The Goldberg Variations. Mark Glanville. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Mark Glanville
Издательство: HarperCollins
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Биографии и Мемуары
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780007383306
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       The Goldberg Variations

      MARK GLANVILLE

       COPYRIGHT

      Fourth Estate

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      Published by Flamingo 2004

      Previously published in Great Britain in hardback by Flamingo 2003

      Copyright © Mark Glanville 2003

      Mark Glanville asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

      Source ISBN: 9780007118427

      Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2013 ISBN 9780007383306 Version: 2016-03-17

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

       PRAISE

      ‘Like C4’s ‘Faking It’ makeovers, The Goldberg Variations opposes two purposes seemingly too different for one person to undertake successfully. Glanville’s ongoing battle between football and music fascinates. One facilitates the other – his first trip to OldTrafford was a reward for passing Grade 5 clarinet. One impinges on the other – concerned about protecting his opera voice, Glanville lowers it an octave on the terraces. The emerging dialectic evolves alongside traditional rites-of-passage (first solo trip abroad, first love, etc) and against a backdrop of troubled sexuality – teenage frustrations kindled by his sisters and an inability to climax with girlfriends. Glanville’s openness is seductive and his memoir is disarming.’

       Time Out

      ‘A richly enjoyable and moving memoir.’

       Tribune

      ‘A chilling account of life on the terraces and of the loyalty it engenders. It is also a fascinating description of the long process of having your voice professionally trained for the opera stage.’

       Irish Examiner

      ‘A readable, funny and intelligent story of a man’s struggle to find himself among a confusion of different lives.’

       Cork Evening Echo

       DEDICATION

      For Joshua and Arabella

      

      Were the wind to blow even slightly against them My eyes would refuse to close HITTAAN BIN AL-MU’ALLAA

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

       Dedication

       VARIATION TWO: The Oxford Classicist

       VARIATION THREE: The Opera Singer

       VARIATION FOUR: The Jew

       ARIA DA CAPO: The Vedl

       Acknowledgements

       About the Author

       About the Publisher

      I must own that I could have assured any questioner that Combray did include other scenes and did exist at other hours than these. But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted by voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect, and since the pictures which that kind of memory shows us preserve nothing of the past itself, I should never have had any wish to ponder over this residue of Combray.

      Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust

       ARIA

      What makes me myself rather than anyone else is the very fact that I am poised between two countries, two or three languages and several cultural traditions. It is preciscly this that defines my identity.

      Les Identites Meurtrieres, Amin Maalouf

      Happy the man who can celebrate his diversity. I wonder how long, if at all, it took the author of the above to reconcile the disparate elements of his own personality, to recognise that they could live in harmony, and that his identity was a compound of them. For a large part of my own life the contradictory elements of my identity have been at war, and have fragmented rather than fused me. Despairing of any reconciliation, I’ve often wished or plotted for the destruction of all but one of them (which depended on my changing mood), so that I and it might live in peace thereafter. What follows is an account of that campaign.

      ‘So Abey goes into a mensvear shop …’

      Sometimes we’d go into ourselves, his captive audience perpetually on hand to applaud a nightly stand-up that ran until we’d all left home.

      ‘I vont to buy a suit!’

      With a shift of the jaw his face would fall comfortably into a parody of a ghetto Jew’s cheek-straining smile.

      ‘I think I can help you, sir,’ the shop assistant would reply with the bright, clipped elocution of the forties public-school-boy Dad had been.

      There