Ангел на мосту

by John Cheever, Джон Чивер

В сборник Джона Чивера (1912-1982), выдающегося американского писателя, автора множества рассказов и нескольких романов, признанного классика американской литературы XX века, вошли его лучшие рассказы. Для творчества писателя характерны глубокий психологизм и юмор, порой довольно мрачный. Его герои - обитатели пригородов, где за фасадом приличий и благосостояния разыгрываются человеческие драмы.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

352 pages, Paperback

First published October 21, 1961

About the author

John Cheever was an American novelist and short story writer, sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs" or "the Ovid of Ossining." His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the suburbs of Westchester, New York, and old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born.

His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both--light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life, characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia.

Reviews

[Connie G · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a lot going on in this story about phobias in the narrator's family. It's a story about brothers who are very competitive. They may feel a little sorry for a brother with a phobia, but they also feel good about something that they can handle better than their sibling.

It's also a work about people who prefer simpler things before technology made things seem more dangerous. Flying in a plane, riding in an elevator, or driving across a long bridge were not things done before 20th Century technology.

The narrator has a phobia of long bridges. He was having a panic attack at the high point of the Tappan Zee Bridge, and had to pull over. A girl who was hitchhiking thought he was pulling over to give her a ride. She was a folksinger with a harp--an angel of the bridge--and she distracted him with her singing as he drove across the bridge.

Cheever had a phobia of bridges in real life, and his descriptions of feeling weak, gasping for breath, and darkening vision give a sense of realism to this fictional story.

"Angel of the Bridge" is story #43 in the collection "The Stories of John Cheever."

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Angel of the Bridge by John Cheever
Exquisite tragicomic story

This story has a strange, but funny start that reads almost surreal to me, even if I am somehow used with supernatural- unnatural sights-for instance, for quite a few days, on my morning jogging exercise I could view a dead cat, hanging from a bag that was thrown over the wall of a cemetery and got stuck in the barbed wire…
“YOU MAY have seen my mother waltzing on ice skates in Rockefeller Center. She’s seventy-eight years old now but very wiry, and she wears a red velvet costume with a short skirt. Her tights are flesh-colored, and she wears spectacles and a red ribbon in her white hair, and she waltzes with one of the rink attendants.”
So there is a quandary
- What is stranger, fiction or reality?
- A seventy –eight year old skating in a red short skirt?
- Or pithecanthropus living in a capital city and torturing and putting cats in barbed wire?
I for one, do not know anymore and it sometimes feel like an escape to read fiction, only to get the feeling of normality, with all the old women in fancy fauvist costumes that we can find in there.
Whenever it gets too creepy for my taste I just lose contact, interest and the narrative thread of the tale, like I do now with another novel I am reading called Swamplandia and where ghosts not only show up, but they marry one of the personages and kidnap her and take her on a boat!
One of the criteria of happiness is
- Diversity!
In order to counteract the hedonic adaptation, whereby we adapt to good things- food, nice cars, etc. - one way out of this quagmire is to try various pleasurable reads, movies, foods…whatever.
And in this vein, John Cheever is a master provider of Infinite Jest and pleasure, because you never know what is coming.
- Who could tell that a story on The Angel of the Bridge would start like it does?
I have been reading John Cheever with enormous merriment and I still do not see it coming when there is another shocking statement, or introduction, angle and I never know how much it is just detached humor and what percentage, if not 100%, is serious calamity or tragedy.
In terms of the angel, I am not so stupid- I guess- to take her ad literam, but still I wonder if it is completely a satire or it addresses the serious medical condition of people who have phobias that are nothing to laugh at.
Writing about something is really good.
As research has proved, and I see it with my eyes now, it does help to clear the mind and see things that only in writing you can figure out.
My best shot is that we have a terrific combination of humor and serious concern for the state of mind of those who see and feel things that most of us do not even register in daily life.
First the brother of the story teller has this fear of tall buildings and would not stand the elevator for fear that the construction would fall.
He even has to quit his job, when his company moves to the 52nd (?) floor of a sky scraper to the initial amusement of the narrator.
But then suddenly, on a bridge he discovers that he has a terrifying anxiety and is sure that the bridge would stumble.
So much for laughing at the misery of others, what the Germans call
Schadenfreude

[Kansas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Esta es una historia sobre miedos y soledad, ese terror existencial al día a día, lo reconvierte aqui Cheever en miedo a volar o a los ascensores, y en el caso del protagonista del cuento, el miedo a cruzar por puentes porque siente la tierra hundirse y él con ella. Claro que Cheever imbuye el cuento de un argumento más o menos sólido, pero realmente lo que al final cuenta es que quiere hablar de sus miedos y de su debilidad a la hora de enfrentar la existencia del día a día, y que ese miedo le hace de alguna forma cambiar su percepción del mundo en el que vive. En cuánto descubre su fobia, ya es incapaz de verlo todo igual.

"Podía llamar a mi mujer y decirle que se las ingeniara para venir a recogerme, pero nuestras relaciones están tan basadas en el amor propio y en las apariencias que admitir abiertamente una cosa tan extraña quizá dañara gravemente nuestra felicidad conyugal".

[Irina Podgurskaya · Rating 4 out of 5]

рассказ как жанр для меня штука вообще не очень понятная, особенно если это сборник рассказов - как медленно не читаю, все равно в голове остаётся какая-то каша.

но не могу отказать автору в изяществе и порой даже орнаментальности - стоило прочитать весь сборник хотя бы ради "Пловца", Кристофер Нолан мог бы снять по нему отличное кино, мне кажется.

[tyucatt · Rating 4 out of 5]

mi clase de escritura creativa es lo mejor que me ha pasado en la vida.

[Runed Platypus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Большая часть рассказов отдает магическим реализмом и вроде бы хорошо, но с другой стороны приторно-сладкая манера повествования слишком быстро начала действовать на нервы. Часть рассказов, очень трудно поддается интерпретации, что хотел донести автор? Зачем и почему?

[Classic reverie · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Cheever's "Angel of the Bridge" is a story about a man who finally can appreciate the fears others have which can bring on terrorising panic.

Story in short- After witnessing panic in his family members, he can no longer be amused at their lack of courage.


"Y OU MAY have seen my mother waltzing on ice skates in Rockefeller Center. She’s seventy-eight years old now but very wiry, and she wears a red velvet costume with a short skirt. Her tights are flesh-colored, and she wears spectacles and a red ribbon in her white hair, and she waltzes with one of the rink attendants. I don’t know why I should find the fact that she waltzes on ice skates so disconcerting, but I do. I avoid that neighborhood whenever I can during the winter months, and I never lunch in the restaurants on the rink. Once when I was passing that way, a total stranger took me by the arm and, pointing to Mother, said, “Look at that crazy old dame.” I was very embarrassed. I suppose I should be grateful for the fact that she amuses herself and is not a burden to me, but I sincerely wish she had hit on some less conspicuous recreation. Whenever I see gracious old ladies arranging chrysanthemums and pouring tea, I think of my own mother, dressed like a hat-check girl, pushing some paid rink attendant around the ice, in the middle of the third-biggest city of the world."

“What in the world is the matter?” I asked. “I’m afraid of elevators,” he said miserably. “But what are you afraid of?” “I’m afraid the building will fall down.” I laughed—cruelly, I guess. For it all seemed terribly funny, his vision of the buildings of New York banging against one another like ninepins as they fell to the earth. There has always been a strain of jealousy in our feelings about one another, and I am aware, at some obscure level, that he makes more money and has more of everything than I, and to see him humiliated—crushed—saddened me but at the same time and in spite of myself made me feel that I had taken a stunning lead in the race for honors that is at the bottom of our relationship."


❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌spoiler alert❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌

After his mother is afraid to fly and his brother cannot ride elevators, he thinks he is superior until after a windy day crossing the George Washington Bridge and panic stricken him. He tries to find ways to recover but only when a hitchhiker comes his way and sings across the bridge, he gains control of himself.


"He stopped in the hallway to recover his composure, and explained that he had been suffering from this phobia far over a year. He was going to a psychiatrist, he said. I couldn’t see that it had done him any good."

"We said goodbye in the lobby, and I went up in the elevator, and told my wife about his fear that the building might fall down. It seemed strange and sad to her, and it did to me, too, but it also seemed terribly funny. It wasn’t terribly funny when, a month later, the firm he worked for moved to the fifty-second floor of a new office building and he had to resign. I don’t know what reasons he gave. It was another six months before he could find a job in a third-floor office."

"He was quite all right on the ground. My wife and I went to his house in New Jersey, with the children, for a weekend, and he looked healthy and well. I didn’t ask about his phobia. We drove back to New York on Sunday afternoon. As we approached the George Washington Bridge, I saw a thunderstorm over the city. A strong wind struck the car the moment we were on the bridge, and nearly took the wheel out of my hand. It seemed to me that I could feel the huge structure swing. Halfway across the bridge, I
thought I felt the roadway begin to give. I could see no signs of a collapse, and yet I was convinced that in another minute the bridge would split in two and hurl the long lines of Sunday traffic into the dark water below us. This imagined disaster was terrifying. My legs got so weak that I was not sure I could brake the car if I needed to. Then it became difficult for me to breathe. Only by opening my mouth and gasping did I seem able to take in any air. My blood pressure was affected and I began to feel a darkening of my vision. Fear has always seemed to me to run a course, and at its climax the body and perhaps the spirit defend themselves by drawing on some new and fresh source of strength. Once over the center of the bridge, my pain and terror began to diminish. My wife and the children were admiring the storm, and they did not seem to have noticed my spasm. I was afraid both that the bridge would fall down and that they might observe my panic.”

"And it was at the highest point in the arc of a bridge that I became aware suddenly of the depth and bitterness of my feelings about modern life, and of the profoundness of my yearning for a more vivid, simple, and peaceable world."

"My life was over, and it would never come back, everything that I loved—blue-sky courage, lustiness, the natural grasp of things. It would never come back. I would end up in the psychiatric ward of the county hospital, screaming that the bridges, all the bridges in the world, were falling down. Then a young girl opened the door of the car and got in. “I didn’t think anyone would pick me up on the bridge,” she said. She carried a cardboard suitcase and—believe me—a small harp in a cracked waterproof."

"She sang me across a bridge that seemed to be an astonishingly sensible, durable, and even beautiful construction designed by intelligent men to simplify my travels, and the water of the Hudson below us was charming and tranquil. It all came back—blue-sky courage, the high spirits of lustiness, an ecstatic sereneness."

[Sophie Van · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dans "L’Ange sur le pont", un recueil de nouvelles, Cheever explore avec une acuité rare la vie en apparence tranquille des banlieues cossues des années 50 aux États-Unis. On y croise des mères de famille désœuvrées, entourées d’appareils ménagers flambant neufs, mais privées de véritable horizon personnel, et des pères qui, malgré une activité professionnelle plus ou moins valorisante, errent eux aussi dans une forme de vide existentiel. La guerre, omniprésente en creux, plane comme un traumatisme dont on ne parle pas. Le tout baigne dans une esthétique de villas impeccables, de barbecues, de sourires figés — et d’alcool, beaucoup d’alcool. John Cheever était lui aussi notoirement alcoolique.
Tous ces personnages fêlés (comme dirait Fitzgerald) et même névrosés, ont en commun le désir de sauver les apparences; ce qui compte surtout, c'est de ne pas choquer les voisins.

Cheever parvient à capturer cette tension sous-jacente avec une langue extraordinairement fine, ironique, incisive. Chaque nouvelle est traversée par des images saisissantes, qui illuminent des vérités qu'on a l'impression d'avoir toujours sues sans le savoir. Le propre des grandes écrivain.e.s c'est cet oeil qui révèle. Par exemple, Cheever parle de cette femme triste de ne pas ressentir de grandes émotions (la tristesse triste comme elle dit), que son mari tente de consoler en lui disant que "ce regret d’une vraie passion est peut-être, lui aussi, une forme d’émotion humaine".

Il y a aussi, chez Cheever, une tendresse désenchantée pour ses personnages féminins, souvent prisonniers d’un quotidien sans éclat. Certaines, pour échapper à l’ennui, s’inventent des amants new-yorkais pour s’offrir une sortie hebdomadaire, se faire belles, mais finissent par dîner seules au restaurant, premières victimes de cette mise en scène ridicule.

Enfin, un élément frappant dans ce recueil comme dans tant d’autres nouvelles américaines (Cheever, Salinger, Carver, Lauren Groff…), c’est la présence des enfants. L’enfant y est souvent un personnage central, et c'est à travers ses yeux que nous recevons le récit. Peut-être que la forme brève de la nouvelle, considérée comme mineure, autorise davantage cette mise en lumière de personnages dits « mineurs ». Mais il me semble quand même que la littérature américaine contemporaine donne à l’enfance une place plus importante, là où la littérature française tend à réserver les enfants à un registre dit « jeunesse ».

L’Ange sur le pont est un recueil que je recommande vivement, à lire… mais aussi à relire, surtout si l’on écrit. Cheever pousse à affiner sa perception, pour échapper aux banalités, et chercher ce qui, dans les relations humaines, dépasse les clichés.

[Isaias Garde · Rating 5 out of 5]

Apunte sobre "El ángel del puente", de John Cheever

Por Isaías Garde

Como Hemingway, es decir como Chejov, Cheever es narrador de indicios más que de aseveraciones, y de transcurso más que de finales. El ángel del puente, relato breve publicado originalmente en 1961, además de ser un buen cuento, se recibe como una lección de oficio narrativo en ese registro indirecto y poco conclusivo. Recurriendo a una de las primeras imágenes del texto, digamos que con Cheever estamos siempre patinando sobre hielo con gracia y fluidez, solo que la capa de hielo es tan delgada y abajo está el océano y apenas más abajo el magma infernal del centro de la tierra.

Cheever que detestaba las tramas casi en la misma medida en que lo entusiasmaba el bourbon, declaró en una oportunidad: "La trama implica la narrativa y un montón de basura. Es un intento calculado de atrapar el interés del lector al punto de que piense en ello como una convicción moral". Ese concepto es bien notable en este relato a través del cual el narrador, su madre, su hermano y un ángel musical -cuatro figuritas, cuatro muñecos eficientes despojados de todo macramé psicológico-, "progresan" a los tumbos, como cualquiera de nosotros, en una odisea de cabotaje que se va armando sola.

El tema del ángel, que da título y final al relato, encaja a la perfección ya que se trata, como muchos otros textos de Cheever, de un cuento de hadas amable y amargo, y en el presupuesto de los cuentos de hadas, los ángeles y otros monstruos siempre funcionan, aunque sepamos que no existen. Se entiende que los lectores realistas (o realísticos) demanden una constatación de lo narrado en aquella verdad-verdad-verdad a la que llaman vida real. Para ellos Cheever pone una pista tranquilizadora, el narrador reflexiona, un rato antes del final del relato que, alcanzado el clímax del miedo o de lo que sea, "el cuerpo y tal vez el espíritu se defienden inventando alguna nueva fuente de energía". Una instancia de salvación, aunque provisoria, a la que no nos cuesta nada llamar "ángel" sin tener que sentirnos místicos, ni ingenuos, ni autoayudados; sin siquiera tener que suspender demasiado nuestra incredulidad. El autor confía en nosotros, nos deja hacer lo nuestro que es leer. Y en Cheever o desde Cheever, nos sentimos lectores de alta destilación.

A tener en cuenta: Si leen a Cheever, no conduzcan. Recurran a un conductor designado que sea, en lo posible, lector de Auster.

[Sarah Sammis · Rating 5 out of 5]

S/M Uhoria Labyrinth 99CC99

[Mind the Book · Rating 4 out of 5]

I planeringsappen MobIsle Notes har jag en ständigt pågående psykologilista. Just nu innehåller den spridda anteckningar om hibernalhatt, Bretoncitatet "mentalsjukhus skapar dårar", Jimenez dikt 'Oceans', något om porr på Las Ramblas efter Francos död (?), anterograd amnesi i Memento, Professor Green om suicid... och så den här novellen från 1961.

Uppskattar så The Swimmer-Cheever som observatör av yttre och inre skeenden i sina skildringar av amerikansk suburbia. Angel of the Bridge öppnar starkt med en excentrisk moder och en äldre broder ansatt av hissfobi. Huvudpersonen är oförstående inför detta ända till den dag han själv utvecklar en plötslig irrationell rädsla för broar.

Utan att namnge med begrepp - vilka myntades decennier senare - tar läsaren del av en veritabel fallbeskrivning med förväntansångest, triggers och panikångest. Även hur den drabbade försöker resonera med sig själv samt motbevisa och motattackera rädslan, bl.a. genom att på eget bevåg testa KBT-metoden flooding.

I dessa passager ser vi också psykoanalysens tolkning av fobiers uppkomst, följt av den alternativa förklaringen att Cheevers alter ego (?) i själva verket hatar hela den moderna världen. Men med tanke på novellens titel, kan vi vänta oss en dea ex machina?

"I tried again to reason out my fear that the bridge would fall. Was I the victim of some sexual dislocation? My life has been promiscuous, carefree, and a source of immense pleasure but was there some secret here that would have to be mined by a professional? Were all my pleasures impostures and evasions, and was I really in love with my old mother in her skating costume?"

"And it was at the highest point in the arc of a bridge that I became aware suddenly of the depth and bitterness of my feelings about modern life, and of the profoundness of my yearning for a more vivid, simple, and peaceable world."

Hela novellen här http://teachershelp.ru/the-angel-of-t...

[JORDAN Morris]

shit