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Canongate Books - Niccolo Ammaniti

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119 pages

English

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FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOKS OF 2017It is four years since the virus came, killing every adult in its path. Not long after that the electricity failed. Food and water started running out. Fires raged uncontrolled across the country. Now Anna cares for her brother alone in a house hidden in the woods, keeping him safe from 'the Outside', scavenging for food amid the packs of wild dogs that roam their ruined, blackened world. Before their mother died, she told them to love each other and never part. She told them that, when they reach adulthood, the sickness will claim them too. But she also told them that someone, somewhere, will have a cure. When the time comes, Anna knows, they must leave their world and find another. By turns luminous and tender, gripping and horrifying, Anna is a haunting parable of love and loneliness; of the stories we tell to sustain us, and the lengths we will go to in order to stay alive.

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Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	03 août 2017
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781782118350
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0360€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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ALSO BY NICCOLÒ AMMANITI
Steal You Away
I’m Not Scared
The Crossroads
Me And You
Let the Games Begin
Niccolò Ammaniti was born in Rome in 1966. He is the author of six novels translated into English and two short story collections. Several of his novels have been adapted for film including Steal You Away , which was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, The Crossroads , winner of the Preimo Strega Prize 2007, and the international bestseller I'm Not Scared , which won the prestigious Italian Viareggio-Repaci Prize for Fiction and has been translated into thirty-five languages.
'Ammaniti sets a new standard in post-apocalyptic fiction . . . This story of children running whild in Sicily brilliantly manipulates the usual models even as it transcends their limits . . . in the midst of wonderfully detailed disorder, one girl name Anna struggles to survive, fighting off feral dogs and crazed children and enduring one of recent literature's most nightmarish visions of hell on earth' Guardian 'One of Italy's foremost literary talents . . . Anna combines the wayword fantasy of J.G. Ballard with comic-strip adventure' Big Issue 'Brave and uncompromising . . . A brutal but moving post-apocalyptic tale set in a world where adults have all been wiped out . . . written with such heart and compassion for the plight of the characters that you can't help but get sucked in and root for them' Big Issue 'Ammaniti won the Italian Strega Prize for I'm Not Scared , and Anna has the same taut narrative, with straight-from-the-bow suspense, but its mark is philosophical . . . concerned not only with the will to live but also what makes us alive' Irish Times ' Anna has pretty much everything you could hope for from a post-apocalyptic picaresque adventure story' The Herald

Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH 1 1 TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Niccolò Ammaniti, 2015
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in Italy by Giulio Einaudi editore
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 836 7 e ISBN 978 1 78211 835 0
Typeset in Bembo by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
He was three, maybe four years old. He sat quietly on a small synthetic leather armchair, chin bent over his green T-shirt, jeans turned up over his trainers. In one hand he held a wooden train which hung down between his legs like a rosary.
On the other side of the room the woman lying on the bed might have been anywhere between thirty and forty. Her arm, covered with red blotches and dark scabs, was attached to an empty drip. The virus had reduced her to a panting skeleton covered with lumpy dry skin, but it hadn’t succeeded in robbing her of all her beauty, which showed in the form of her cheekbones and her turned-up nose.
The little boy raised his head and looked at her, grasped one arm of the chair, climbed down and walked over to the bed with the train in his hand.
She didn’t notice him. Her eyes, sunken in two dark wells, stared at the ceiling.
He toyed with a button on the dirty pillow. His fair hair covered his forehead; in the sunlight that filtered through the white curtains it looked like nylon thread.
Suddenly the woman rose up on her elbows, arching her back as if her soul was being torn from her body, clutched the sheets in her fists and then fell back, coughing convulsively. She tried to swallow air, stretching her arms and legs. Then her face relaxed, her lips parted and she died with her eyes open.
Gently the little boy took hold of her hand and tugged at her forefinger. He whispered: ‘Mama? Mama?’ He put the train on her chest and ran it over the folds in the sheet. He touched the blood-caked plaster which hid the needle of the drip. Finally he went out of the room.
The corridor was dimly lit. The beep beep of a medical device came from somewhere or other.
He passed the corpse of a fat man crumpled up on the floor beside a wheeled stretcher. Forehead against the floor, one leg bent in an unnatural position. The light blue edges of his smock had pulled apart, revealing a greyish-purple back.
The little boy staggered on uncertainly, as if he couldn’t control his legs. On another stretcher, near a poster about breast cancer screening, and a photograph of Liège featuring St Paul’s Cathedral, lay the body of an old woman.
He walked under a crackling neon light. A boy in a nightgown and foam-rubber slippers had died in the doorway of a long ward, one arm forward, the fingers contracted into a claw, as if he were trying to stop himself being sucked down into a whirlpool.
At the end of the corridor the darkness struggled with gleams of sunlight that entered through the doors at the hospital entrance.
The little boy stopped. To his left were the stairs, the lifts and reception. Behind the steel counter were PC monitors overturned on desks and a glass screen shattered into thousands of little cubes.
He dropped the train and ran towards the exit. He closed his eyes, stretched out his arms and pushed the big doors, disappearing into the light.
Outside, beyond the steps, beyond the red and white plastic ribbons, were the outlines of police cars, ambulances, fire engines.
Somebody shouted: ‘A kid. There’s a kid . . .’
The little boy covered his face with his hands. An ungainly figure ran towards him, blotting out the sun.
The little boy just had time to see that the man was encased in a thick yellow plastic suit. Then he was snatched up and carried away.
Four years later . . .
Contents
Part One: Mulberry Farm
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Two: The Grand Spa Hotel Elise
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part Three: The Strait
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part One
Mulberry Farm
1
Anna ran along the autostrada, holding the straps of the rucksack that was bouncing on her back. Now and then she turned her head to look back.
The dogs were still there. One behind the other, in single file. Six or seven of them. A couple, in worse shape than the others, had dropped out, but the big black one in front was getting closer.
She’d spotted them two hours before at the bottom of a burnt field, appearing and disappearing among dark rocks and blackened trunks of olive trees, but hadn’t thought anything of them.
This wasn’t the first time she’d been followed by a pack of wild dogs. They usually kept up the chase for a while, then tired and wandered off.
She liked to count as she walked. How many steps it took to cover a kilometre, the number of blue cars and red cars, the number of flyovers.
Then the dogs had reappeared.
Desperate creatures, adrift in a sea of ash. She’d come across dozens like them, with mangy coats, clumps of ticks hanging from their ears, protruding ribs. They’d fight savagely over the remains of a rabbit. The summer fires had burnt the lowlands and there was virtually nothing left to eat.
She passed a queue of cars with smashed windows. Weeds and wheat grew around their ash-covered carcasses.
The sirocco had driven the flames right down to the sea, leaving a desert behind it. The asphalt strip of the A29, which linked Palermo to Mazara del Vallo, cut across a dead expanse out of which rose blackened stumps of palm trees and a few plumes of smoke. To the left, beyond what was left of Castellammare del Golfo, a segment of grey sea merged with the sky. To the right, a line of low dark hills floated on the plain like distant islands.
The road was blocked by an overturned lorry. Its trailer had smashed into the central reservation, scattering basins, bidets, toilet bowls and shards of white ceramic over dozens of metres. She ran straight through the debris.
Her right ankle was hurting. In Alcamo she’d kicked open the door of a grocery shop.
*
To think that, until the dogs’ appearance, everything had been going fine.
She’d left home when it was still dark. From time to time she was forced to go further afield in search of food. Previously it had been easy: you only had to go to Castellammare and you found what you wanted. But the fires had complicated everything. She’d been walking for three hours under the sun as it rose in a pale cloudless sky. The summer was long past, but the heat wouldn’t let up. The wind, after starting the fire, had vanished, as if this part of creation no longer held any interest for it.
In a garden centre, next to a crater left by the explosion of a petrol pump, she’d found a crate full of food under some dusty tarpaulins.
In her rucksack she had six cans of Cirio beans, four cans of Graziella tomatoes, a bottle of Amaro Lucano, a large tube of Nestlé condensed milk, a bag of rusks, which were broken, but would still make a good meal soaked in water, and a half-kilo vacuum pack of pancetta. She hadn’t been able to resist that; she’d eaten the pancetta immediately, in silence, sitting on some bags of compost heaped up on the floor, which was covered with mouse droppings. It was as tough as leather, and so salty it had burnt her mouth.
*
The black dog was gaining ground.
Anna speeded up, her heart pumping in time with her steps. She couldn’t keep this up much longer. She was going to have to stop and face her pursuers. Oh for a knife. As a rule she always carried one with her, but she’d forgotten to pack one that morning, and had gone out with an empty rucksack and a bottle of water.
The sun was only four inches above the horizon – an orange ball trapped in purple drool. Soon to be swallowed up by the plain. On the other side, the moon, as thin as a fingernail.
She looked back.
He was still there. The other dogs had gradually dropped away. Not him. He hadn’t closed on her over the last kilometre. But she was running flat out; he wa