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Pitchman's Blues (Paperback)
Loot Price: R506
Discovery Miles 5 060
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Pitchman's Blues (Paperback)
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Loot Price R506
Discovery Miles 5 060
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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This short story collection offers snapshots of a life. A kid is
set up by an old uncle to think he's going to be scalped. Seeing
demons in every shadow a few nights later, he's told by an older
cousin it was all a joke, that adults always seem to want kids to
go through the same bad things they did. Just how they are. Shut
up, he's advised. Get used to it. Hunkered in the dark listening.
In the next room, bubbling a bottle with a drinking buddy, his Old
Man telling tales of roadhouse glory. Bad odds fist fights,
rearranged faces that stay that way. For weeks he wakes afraid to
touch his face. Will his nose, ears and eyes have shifted places
while he slept, his face forever scrambled, rearranged? Riots and
war. Conscription. The fights, the violence no longer just yarns
heard late at night. Drafted at eighteen, he has to decide, will he
go halfway round the world to kill people he has no earthly quarrel
with? Considers conscientious objection. His girlfriend bluntly
asks him when he became a pacifist. You can't, she suggests, the
minute you get drafted, suddenly announce yourself as some kind of
Instant Gandhi. Not, anyway, and expect a Draft Board made up of
World War II vets to buy it. Teaching in a tiny mountain town. Some
kids, he's told early on, are just too dumb to bother with. Signing
on for a salesman's pay. Hit your quota or hit the road. Logic of a
kiss, that sprung free promise of what life can be, the one
constant throughout. A better way glimpsed, lost and found, here
and gone. Pitchman's blues.
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