Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [0]
“The great strength of Alva & Irva is the portrayal of the sisters themselves, the best manifestations yet of Edward Carey’s compassion for people on the fringe…. They stand before us with all their imperfections on frank display, daring us to call them freaks but challenging us to look deeper and find what links us to them.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)
“Carey involves you in the way we live secret lives, the way we try to wring order out of chaos, the way time tinkers with memory and history.”
—The Independent (UK)
“Powerful … Carey is an enormously talented writer.”
—Publishers Weekly
“ … a book that starts out playfully weird becomes a beautifully affecting—and eminently topical—exploration of urban destruction, the persistence of hope, and the human need to memorialize. In the process it turns into a much broader and deeper book: a triumph of pure vigorous imagination—a sad tale of obsession—and a grimly plausible portrait of a city overwhelmed by catastrophe.”
—Patrick McGrath, Bomb magazine (US)
“Besides realism, there is an older tradition of the novel, in which people, events, places—or two or all of those elements—are quite awry. Carey’s amazing, amusing and affecting second novel belongs to that tradition … a genuine human comedy.”
—Booklist
for Elizabeth
Acknowledgements
Craig Czury, Joe and Renata Gayon, Ariel Kotker, Tom Langdon, Anna Searle, Gabija Veberiene, Jeremy Wellens, Claudia Woolgar and Maria-Cecilia Woolgar have helped me in varying ways through the slow process of this book: by taking me on visits to ruined collieries, by providing me with places to write, by daily sending me postcards of the same city, by keeping still in unpleasant positions for many long hours, by taking photographs of teeny-weeny buildings. I would like to give particular thanks to the ever-patient and generous Janos Stone, who nannied me through what was I’m sure for him the exhausting sculpture part of this project, and to Isobel Dixon, Ursula Doyle, Elizabeth McCracken, Richard Milner and, most hugely, Ann Patty for their wonderful advice on how I might proceed with the writing part of it.
You will find no new lands, you will find no other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same
streets. And you will age in the same neighbourhoods;
and you will grow gray in these same houses.
Always you will arrive in this city. Do not hope for any other–
There is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have destroyed your life here
in this little corner, you have ruined it in the entire world.
C. P. CAVAFY
Welcome to the history of
Alva & Irva,
the twins who saved a city
Introduction by August Hirkus: A New Statue for Our City
PART ONE: Dallia & Linas
A Love Story in Our Central Post Office
A Newly Married Couple Once Played Husband and Wife on Napoleon Street
Interlude 1: Coffee, Market Square
PART TWO: Alva & Irva
An Over-Protective Mother Once Lived on Veber Street
A Set of Female Twins Once Attended the School on Littsen Street
A Love Story Written on the Ceiling of the Central Train Station
Interlude 2: Lunch, The International World Hotel
PART THREE: The World & Our City
A Postwoman from Our City Once Travelled the World Without Ever Leaving Our City
The City in a House
The World Loses Its Head
Interlude 3: Supper: Tectonic House, Television Tower, Le Grand Lubatkin
PART FOUR: Entralla & Entralla
Two Sisters of Pult Street Were Once Given the Keys to Our City
A New Statue for Our City
INTRODUCTION BY AUGUST HIRKUS
A New Statue For Our City
There were once twin sisters in our city, trapped in a loneliness that was perpetually crowded by each other. One day, in a desperate urge to fit in, in a deep yearning to belong somewhere, these sisters decided to map our city, to make a detailed inventory of our home, to make precise miniature models of every street, of every dwelling. One twin stayed at home constructing this ever swelling model, built out of plasticine purchased from a toy shop on Pilias Street; the other