book Review, will transport readers to a lost world and remind them of the power of poetry and imagination. Alejandro de Yepes and Jesús Rocamora, young officers in the Spanish regular army, are stationed alone at Castillo when a friendly redhead named Petrus appears out of nowhere. There is something magnetic and deeply mysterious about him. Alejandro and Jesús are bewitched, and, in the middle of the sixth year of the longest war humankind has ever endured, they abandon their post to follow him across a bridge that only he can see. Petrus brings them to a world of lingering fog, strange beings, poetry, music, natural wonders, harmony and extraordinary beauty. This is where the fate of the world and all its living creatures is decided. Yet this world too is under threat. A long battle against the forces of disenchantment is drawing to a climactic close. Will poetry and beauty prevail over darkness and death? And what role will Alejandro and Jesús play?

Muriel Barbery is the author of four previous novels, including the IMPAC-shortlisted multimillion-copy bestseller The Elegance of the Hedgehog. She has lived in Kyoto, Amsterdam and Paris and now lives in the French countryside.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Barbery, Muriel

Weitere Mitwirkende

Anderson, Alison

Leseproben

GENESIS
1800–1938

PREAMBLE

The practice of storytelling is a strange thing. The day before the great battle of this time, in the sixth year of the deadliest war ever endured by humans and elves, at a turning point between epochs, the likes of which only two have ever existed in the history of the humans of the west, I must veer off the beaten path in order to continue the tale. Just as the earth never appears so vast as after the tide, stories and fables require the ebb and flow of the seas – and so, just as the waters are changing, a simple shell is revealed which alone encompasses the entire cosmos. It is our eyes, our ears, our feelings and our knowledge, and it is to that shell that we must turn for light in the darkness.

Here it is, then, slightly less than a century and a half ago: our lonely shell at the moment when the great tide of kingdoms is ebbing.

TO THE LIVING
1800

There were not many elves as apparently insignificant as Petrus, nor many destinies as brilliant as his. In fact, it seemed at the outset his fate was to remain as obscure as the woods and the good family of squirrels into which he was born. The Deep Woods, to the east of Katsura, was a region of mountain and forest filled with terraces of thorny pine trees, whose branches reached skywards from their twisted trunks to form a sort of parasol, so elegant you could weep. Nature had created them in great number, then planted them one by one in the rock, choosing each location as if it were the setting for a jewel. Then the entire scene was cloaked in mist, and as it emerged from the void it revealed a landscape of peaks crowned with pine trees that seemed to be writing upon the sky. The Deep Woods were highly valued by the community of elves and, bathed in the majesty of high-altitude fog, they went there to admire the rising and setting of a sun that glorified every branch and every delicate twist of foliage. From one summit to the next the elves proclaimed the beauty of the sight, and Petrus grew up with these dawns and twilights that rustled with sounds and poetry. The ridges stretched beyond space, against a golden backdrop sketched with the curve of pines.

There are many mountains worthy of such moments of wonder, but none can compare to these. Fortune had decreed they would be vertiginously high and narrow, and wherever one looked, the slender mass of summits bathed in an ocean of clouds. At times, the trees, set on a single salient point, were as delicate as lace in the great mossy void. At other times, the entire range rose above the cloudbank and offered up its succession of peaks. But what ultimately completed the picture was not the unending succession of undulating summits, but the fact that they overlooked a vaporous mass that seemed to give birth to each slope before planting the kiss of a pine tree upon it. Immersing yourself in the spectacle, where the mystery of creation seemed to have found refuge, brought you face to face with your own self; as if you were a mountain in a storm that turned the world on its head then restored it to the hollow of its own consciousness; and this was what the elves of every province came to seek in the Deep Woods, travelling great distances to stand in the morning to face the mystery above them. Later they would recall the hard rock, which was smooth and benign in places and sharp as a blade in others, and again they would see the landscape of the Deep Woods, the velvet mists, and the beauty of the mountain range, as if it were their own internal landscape.

Quite logically, the province was largely inhabited by elves that were also squirrels, bears, and eagles, who feared neither the steep crags nor the dizzying heights. The villages seemed to have been transported through the ether before being deposited on their high plateaus; and then all was hidden, revealed, and so on, to infinity. And so, everything that was true for the world of elves in general was true here a hundredfold, since the colossal spires reaching for the sky left no less colossal valleys to the mists, gigantic expanses where the hand of the elf could not be seen. From Mount Hiei, all you could see on the horizon were three needles floating on the magma until, suddenly, ten more broke through the surface, and you felt reborn. The mountains, rising out of nothing, hovered over a sea of emptiness; through the force of the void, spirit and rock danced on the summit of existence before turning back to nothingness; and these games of hide and seek, of incessant birth and dying, gave the mountain in return the shape of consciousness that it had lacked until then.

It was in such a land that Petrus – who was not yet called Petrus – was born and grew up. He retained a sincere affection for the mountain country and the poems of dawn. Raised on the affection of his family and the favour of the great mists, his first decades were filled with enchantment and love. Far from the sound and fury of the rest of creation, the squirrel elves made up a peace-loving house. They didn’t write poetry, but they gladly partook of the poetry of others and, although they loved the thrill of soaring through the air, they could stay still for long stretches of time. While they were frugal in nature, they knew how to entertain extravagantly, and even though they were far away from Katsura, they were never the last to reply to a summons from the Council. They were well adapted to their landscape: as dark as their woods and as noble as their mountains, they wandered in peace there, among treetops and cliffs, untroubled by philosophical crises or longing for unknown horizons.

Despite the idyllic landscape, Petrus’s youth had been quite turbulent. Among his numerous relations he was unique because, ordinarily, all elves are identical: their human form is handsome and dignified, their horse is noble and thoroughbred, their third animal is ideally proportioned, but here we must face facts: our hero did not correspond to the norm of the species. Shorter than his brothers, he also had more padding, which had grown, by adolescence, into a little belly, the likes of which had never been seen on any local lads, and, year after year, he grew chubbier, and the fine features of his kin melted into a rather round face. It is true that he had the most remarkable eyes in all the Deep Woods, and his mother had eventually come to believe that Petrus could be summed up by a pair of silver pupils. In reality, it was not only his eyes, but above all his gaze that was so striking, and the contrast between his chubby face and the pensive twinkle of his eyes meant that everyone around him grew irresistibly fond of him, so much so that the only elf in the mists who had a perfectly ordinary appearance had a special gift for arousing the affection of his peers. But others followed him not only because they loved him, but also because they wanted to protect him on escapades he oughtn’t to have undertaken, for fear of his coming to harm. The mists had never seen a clumsier elf: he had almost lost his tail by getting it caught between two boulders, something which in all the memory of the Deep Woods had never happened, and it had earned him the torment of remaining trapped in his squirrel essence until his appendage was completely healed (and he was forced to nibble hazelnuts which – another oddity of his nature – he only moderately enjoyed, and this added to the pain he felt in his poor crushed tail). It must be said that his rescuers, once the fear that he might be seriously injured had passed, had some difficulty in restraining their laughter as they set about moving the boulders. Three days earlier, the same Petrus had almost got himself killed taking a squirrel leap just as he’d decided to change into a horse, and he’d only been saved thanks to the thick carpet of fresh pine needles, where he landed with a stunning lack of grace. To top it all off, for no apparent reason he often tripped over his own tail. For an elf, this was as unthinkable as turning into a cauldron. In short, the obvious conclusion to be drawn from all this – even if one couldn’t really understand why – was that Petrus would go from one disaster to the next, but his lucky star would save him, every time.

Naturally, his awkwardness and appearance were only the tip of the iceberg. What lay below the surface was a mind configured like no other, completely indifferent to the matters of mountains – perpetual rebirth, merging marvels, and so on. The morning of his first hundredth birthday he gazed glumly at the sparkling summits covered in jade-lacquered pine trees and told himself he could no longer live in this sublime boredom. His usual sidekicks were there with him: a ravishing squirrel and a tall brown bear, full of the graceful, powerful vivacity Petrus utterly lacked – and, turning to them as they became lost in silent admiration of the landscape, he declared:

‘I can’t take it any more. I have to get away.’

‘And where would you go?’ asked the bear, tearing himself away from the splendour of the vista.

‘I’ll go to Katsura,’ said Petrus.

‘You’ll get yourself killed ten minutes into the trip,’ the other squirrel pointed out, ‘and if you survive your own bad luck, you’ll pick the wrong channel.’

‘It doesn’t matter where I go,’ Petrus said obstinately. ‘I just don’t want to end up like some old pine tree on a peak that’s never seen the world.’

‘But the world is inside you,’ said the bear, ‘in every pine tree, every peak, and every boulder you see.’

Petrus sighed.

‘I’m...