Fame by Daniel Kehlmann

Author:Daniel Kehlmann [Kehlmann, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Adult, Contemporary
ISBN: 9780307378712
Google: wDy_FQ8ydkYC
Amazon: 0307378713
Publisher: Pantheon
Published: 2010-09-13T16:00:00+00:00

Replying to the Abbess

Miguel Auristos Blanco, the writer venerated by half the planet and mildly despised by the other, author of books on serenity, inner grace, and the wandering journey in quest of the meaning of life across hills, meadows, and valleys, paced ceremoniously into his study in the front of his penthouse apartment in a skyscraper high above the glittering coastline of Rio de Janeiro. A blinding light came off the sea; on the other side of the bay, first clearly, then in patches of gray shadow, the shapes of the mountains stood out, their slopes edged with the favelas. Miguel Auristos Blanco shaded his eyes with his hand, the better to see his desk: two gold pens, seventeen well-sharpened pencils, a flat keyboard in front of a flat screen, and in the filing tray the perfectly aligned stack of pages of his new manuscript, Ask the Cosmos, It Will Speak. Only one chapter still to write after the entire opus had written itself with the same effortlessness over the previous four weeks as had all his previous books; this one was about the faith and the trust that were engendered by the gestures and rituals which served to express them, and not, as was so often supposed, the other way around: if you were true to someone, you would begin to love them, if you helped a friend, you would become more honest with yourself, if you made yourself attend a Mass, you would find that it ceased to be a blind ritual and gradually revealed the existence and nearness of a Supreme Being watching over you.

Miguel Auristos Blanco didn’t invent these things, they came of their own volition and found their way into the manuscript without any help from him while he sat there watching with restrained curiosity as his typing fingers put line after line up onto the shimmering white screen, and when he stood at the end of a working day, and—like now, for instance—blinked as he watched the sun go down, he was no less exalted and edified than all of his seven millions readers were about to be.

He sighed. With a quick movement of the left hand, on whose middle finger a small tapered sapphire gleamed, he stroked first his moustache and then his thinning hair. As always when he came back from the toilet, he felt both comforted and prey to a vague melancholy. He was spending a great deal of time on the toilet these days; his doctor had told him recently that he would have to have a prostate operation soon. Miguel Auristos Blanco tilted his head, licked his lips, and heard himself give a faint sigh again. He was wearing bespoke shoes of highly polished chestnut leather, white linen trousers, and a white silk shirt open to the third button. His gray chest hair was more sparse than it used to be, but his body, at sixty-four, was athletic, with the flat stomach only to be seen on people

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