The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [0]
Copyright © 2010 by Matthew Gallaway
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Translation of the Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde used with kind permission of Christopher Bergen.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gallaway, Matthew.
The Metropolis case : a novel / Matthew Gallaway. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Opera—Fiction. 2. Immortality—Fiction. 3. Wagner, Richard, 1813–1883. Tristan und Isolde—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3607 A415515M48 2010
813′.6—dc22 2010013576
eISBN: 978-0-307-46344-9
v3.1
FOR STEPHEN
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
First Act: Contingency
Chapter 1: The Tristan Chord
Chapter 2: Through Its Street Names, the City Is a Mystic Cosmos
Chapter 3: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
Chapter 4: Il n’existe pas deux genres de poésies; il n’en est qu’une
Chapter 5: The Marble Index
Chapter 6: The Apology of Socrates
Chapter 7: Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To
Chapter 8: The Diary of One Who Disappeared
Chapter 9: Expériences nouvelles touchant le vide
Chapter 10: Rembrandt Pussyhorse
Chapter 11: Meine Musikdramatische Idee
Chapter 12: Kritik der reinen Vernunft
Chapter 13: Spiderland
Chapter 14: The Experience of Our Generation: That Capitalism will Not Die a Natural Death
Chapter 15: A Kind of History of My Life
Chapter 16: Je n’ai pas oublié, voisine de la ville
Second Act: Irony
Chapter 17: Dial M for Motherfucker
Chapter 18: The Psychology of the Transference
Chapter 19: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical
Chapter 20: A Section That May Be Skipped by Anyone Not Particularly Impressed by Thinking as an Occupation
Chapter 21: The Past Unfolds in the Wax Museum like Distance in the Domestic Interior
Chapter 22: Original Stories from Real Life
Chapter 23: Loveless
Chapter 24: The Motion of Light in Water
Chapter 25: The World as Will and Representation
Chapter 26: What Fun Life Was
Chapter 27: The City as a Landscape and as a Room
Chapter 28: The Fighting Téméraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken
Chapter 29: Blue Monday
Chapter 30: Ce Livre pourrait s’appeler Les enfants de Marx et de Coca-Cola
Chapter 31: The Intermittences of the Heart
Chapter 32: Do You Want Chillwave or Do You Want the Truth?
Chapter 33: This Screaming Girl Has Suddenly Realized That the Body Lying Under the Blanket Is That of Her Mother
Chapter 34: Into the Millennium (The Criminals)
Third Act: Solidarity
Chapter 35: We have to Wake Up from the Existence of Our Parents: In This Awakening, We Must Give an Account of the Nearness of That Existence
Chapter 36: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Chapter 37: The World Is the Totality of Facts, Not of Things
Chapter 38: The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths
Chapter 39: On Fire
Chapter 40: Fashion Is a Canon for This Dialectic Also
Chapter 41: Cocksucker Blues
Chapter 42: Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing
Chapter 43: In Distortion-Free Mirrors
Chapter 44: La vraie douleur est incompatible avec l’espoir
Chapter 45: There Is a Light That Never Goes Out
Acknowledgments
About the Author
1
The Tristan Chord
NEW YORK CITY, 2003 (via e-mail)
S—news!—your elder brother has procured four tickets to the opera on the Saturday night of your visit next month AND invitations to the after-party at Demoiselles, an old and rather exquisite French restaurant not far from Lincoln Center. There will be champagne; there WILL be chocolate soufflés. (Obviously M had a big hand in making this happen: you’ll be able to thank HER in person.) We’re seeing Tristan and Isolde by Richard Wagner,