Someone Called Derrida: An Oxford Mystery

ISBN-13: 9781845190316 / Angielski / Miękka / 2007 / 211 str.

John Schad

Opis

Someone called Jacques Derrida, someone called him on the phone, someone who was dead this was August 22nd 1979. A mystery, he thought; but it is a mystery that began more than ten years earlier, in 1968, when Derrida, a philosopher, visits Oxford and there, before the very eyes of the Philosophy Sub-Faculty, he dies, several times. Murder, he thought. And so I shall investigate, and begin with a sign that the philosopher says he left within a book from the thirteenth century, a strange fortune-telling book that he had found in the oldest part of Oxford s Bodleian Library. In the book are a host of cryptic questions, but the philosopher directs us to one in particular, a peculiar question about a boy, and the question is this: Does the boy live? The philosopher will not, though, give the answer; he requires, instead, that we go to Oxford to open the book for ourselves. So, I shall go. And, as I do, there is a phone call from a boy who had struggled to live. This boy was once my father, a man who, for the last five or six years of his life, suffered from some kind of terrible dementia. It was as if he had lost his memory and found someone else s; for he spoke of appalling things, unspeakable things. Above all, he said, I must telephone. He is murdering me. We have, it seems, another call from the dead and, perhaps, another murder on our hands. So, let us be going and not just to Oxford in the late 1960s but also to an English public school in the middle of the Second World War. And much else may yet demand our attention, may yet act as clues a forested silence near Freiburg, a stolen evening in America, an abandoned car in Paris. And all the while, all the while, the radio transmits, the TV is on, and, back in Oxford, analysts decrypt intercepted messages, a Jew investigates, the Great Dictator counts to six million, and Esther prepares to take the minutes."