The Long Habit of Living
Author
Mark Zipoli
Author Bio
Mark was born and raised in Connecticut. He has a B.A. in English from Queens College/City University of New York, and has lived in California for the past 23 years. He’s worked for the New York Friends Group, U.S. Agency for International Development, the George Washington University, Terry’s Fish & Seafood, Inc., and for 18 years was the Administrative Director of Travelers Aid Society of Los Angeles. Mark’s short stories have appeared in “Uncharted Frontier” magazine; “Writing Tomorrow” magazine (he received Honorable Mention for their First Annual Short Story Award); and Hirschworth magazine. At markzipoli.blogspot.com, Mark maintains a companion site with visual references to the people, places, music, and art that are mentioned in The Long Habit of Living. This novel is the first in a series that he is writing.
Description
“We are often less than monuments to the heart…” begins The Long Habit of Living, a novel of complex relationships, unexpected ironies, and uncertain metaphysics. The story begins as three New Yorkers find themselves on the road to exile, fleeing despair in hopes of finding salvation in southern France. Told both in flashback and in present-tense narrative, the story, violent and psychological, sends the characters through events and adventures on the streets and alleys of New York City and through the winding countryside and dark history of the Vaucluse, in the Provence region of France. The central focus of the novel is Owen Sarjevo, and the events that bring him to shed his every principle and belief to consider and plan an ultimate act against a family member–fratricide.
As the story vacillates between New York and France, we find out the source of Owen’s headlong rush into perdition and his possible salvation among the eccentric characters and conditions he encounters. The novel includes Owen’s companions in exile–Sarah, his girlfriend, Walter, his best friend; as well as his older brother (a career naval officer), and his cousin (a bigger-than-life New York restaurateur). In France the story assays characters with just as wide a personality as those in America: a peculiar Catholic priest, a dying French novelist, and an unscrupulous German businessman. It is among this panorama of characters and the rich background of rural France that Owen tries to find redemption from his violent and corrupted past.
Book excerpt
On the morning of the fourth of November, as the neighborhood streets had remained silent and solitary for a couple compulsory hours, before sunrise, before the birds and other strangers had documented themselves with the presence of a new day, the click and snap of a man’s shoe heels on the pavement had fallen with a deadness into an unawakened world. I’d watched Lucian swagger and sway as he’d walked along the sidewalk. His hands were placed in his jacket for warmth and stability, his cigarette burned from his mouth. I was certain he knew nothing but the irritation of his bloodshot eyes and the longing for that restful slump into bed which precipitated a half-day’s worth of unconscious drying out.
The walk toward his secret apartment was ten blocks in length, of which the first three had looked, that particular morning, almost too extensive to bear. I could hear him mumble to himself that he’d drunk too much. As he’d lifted his left foot to climb onto the curb of the fourth block, the unnoticed, unseen, unheard entrance to his chest of a marksman’s bullet had stopped him like a fly swatter made of cement. The explosion of skin, the residue of smoke, and the immediate, swift flow of blood were all that Lucian, and I, could see in the confused light of the street lamp and the expected arrival of dawn as he’d fallen to the grassy border between the sidewalk and the road.
The undisturbed momentum within which Lucian’s lifeless body had become part was so harmonious, if one could include murder with such a thought, that it had appeared aesthetic. It was vicious for me to have smiled at the delicacy with which one bullet had pierced and had terminated a human being’s life. But I’d looked at it that clinically. I’d smiled, too, at the superiority I’d assumed in the “job well done.”
It was then that I awoke.
“How could I?” I said aloud, the words falling flatly in the solitude of my living room. “He’s going to do it that way, isn’t he?” I asked myself.
How absorbed had I become in Owen’s life was evident in the dreams I was having. Not only did I dream of events to come but I also dreamed of events past, Owen’s events: A life he’d told me about with the impression and interest that I’d found even when I’d first met him years ago. I was attached to Owen’s life.
If I thought about Owen I couldn’t do so without thinking of his father, too, because the similarities of face as well as temperament had made them so identical as to throw one into a quandary: Where did one life leave off and the other begin?
Author Website
http://markzipoli.blogspot.com
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