This Is All , livre ebook

Praise for This Is All:
An ambitious read Kate Kellaway, Observer
A warm, poignant and sometimes funny novel beautifully written and cleverly crafted a very readable book whose ease belies its length and complexity Kate Agnew, Guardian
A true novel, a work of art in which experimental narrative techniques embody and express the prolonged experiment in self-discovery - sexual, emotional and not least intellectual the book is immense, in size, ambition, scope and reach. The torment, joy and intensity of sexual learning can rarely have been caught so vividly a huge and wonderful act of imaginative empathy, for which all 16-year-olds have cause to be grateful, as does the art form of young fiction School Librarian
As always, Chambers writes with the fierce intelligence and honesty which distinguishes his work. If more novels of adolescence had this quality and seriousness, we wouldn t risk losing those readers who feel patronised by teenage fiction Linda Newbery, TES Teacher
Serious and self-absorbed, Cordelia is the antidote to the ditzy heroines of a thousand pink covers but it is an addictive read, even at 800 pages. Anyone who questions the validity of specialist teen fiction should read it Sunday Telegraph
Its ambition, its complexity and its length demand a slow, close reading, but one which will be more than repaid by the power and depth of its insights Irish Times
Chambers has delivered another provocative, informed, stimulating and controversial book Inis
Ultimately, this novel is more than a mere pi ce de r sistance; it is the masterpiece of one of young-adult literature s greatest ever living writers Michael Cart
With profound respect for readers, Chambers again stretches the Young Adult genre to its edges and beyond ambitious challenging and powerfully affecting Kirkus Review
Also by Aidan Chambers
The Dance Sequence
Breaktime
Dance on My Grave
Now I Know
The Toll Bridge
Postcards from No Man s Land
This Is All
For younger readers
The Present Takers
Seal Secret
www.aidanchambers.co.uk

THIS IS ALL
The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn
A DEFINITIONS BOOK 978 0 099 41776 7
First published in Great Britain by The Bodley Head, an imprint of Random House Children s Books
The Bodley Head edition published 2005
Definitions edition published 2007
Copyright Aidan Chambers, 2005
The right of Aidan Chambers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This edition published in 2008 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN: 9780810995505 eISBN: 9781683358442
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Amulet Books is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
ABRAMS The Art of Books 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007 abramsbooks.com
To ANTHEA CHURCH
I am indebted to many women, young and old, for personal information during the writing of Cordelia s story. Of a list of helpful books, The Pillow Book of Sei Sh nagon in the translation by Ivan Morris, published by Oxford University Press in l967, is primary; I must also mention the usefulness of a book on the biology of the female body, Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier, published by Virago in 1999. Generous friends in Japan sent me appropriate translations of Japanese tanka and books relating to the Heian period of Sei Sh nagon. In particular, I could not have written this novel without the assistance of three people, my wife Nancy, my editor Delia Huddy, and my friend, the teacher and writer Anthea Church.
A. C.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Permission to quote the following is gratefully acknowledged: the poems beginning Wishing to see him , The one close to me now , On such a night and The way I must enter by Izumi Shikibu from The Ink Dark Moon by Jane Hirschfield with Mariko Aratani, copyright 1990, used by permission of Vintage Books, a division of Random House Inc.; the poem beginning What shall I leave for you by Ry kan from Only Companion, Japanese Poems of Love and Longing , translated by Sam Hamill, 1997, reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications Inc., Boston, www.shambala.com, where the Japanese original is also given, and from the same collection, the poem beginning An ocean of clouds by Kakinomoto no Hitomaro; the passage beginning Man is afraid to attain what he longs for by Ivan Klima from Love and Garbage , translated by Ewald Osers, published by Chatto Windus and Knopf, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group; the poems beginning A word is dead and Wild Nights! Wild Nights! by Emily Dickinson, reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson , Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass., the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and fellows of Harvard College; the poem The Ship of Death by D. H. Lawrence, selected and introduced by Keith Sagar, revised edition, Penguin Books, 1986, copyright the Estate of D. H. Lawrence, 1972, reproduced by permission of Pollinger Limited and the proprietor; lines from the poem Cordelia, or A Poem Should not Mean but Be , from Collected Poems and Translations by Veronica Forrest-Thomson (Allardyce, Barnett, Publishers, Lewes, East Sussex, 1990), copyright Jonathan Culler and the Estate of Veronica Forrest-Thomson, 1976, 1990, quoted by permission of Allardyce, Barnett, Publishers; extract of 40 words from the introduction of The Pillow Book of Sei Sh nagon edited by Ivan Morris (translator), 1996, by permission of Oxford University Press and Columbia University Press; image of The Sluggard by Frederic Leighton reproduced by permission of the Tate Gallery, copyright Tate, London, 2005.
The editor and publishers have made every effort to trace the holders of copyright material in this book. Any query should be addressed to the publishers.
CONTENTS
Book One The Red Pillow Box
Book Two The Green Pillow Box
Book Three The Orange Pillow Box
Book Four The Black Pillow Box
Book Five The Yellow Pillow Box
Book Six The Blue Pillow Box
BOOK ONE
The Red Pillow Box
You
Pregnant.
What silly phrases people use: in the club, up the duff, a bun in the oven.
This one is better and is true: heavy with child.
I swell with you. I hunger for you. I m so besotted with you I want you out of me. I want to see you and hold you skin-to-skin right now.
Like everything in life, there comes a time with pregnancy when enough is enough, even for a pupative mum. Well, it won t be long now. A week. Perhaps less.
I m making this book for you while I wait for your appearance. I started putting it together as soon as I knew I had conceived you. I plan to give it to you on your sixteenth birthday. You see, a few weeks after you are born I ll be twenty, and I m sure those two events will bring my youth to an end, because after that I ll be a mother and no longer an irresponsible adolescent. So this is a kind of portrait of myself as a teenager. I hope we will read it together when you are sixteen and I m in my late thirties so that we can share the years of our youth, you in the flesh and me in written words, and find out how similar we are and how different.
You move in me as I write this, and kick with pleasure like a penalising footballer, you brazen bambino.
I know you re a girl. I didn t want to know, but a garrulous nurse blabbed the news after a scan. I wanted it to be a surprise at the moment of your entrance into the world - your coming out and your coming in. But I admit that I wanted you to be a girl. It being our time now.
Me and my window pain
Before I go any further, I must tell you a secret and make a confession.
The truth is, you were not my first ambition. A different mothering occupied me before you were planted inside me. And still does. Will you be jealous of your older sibling? Will you be rivalrous?
Here is how this other seed was sown.
Sitting in a bus with my best friend, Izumi Yoshida, on our way home late one night when I was about fifteen, I saw my face reflected in the dark window.
Suddenly I thought, This girl, this me, will be old one day, and will die. What will be left of her then?
I told Izumi. She said, You ll have children, won t you?
That seemed to be enough for her.
Her question startled me. Naturally, I d thought of having children. But I knew already it would not be enough for me. The way I d live on in a child wasn t the way I wanted. Children have their father in them as well as their mother. Children aren t their parents, they are themselves.
If anything is to be left of me, I want it to be of me alone.
As soon as I got home, I wrote a poem, the first of many. Not as a school exercise, not for a competition, and not because anyone asked me to, but because I had to. Writing it wasn t an option, something I chose to do, but was a necessity. And when I d written it I knew I d found the answer to my question.
face in the window
reflecting on reflection
window pain
written on glass
in memoriam
At the time, I didn t know whether my poems really were poems. I ve always loved poetry so much that I didn t dare claim the honour of the name poem for my scribblings. So I called them Cordelia s Mopes. Perhaps I should have called them soup ons - a taste of the real thing I hoped to write one day. All I knew was that my mopes said what I needed to say in the way I needed to say i