Special topics in calamity physics - By Marisha Pessl Page 0,1

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ForAnne and Nie

Core Curriculum (Required Reading

INTRODUCTION 5

PART 1 13

Chapter #1: OTHELLO, William Shakespeare 15

Chapter #2: A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, James Joyce 22

Chapter #3: WUTHERING HEIGHTS, Emily Brontë 35

Chapter #4: THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES,

Nathaniel Hawthorne 45

Chapter #5: THE WOMAN IN WHITE, Wilkie Collins 54

Chapter #6: BRAVE NEW WORLD, Aldous Huxley 61

Chapter #7: LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos 73

Chapter #8: MADAME BOVARY, Gustave Flaubert 83

Chapter #9: PYGMALION, George Bernard Shaw 108

Chapter #10: THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT STYLES,

Agatha Christie 131

CORE CURRICULUM (REQUIRED READING)

PART 2 147

Chapter #11: MOBY-DICK, Herman Melville 149

Chapter #12: A MOVEABLE FEAST, Ernest Hemingway 171

Chapter #13: WOMEN IN LOVE, D. H. Lawrence 193

Chapter #14: "THE HOUSEBREAKER OF SHADY HILL," John Cheever 211

Chapter #15: SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH, Tennessee Williams 230

Chapter #16: LAUGHTER IN THE DARK, Vladimir Nabokov 242

Chapter #17: THE SLEEPING BEAUTY AND OTHER FAIRY TALES, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch 254

Chapter #18: A ROOM WITH A VIEW, E. M. Forster 262

PART 3 277

Chapter #19: HOWL AND OTHER POEMS, Allen Ginsberg 279

Chapter #20: THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, William Shakespeare 293

Chapter #21: DELIVERANCE, James Dickey 311

Chapter #22: HEART OF DARKNESS, Joseph Conrad 328

Chapter #23: ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, Ken Kesey 337

Chapter #24: ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, Gabriel García Márquez 346

Chapter #25: BLEAK HOUSE, Charles Dickens 361

Chapter #26: THE BIG SLEEP, Raymond Chandler 375

Chapter #27: JUSTINE, Marquis de Sade 385

Chapter #28: QUER PASTICCIACCIO BRUTTO DEVIA MERULANA,

Carlo Emilio Gadda 403 Chapter #29: THINGS FALL APART, Chinua Achebe 413

CORE CURRICULUM (REQUIRED READING) 3

Chapter #30: THE NOCTURNAL CONSPIRACY, Smoke Wyannoch Harvey 426

Chapter #31: CHE GUEVARA TALKS TO YOUNG PEOPLE, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna 436

Chapter #32: "GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE," Flannery O'Connor 457

Chapter #33: THE TRIAL, Franz Kafka 460

Chapter #34: PARADISE LOST, John Milton 471

Chapter #35: THE SECRET GARDEN, Frances Hodgson Burnett 479

Chapter #36: METAMORPHOSES, Ovid 495

FINAL EXAM 509

Introduction

I had always said a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it.

"Unless your name is something along the lines of Mozart, Matisse, Churchill, Che Guevara or Bond—James Bond—you best spend your free time finger painting or playing shuffleboard, for no one, with the exception of your flabby-armed mother with stiff hair and a mashed-potato way of looking at you, will want to hear the particulars of your pitiable existence, which doubtlessly will end as it began—with a wheeze."

Given such rigid parameters, I always assumed I wouldn't have my Magnificent Reason until I was at least seventy, with liver spots, rheumatism, wit as quick as a carving knife, a squat stucco house in Avignon (where I could be found eating 365 different cheeses), a lover twenty years my junior who worked in the fields (I don't know what kind of fields—any kind that were gold and frothy) and, with any luck, a small triumph of science or philosophy to my name. And yet the decision —no, the grave necessity—to take pen to paper and write about my childhood—most critically, the year it unstitched like a snagged sweater—came much sooner than I ever imagined.

It began with simple sleeplessness. It had been almost a year since I'd found Hannah dead, and I thought I'd managed to erase all traces of that night within myself, much in the way Henry Higgins with his relentless elocution exercises had scrubbed away Eliza's Cockney accent.

I was wrong.

By the end of January, I again found myself awake in the dead of night, the hall hushed, dark, spiky shadows crouching in the edges of the ceiling. I had nothing and no one to my name but a few fat, smug textbooks like Introduction to Astrophysics and sad, silent James Dean gazing down at me where he was trapped in black and white and taped to the back of our door. I'd stare back at him through the smudged darkness, and see, in microscopic detail, Hannah Schneider.

She hung three feet above the ground by an orange electrical extension cord. Her tongue — bloated, the cherry pink of a kitchen sponge —slumped from her mouth. Her eyes looked like acorns, or dull pennies, or two black buttons off an overcoat kids might stick into the face