The Other Side of the World Read Online Free PDF

she liked to imagine Max had had in mind for her—for novels he imagined she might imagine into being were she to come across them one day.
    What she wanted from me was not my opinion—how could one have an opinion of an unwritten novel that might be based on
a title and a squiggle of words?—but my immediate and, more important, my unreflective reactions.
    Because what made me an ideal collaborator, she added pointedly, was that she believed me capable of a truly thoughtless response.
    â€œThanks,” I said.
    She stared past me with glazed eyes, then blinked. “Okay,” she said, as if she were waking up. “You’re right. Okay then. I’ve thought about this and here’s what I’ve come to—that I’ve never collaborated with anyone before, so I’m doubtless wary of doing so, and covering my wariness—my sadness? my fear?—with aggression. A familiar pattern because—and I’m on a slight roll now, Charlie, so don’t interrupt, please—unlike Mister James, a writer more generously sociable than most, who wrote that the port from which he set out was the essential loneliness of life—hardly an unusual journey for an Irishman—I’ve always believed my compass was set in an opposite direction: that the port to which I’ve been heading was the essential loneliness of my life. Can you understand that?”
    â€œYes,” I said.
    â€œYes,” she repeated, and she pushed several pieces of paper across the table. “So here’s the list—what I wanted to ask you about. And now that I’ve given it to you, do you know what that makes me?”
    â€œList-less?”
    â€œIt is apparent that you are more your father’s son than either of you understand.”
    â€œMaybe. But consider this too—that because you made your deal with him, he’s become listless too.”
    She tapped on the list with the eraser end of a pencil. “To the task at hand, young man,” she said. “Read them and then tell me, please: Which ones appeal most? Which ones seem of no interest? Which ones inspire your curiosity, and—question numéro uno —which one do you think I should use as the basis
for my next novel—or, to make it easier on you, why don’t you choose three, say—but in ranked order of preference.”
    I picked up the pages.
    â€œIs that too much to ask?” she said. “Too much responsibility for an innocent young guy like you?”
    â€œInnocent and thoughtless,” I said, correcting her.
    â€œOh Charlie,” she said. “You shouldn’t take my words as seriously as I sometimes do. I was just trying to get a rise out of you. My apologies—okay?”
    â€œOkay,” I said.
    This is the list she gave me:
    Â 
    Pagello’s Surgery . Memoirs of an aging Italian country doctor who had once been George Sand’s lover.
    A Missing Year . A veteran of the Korean War, suffering intermittently from suicidal impulses, returns home to Kansas in order to marry a fellow soldier’s widowed wife even while he struggles to come to terms with the death of that soldier, an act of murder he may or may not have imagined.
    Hector on 9/11 . Story of a Puerto Rican teenager who, on the day the World Trade Center towers come down, has an exceptionally successful 24 hours of romance with his social studies teacher and several frightened teenage girls, all of whom are in extreme need of tenderness and consolation.
    Tag Sale . A retired professor at a New England college organizes a tag sale in which he attempts to sell material from his unpublished and/or abandoned novels, and the ways in which this act affects the destinies of people dear to him.
    Sky Captain . An Irish priest, chaplain to the crew of a merchant marine training ship, dies in a Marseilles brothel and is transported back across the Atlantic in the ship’s freezer among sides of beef, cartons of