Chang and Eng

Zusatztext Praise for Darin Strauss and Chang and Eng Stunning. Publishers Weekly (starred review) Richly imagined...a haunting and thoroughly entertaining parable of loyalty and love. Los Angeles Times Chang and Eng rocks with twisted passion! wickedly astute ruminations and a sly and powerful wit.James Ellroy! author of The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential Informationen zum Autor Darin Strauss Klappentext This stunning novel combines fiction with astonishing fact to tell the story of history's most famous conjoined twins. Born in Siam in 1811-on a squalid houseboat on the Mekong River-Chang and Eng Bunker were international celebrities before the age of twenty. Touring the world's stages as a circus act, they settled in the American South just prior to the Civil War. They eventually married two sisters from North Carolina, fathering twenty-one children between them, and lived for more than six decades never more than seven inches apart, attached at the chest by a small band of skin and cartilage. Woven from the fabric of fact, myth, and imagination, Strauss's narrative gives poignant, articulate voice to these legendary brothers, and humanizes the freakish legend that grew up around them. Sweeping from the Far East and the court of the King of Siam to the shared intimacy of their lives in America, Chang and Eng rescues one of the nineteenth century's most fabled human oddities from the sideshow of history, drawing from their extraordinary lives a novel of exceptional power and beauty.CHAPTER ONE When First We Met Monday, December 10, 1842 North Carolina Chang-Eng, the children chanted. Mutant, mutant. Now and then the little innocents sprang from the dust cloud chasing our carriage to cry my name and Chang's. The path we traveled cut through a droughty careworn field, and to either side of us a fast-passing scene of blond grass and dead milkweed thirsted under the burnt sky of sunset. My ear tingled with the nearness of my brother, who picked lint off of my shoulder and knew not to bump my head as he did so. His dark eyes showed little reflections of me. I was thirty-one. My life was about to begin: I was entering North Carolina. My brother and I did not know that love was soon to deliver us. But twenty-one children and three decades later, how obvious it seems that everything to follow was a consequence of that evening. When you know you are dying, self-deceptions fly from your bedside like embers off a bonfire. Alone in the dark with a final chance to bind together circumstances that have made you a peasant who sells duck eggs on the Mekong one day and the South's most famous temperance advocate the next, you see a curtain open onto the landmark moments of your past. When Chang and I arrived in North Carolina, we were coming to the end of yet another tour, exhibiting the bond that the public could not see without assuming we two were so very different from everybody else. The halfwit we'd hired drove at a quick pace. And now, jounced inside a rickety carriage that had the legend the siamese twin in chipping yellow paint on its doors, I was trying to nap beside Chang. My eyes were not closed for long. My brother tapped my shoulder. Eng? I knew better than to ask him to quiet when he was in one of his talkative moods. Maybe, Chang said, you read out loud? He spoke in a soft voice whenever asking me for something. Now? I made a show of closing my eyes more tightly. I'd prefer not. A Shakespeare speech from your book, make the trip go faster? There was a shiver in his words from the bustle of our ride. I felt his half of our stomach spasm. Let me please catch a little rest, I said, opening an eye. Why don't you read it yourself? Me? You joking. The listlessness in Chang's smile suggested what ...

Praise for Darin Strauss and Chang and Eng

“Stunning.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Richly imagined...a haunting and thoroughly entertaining parable of loyalty and love.”—Los Angeles Times

“Chang and Eng rocks with twisted passion, wickedly astute ruminations and a sly and powerful wit.”—James Ellroy, author of The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential

Autorentext

Darin Strauss

Klappentext

This stunning novel combines fiction with astonishing fact to tell the story of history's most famous conjoined twins.

Born in Siam in 1811-on a squalid houseboat on the Mekong River-Chang and Eng Bunker were international celebrities before the age of twenty. Touring the world's stages as a circus act, they settled in the American South just prior to the Civil War. They eventually married two sisters from North Carolina, fathering twenty-one children between them, and lived for more than six decades never more than seven inches apart, attached at the chest by a small band of skin and cartilage.

Woven from the fabric of fact, myth, and imagination, Strauss's narrative gives poignant, articulate voice to these legendary brothers, and humanizes the freakish legend that grew up around them. Sweeping from the Far East and the court of the King of Siam to the shared intimacy of their lives in America, Chang and Eng rescues one of the nineteenth century's most fabled human oddities from the sideshow of history, drawing from their extraordinary lives a novel of exceptional power and beauty.

Leseprobe
CHAPTER ONE

When First We Met

Monday, December 10, 1842 North Carolina

Chang-Eng,” the children chanted. “Mutant, mutant.”   Now and then the little innocents sprang from the dust cloud chasing our carriage to cry my name and Chang’s. The path we traveled cut through a droughty careworn field, and to either side of us a fast-passing scene of blond grass and dead milkweed thirsted under the burnt sky of sunset. My ear tingled with the nearness of my brother, who picked lint off of my shoulder and knew not to bump my head as he did so. His dark eyes showed little reflections of me. I was thirty-one. My life was about to begin: I was entering North Carolina.

My brother and I did not know that love was soon to deliver us. But twenty-one children and three decades later, how obvious it seems that everything to follow was a consequence of that evening. When you know you are dying, self-deceptions fly from your bedside like embers off a bonfire. Alone in the dark with a final chance to bind together circumstances that have made you a peasant who sells duck eggs on the Mekong one day and the South’s most famous temperance advocate the next, you see a curtain open onto the landmark moments of your past.

When Chang and I arrived in North Carolina, we were coming to the end of yet another tour, exhibiting the bond that the public could not see without assuming we two were so very different from everybody else.

The halfwit we’d hired drove at a quick pace. And now, jounced inside a rickety carriage that had the legend the siamese twin in chipping yellow paint on its doors, I was trying to nap beside Chang.

My eyes were not closed for long. My brother tapped my shoulder. “Eng?”

I knew better than to ask him to quiet when he was in one of his talkative moods.

“Maybe,” Chang said, “you read out loud?” He spoke in a soft voice whenever asking me for something.

“Now?” I made a show of closing my eyes more tightly. “I’d prefer not.”

“A Shakespeare speech from your book, make the trip go faster?” There was a shiver in his words from the bustle of our ride. I felt his half of our stomach spasm.

“Let me please catch a little rest,” I said, opening an eye. “Why don’t you read it yourself?”

“Me? You joking.” The listlessness in Chang’s smile suggested what it is to spend three decades within five to seven inches of one another. “Eng?…