روزی روزگاری: یک اپرای شناور

“A celebration of the power of narrative, of the questions it must ask and can answer ...” —New York Times--“A celebration of the power of narrative, of the questions it must ask and can answer ... [It is] brilliantly conceived, elegantly written, bursting with life, profound in its understanding, bawdy and funny, and comic in the wisest and best sense of the word.” —New York TimesJohn Barth, a moderately successful novelist just turned sixty, decides to take a sail on Chesapeake Bay with his wife, but a tropical storm forces them deep into the Maryland tidal marshes. Lost, Barth takes out his dinghy to search for a way home, but becomes embarked instead on a quest through the murkier regions of his own memory—a semi-memoir, staged as an operatic cruise through desire, vocation, despair, love, marriage, selves, and counterselves. From master storyteller and National Book Award winner John Barth comes a bravura performance: a memoir wrapped in a novel and launched on a sea voyage. A cutter-rigged sloop sets sail for an end-of-season cruise down into the "Chesapeake Triangle." Our captain: a middle-aged writer of some repute. The sole crewmate: his lover, friend, editor, and wife. The journey turns out to be not the modest three-day cruise it at first seems. As we sail through sun and storm, our skipper spins (and is spun by) the Story of His Life - an operatic saga that's part Verdi, part Puccini, and more than a dollop of bouffe, a compound narrative voyaging through the imagination. Crisscrossing the past, mixing memory with desire, our narrator navigates among the waypoints of his life, beguiling us with tales of adventure and despair, love and marriage, selves and counterselves, aging and sailing, teaching and writing - steering always by the polestar of Vocation, the storyteller's call. With all the narrative verve, playful flourishes, and dazzling prose that made works like The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, Giles Goat-Boy, and The Sot-Weed Factor so memorable, Once Upon a Time is a mesmerizing and entertaining performance from one of the most important writers of our time. An fantasy-filled sailing trip through Chesapeake Bay, in the course of which a writer recounts his life. The novel is written in the form of an opera whose arias serve as vehicles for digressions which would otherwise have slowed down the narrative. By the author of The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor