The Age of Reinvention Read Online Free

expiation—Nina, surrendering to the heroic romanticism of suicide for love . How beautiful it was, how powerful, how great. Nina never leaving the room except when the nurses asked her to. As for Samir, the case was closed. Neither of them ever attempted to see him again. His name was taboo. They pretended to forget him.
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    Upon his release from the hospital, Samuel quit his parents’ apartment (too expensive), donated their furniture to charity, rented an efficiency, and gave up pursuing his law degree. (He even wondered why he had begun it: to piss off his father, he supposed, but he was no longer very sure. His suicide attempt and the spell in the hospital that followed it seemed to have annihilated all his determination and willpower; from now on, his vision of life was blurred and murky, everything ambiguous.) He took a literature degree by correspondence and began a job teaching foreigners to read and write. Nina too gave up her studies—she had never liked law—and became first a sales assistant, then a waitress, then a receptionist. Nowadays she worked as a model for a few major store catalogues—Carrefour and C&A, mostly.
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    Look at him! My God, look at him!
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    There was something masochistic in the way they kept watching Samir’s media consecration. They could have changed channels, but no—their suffering fed their rage, their fury. (Finally fuel for a book, thought Samuel. Finally a chance to write a novel that might actually be published!) Samuel and Nina sat petrified in front of their Firstline TV set, bought at Carrefour for €545, payable in three installments, interest-free—an object whose acquisition had caused so much tension and discord between them, with Nina pleading for its purchase for years while Samuel argued against, seeing it as a threat, before finally yielding—realizing that nothing would ever be the same again, that something had been corrupted/destroyed/soiled forever, something like innocence, like the artificial bliss that ignorance provides.
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    Moving closer to the screen, Samuel examined Samir, wondering if he’d had a nose job, scrutinizing his tumid lips, his amazingly smooth forehead, the way he shone and swaggered on the screen, and seeing his own reflection superimposed on Samir’s image, in a cruel comparison. “Get out of the way!” Nina shouted. “I can’t see!” Samuel moved aside, then walked behind Nina, watching her as she knelt in front of the TV, in a sacrificial posture, intoning something—but what?
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    Samir smiled mechanically at the journalist, proud and happy to be where he was, where he belonged—you could see it in his puffed-out chest, the quiver in his upper lip. He lit up the screen. Nothing they had been through seemed to have affected him in the slightest. He was like a man who escapes from a crashed and burning car without a scratch, while the vehicle’s other occupant is dead at the wheel.
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    1 . Santiago Pereira, twenty-two, and Dennis Walter, twenty-five. The former dreamed of becoming an artist but was pressured into enlisting by his high-ranking father. The latter stated: “Success, to me, means fighting for my country.”
    2 . Kathleen Weiner. Born in 1939 in New Jersey to a shoemaking father and a housewife mother, Kathleen graduated from Harvard. But her greatest claim to fame remained her supposed liaison, at the age of sixteen, with Norman Mailer.
    3 . Her employer, François Brunet, is a French politician, born September 3, 1945, in Lyon, Socialist Party member and parliamentary deputy, the author of several books, the latest of which, Toward a Just World , had been a best seller (source: Wikipedia).
    4 . The daughter of Polish farmers, Sofia Antkowiak dreamed of becoming a famous dancer but became pregnant after a one-night stand with a soldier. Two months after giving birth, she threw herself under the wheels of the Warsaw-Lodz