Présentation de l'éditeur
Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About concerns a guy named Pel who lives with his German girlfriend, Ursula. Pel leads an uneventful life—quietly bluffing his way through his job and discovering new things to argue about with Ursula. But when his boss mysteriously disappears, Pel steps innocently into his shoes and his life spirals out of control in a chaotic whirl of stolen money, missing colleagues, and Chinese mafiosi.
Its fractured thriller plot punctuated by blazingly hilarious set-piece arguments between the hapless Pel and the unflappable Ursula,
Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About is a brilliant comic novel examining the unique warfare in long-term relationships.
Extrait
A THIN BEAM OF RED LIGHT
Where the hell are the car keys?”
I’m now late. Ten minutes ago I was early. I was wandering about in a too-early limbo, in fact; scratching out a succession of ludicrously trivial and unsatisfying things to do, struggling against the finger-drumming effort of burning away sections of the too-earliness. The children, quick to sense I was briefly doomed to wander the earth without reason or rest, had attached themselves, one to each of my legs. I clumped around the house like a man in magnetic boots while they laughed themselves breathless and shot at each other with wagging fingers and spit-gargling mouth noises from the cover of opposite knees.
Now, however, I’m in a fury of lateness. The responsibility for this rests wholly with the car keys and thereby with their immediate superior—my girlfriend, Ursula.
“Where—where the hell—are the car keys?” I shout down the stairs. Again.
Reason has long since fled. I’ve looked in places where I know there is no possible chance of the car keys lurking. Then I’ve rechecked all those places again. Just in case, you know, I suffered transitory hysterical blindness the first time I looked. Then I’ve looked down, gasping with exhaustion, begged the children to please get off my legs now, and looked a third time. I’m a single degree of enraged frustration away from continuing the search along the only remaining path, which is slashing open the cushion covers, pulling up the floorboards and pickaxing through the plasterboard false wall in the attic.
I do a semi-controlled fall down the stairs to the kitchen, where Ursula is making herself a cup of coffee in a protective bubble of her own, non-late, serene indifference.
“Well?” I’m so clenched I have to shake the word from my head.
“Well what?”
“What do you mean ‘Well what’? I’ve just asked you twice.”
“I didn’t hear you, Pel. I had the radio on.” Ursula nods towards the pocket-sized transistor radio on the shelf. Which is off.
“On what? On stun? Where are the damn car keys?”
“Where they always are.”
“I will kill you.”
“Not, I imagine . . .” Ursula presents a small theater of stirring milk into her coffee. “. . . with exhaust fumes.”
“Arrrrgggh!” Then, again, to emphasize the point, “Arrrrgggh!” That out of my system, I return again to measured debate. “Well, obviously, I didn’t think to look where they always are. Good Lord—how banal would I have to be to go there? However, My Precious, just so we can share a smile at the laughable, prosaic obviousness of it all, WHERE ARE THE CAR KEYS? ALWAYS?”
“They are in the front room. On the shelf. Behind the Lava Lamp.”
“And that’s where they always are, is it? You don’t see any contradiction at all in their always-are place being somewhere they have never been before this morning?”
“It’s where I put them every day.”
I snatch up the keys and hurl myself towards the door, jerking on my jacket as I move; one arm thrust into the air, waggling itself urgently up the sleeve as if it’s attached to a primary school pupil who knows the answer. “That’s a foul and shameless lie.”
As my trailing arm hooks the front door shut behind me, Ursula shouts over the top of her coffee cup, “Bring back some bread—we’re out of bread.” It’s 9:17 a.m.
The sto
