retirarse... ¿a tiempo?

leyendo a Zuckerman
a Philip Roth
la vieja tradicion de leer aquel que NO ganó el Nobel

ahora leo, con bastante pasión, American Pastoral
(and since we don´t just forget things because they don´t matter but
also forget things because they matter too much...)

y me estoy haciendo bastante amigo de este Zuckerman, al que recién estoy
conociendo a los 62 años (él, no yo).


Zuckerman es un novelista que, a veces, escribe en primera personas sobre asuntos que le suceden a él y, en otras ocasiones, narra historias de otros, relatos que le intrigan, siempre desde su punto de vista, desde su lado de la vereda.

no sé cuál es la forma de conocer a alguien que tiene muchos libros acerca de su saga. Ya no partí en orden pero sí tengo claro que, leyendo el comienzo de su último libro, el que supuestamente será la última novela de Zuckerman, creo que mi acercamiento a Nathan será un tanto zigzagueante.
Casi de atrás para adelante.

aqui va este comienzo que me dejó tan impresionado como envidioso. Qué ganas de vivir sin dvd, sin internet, sin nada.
Se puede?
Puedo?
Creo que a veces.




I'd been alone these past eleven years in a small house on a dirt road in the deep country, having decided to live apart like that some two years before the cancer was diagnosed. I see few people. Since the death, a year earlier, of my neighbor and friend Larry Hollis, two, three days can go by when I speak to no one but the housekeeper who comes to clean each week and her husband, who is my caretaker. I don't go to dinner parties, I don't go to movies, I don't watch television, I don't own a cell phone or a VCR or a DVD player or a computer. I continue to live in the Age of the Typewriter and have no idea what the World Wide Web is. I no longer bother to vote. I write for most of the day and often into the night. I read, mainly the books that I first discovered as a student, the masterpieces of fiction whose power over me is no less, and in some cases greater, than it was in my initial exciting encounters with them. Lately I've been rereading Joseph Conrad for the first time in fifty years, most recently The Shadow-Line, which I'd brought with me to New York to look through yet again, having read it all in one go only the other night. I listen to music, I hike in the woods, when it's warm I swim in my pond, whose temperature, even in summer, never gets much above seventy degrees. I swim there without a suit, out of sight of everyone, so that if in my wake I leave a thin, billowing cloud of urine that visibly discolors the surrounding pond waters, I'm largely unperturbed and feel nothing like the chagrin that would be sure to crush me should my bladder involuntarily begin emptying itself while I was swimming in a public pool.