英语文学
Providence 豆瓣 Goodreads
作者: Brookner, Anita Random House Inc 1994 - 1
This brightly polished yet immensely touching comedy presents the romantic quest of Kitty Maule, who, in revenge against the impossibly charming and elusive man who rejects her, resolves to become "totally unreasonable, totally unfair, very demanding, and very beautiful," to any number of others.
2016年10月3日 已读
在两个世界、两种气质之间勉力挣扎的年轻知识女性,被撕扯的不仅有日日需要面对的身份归属,还有文学与现实之间两相映照的冷酷。其实读到结尾会觉得似乎什么也没说,只不过是一段波澜不惊的故事,但所有的波澜都发生在不为人知的内心角落,让平凡的读者们不由自主跟着产生认同。Anita Brookner的书我是第一次读,喜欢她行文的优美、爽利与机智。
外国文学 小说 文学 英国 英语文学
Carol 豆瓣 Goodreads
The Price of Salt
8.8 (8 个评分) 作者: Patricia Highsmith W. W. Norton & Company 2015 - 11
"A great American writer…Highsmith's writing is wicked…it puts a spell on you." ―Entertainment Weekly
Now a major motion picture.
Patricia Highsmith's story of romantic obsession may be one of the most important, but still largely unrecognized, novels of the twentieth century. First published in 1952 and touted as "the novel of a love that society forbids," the book soon became a cult classic.
Based on a true story plucked from Highsmith's own life, Carol tells the riveting drama of Therese Belivet, a stage designer trapped in a department-store day job, whose routine is forever shattered by a gorgeous epiphany―the appearance of Carol Aird, a customer who comes in to buy her daughter a Christmas toy. Therese begins to gravitate toward the alluring suburban housewife, who is trapped in a marriage as stultifying as Therese's job. They fall in love and set out across the United States, ensnared by society's confines and the imminent disapproval of others, yet propelled by their infatuation. Carol is a brilliantly written story that may surprise Highsmith fans and will delight those discovering her work.
This authorized edition includes an afterword by Patricia Highsmith. Previously titled The Price of Salt.
2016年1月27日 已读
3.5星。还算是值得一读吧,比同名电影在人物和情节线索上都丰富一些。然而遗憾是同样的,一个本可以更精彩更深入的女性故事,被写成了跟今天的少女们幻想被霸道总裁和高富帅爱上差不多的通俗小说,并且几乎没跟时代背景发生什么关系。语言的确不错,但一些精彩的描写被叙事上的啰嗦给淹没了。没读过作者的其他作品,不过仅就这一本来讲,我想说通俗作家就是通俗作家。
小说 文学 美国 英语文学
The Easter Parade 豆瓣 Goodreads
8.8 (6 个评分) 作者: Richard Yates Vintage Classics 2008 - 4
The famous opening line of the novel warns of the bleak narrative to follow, "Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce." Emily and Sarah Grimes are sisters who share little in terms of character but much in terms of disappointment with their lives. Emily, the more intellectual and cosmopolitan of the two, seeks love in numerous disappointing affairs and short-term relationships while Sarah, the prettier and more conventional sister, marries young and bears children to an uncouth and abusive husband. Their troubled, rootless mother, Pookie, like many Yatesian matriarchs, is likely modeled on his own mother, who was nicknamed "Dookie". The novel, beginning in the 1930s when the sisters are children and ending in the 1970s with Sarah's death, primarily revolves around Emily as the book's central character, though the book employs Yates' characteristic and seamless shifts of consciousness throughout.
2015年12月27日 已读
对于非常打动人的作品,有时反而不知该说些什么,说句“我爱XXX(作者)”可能就够了。耶茨写出了女性在社会中的困境——不论她们的具体社会处境如何,所面临的也无非是相当有限的可能性:婚姻、生育、生存、两性关系。这哪里是评论者常说的“失败者”,耶茨写的明明是我们自己,是每天出现在生活中的你我她。因真实而常被我们忽略,因真实而触目惊心。
Richard_Yates 外国文学 小说 文学 美国
Stoner 豆瓣 Goodreads
Stoner
8.7 (41 个评分) 作者: John Williams NYRB Classics 2006 - 6
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a "proper" family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude. John Williams's luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
2015年12月15日 已读
一部极具深度的作品。它对人心的挖掘达到了让读者的心跟着抽动的程度,以至于谈论它深藏不露的文采和情节上的起伏都显得略为肤浅了。平铺直叙的写作方式既显示了作者的自信,也回到了最传统的讲故事的方式。它捕捉到了普通人生命中不为外界所知的丰盛与伟大,感人至深。故事发生在我所生活过的密苏里州,亦觉亲切。
外国文学 小说 文学 美国 英语文学
Death of a Salesman 豆瓣
作者: Arthur Miller San Val 1998 - 5
2015年10月23日 已读
阿瑟米勒对美国社会的批判和对家庭关系的反思在今天看来仍是一点不过时。只是读剧本,也能体会到多时空并置带来的戏剧力量,以及现实和幻想相交织的舞台感。尽管戏剧冲突相当集中,米勒却有本事把每个人物都塑造得很丰满,一点也不单一、扁平。
外国文学 戏剧 文学 美国 英语文学
自深深处 豆瓣 谷歌图书
De Profundis
8.3 (126 个评分) 作者: [爱尔兰] 奥斯卡·王尔德 译者: 朱纯深 译林出版社 2008 - 4
我人生有两大转折点:一是父亲送我进牛津,一是社会送我进监狱。碰上你,对我是危险的,而在那个特定时候碰上你,对我则成了致命。命运将我们两个互不相干的生命丝丝缕缕编成了一个血红的图案,你的确真心爱过我。即使你拒绝收我的信,我也会照写不误,这样你就会知道,不管怎样,总是有信在等着你。
《自深深处》是王尔德写给他的同性恋伙伴道格拉斯的一封长信,这封信是王尔德在牢狱生活的最后几个月内写成的,信中充满了以道格拉斯爱恨交织的情绪,同时还集中阐述了王尔德的艺术观、生活观。
2015年6月29日 已读
只有纯真而伟大的心灵才能倾吐出如此动人的哀歌。当王尔德谈论基督和sympathy与艺术的关系、当他反省自己的人生并几乎达到了涅槃重生的高度、当他挥洒自如地征引莎士比亚和古希腊戏剧,他是光辉而伟大的。但更多的篇幅花在了他对Bosie的“控诉”和倾吐衷肠上,这是他纯真一面的体现。所谓的“狗血”和“极品”,不过是我们这些庸人对天真心灵的误读与想象。文字更不用说了,华丽雅致,不少长句都在十行以上,读来非常过瘾。这次没来得及看译文,等新版出了再好好研究朱先生的翻译吧。
外国文学 文学 经典 英语文学 随笔/散文
When Nietzsche Wept 豆瓣 Goodreads
When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession
8.0 (8 个评分) 作者: [美国] 欧文·亚龙 Harper Perennial 2005 - 1
In nineteenth-century Vienna, a drama of love, fate, and will is played out amid the intellectual ferment that defined the era. Josef Breuer, one of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, is at the height of his career. Friedrich Nietzsche, Europe's greatest philosopher, is on the brink of suicidal despair, unable to find a cure for the headaches and other ailments that plague him. When he agrees to treat Nietzsche with his experimental "talking cure," Breuer never expects that he too will find solace in their sessions. Only through facing his own inner demons can the gifted healer begin to help his patient. In When Nietzsche Wept, Irvin Yalom blends fact and fiction, atmosphere and suspense, to unfold an unforgettable story about the redemptive power of friendship.
2015年5月19日 已读
哲学家本人作为一个主要人物出现在了书中,使本书中的孤独、死亡、痴迷、丧失等主题可以得到非常深入的讨论,也因此而是一本比《叔本华的治疗》更引人思考的好书。尼采用永恒复归“治愈”了Breuer医生在生活中的意义迷失和对病人的执迷情感,而Breuer不仅帮助尼采克服了对莎乐美的痴迷,也在无意中实践了精神分析的雏形。Yalom的独特之处在于他能在借用尼采或叔本华的哲学思想“治愈”某些心理问题之后,又经由更为人本主义的立场实现“反转”,使得人物意识到或孤独或厌世的倾向之下潜藏的对于友谊、同伴以及人性温暖之处的向往。
Irvin_Yalom 外国文学 小说 心理学 文学
Side Effects 豆瓣
作者: Woody Allen Ballantine Books 1986 - 9
A humor classic by one of the funniest writers today, SIDE EFFECTS is a treat for all those who know his work and those just discovering how gifted he is. Included here are such classics as REMEMBERING NEEDLEMAN, THE KUGELMASS EPISODE, a new sory called CONFESSIONS OF A BUGLAR, and more.
2015年2月28日 已读
3.5星。虽然是轻松的读物,却不适合连续地读,因为伍迪艾伦实在是太wordy,尤其头晕不舒服的时候,越看越头大。初看会有新鲜感,多读几篇后就觉得有故作幽默之嫌了。当然这老头思维一向很发散,跟他的电影作品倒是挺一致的。
外国文学 小说 文学 短篇小说 美国
The Schopenhauer Cure 豆瓣
作者: Irvin Yalom HarperCollins 2005 - 1
From novelist and master psychotherapist Irvin Yalom, author of Lying on the Couch and When Nietzsche Wept, comes the world's first accurate group-therapy novel, a mesmerizing story of two men's search for meaning.
At one time or another, all of us have wondered what we'd do in the face of death. Suddenly confronted with his own mortality after a routine checkup, distinguished psychotherapist Julius Hertzfeld is forced to reexamine his life and work. Has he really made an enduring difference in the lives of his patients? And what about the patients he's failed? What has happened to them? Now that he is wiser and riper, can he rescue them yet?
Reaching beyond the safety of his thriving San Francisco practice, Julius feels compelled to seek out Philip Slate, whom he treated for sex addiction some twenty-three years earlier. At that time, Philip's only means of connecting to humans was through brief sexual interludes with countless women, and Julius's therapy did not change that. He meets with Philip, who claims to have cured himself -- by reading the pessimistic and misanthropic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.
Much to Julius's surprise, Philip has become a philosophical counselor and requests that Julius provide him with the supervisory hours he needs to obtain a license to practice. In return, Philip offers to tutor Julius in the work of Schopenhauer. Julius hesitates. How can Philip possibly become a therapist? He is still the same arrogant, uncaring, self-absorbed person he had always been. In fact, in every way he resembles his mentor, Schopenhauer. But eventually they strike a Faustian bargain: Julius agrees to supervise Philip, provided that Philip first joins his therapy group. Julius is hoping that six months with the group will address Philip's misanthropy and that by being part of a circle of fellow patients, he will develop the relationship skills necessary to become a therapist.
Philip enters the group, but he is more interested in educating the members in Schopenhauer's philosophy -- which he claims is all the therapy anyone should need -- than he is in their individual problems. Soon Julius and Philip, using very different therapeutic approaches, are competing for the hearts and minds of the group members.
Is this going to be Julius's swan song -- a splintered group and years of good work down the drain? Or will all the members, including Philip, find a way to rise to the occasion that brings with it the potential for extraordinary change? In The Schopenhauer Cure, Irvin Yalom elegantly weaves the true story of Schopenhauer's psychological life throughout the narrative, knitting together fact and fiction to form a compellingly readable tale.
2015年2月12日 已读
并非侦探小说,描写团体治疗的场景却有侦探小说般引人入胜的力量。书名具有双重含义,主人公Philip既以叔本华哲学疗愈了自己的性瘾行为,也在Julius的治疗小组中被矫正了离群索居、厌恶人类的叔本华式的思维/生活方式。书中穿插了对叔本华生平和哲学思想的介绍,以及作者Irvin Yalom透过Julius这一人物对团体治疗所发表的真知灼见;再加上所探讨的如何面对不可避免的死亡、在已知生活的无意义时应如何继续生活、现代人的孤独感和两性关系等诸多问题,都使这本书成为一部极具可读性和思想性并且还兼具心理治疗教学意义的严肃小说。
Irvin_Yalom 外国文学 小说 心理学 文学
Darkness Visible 豆瓣
作者: William Styron Modern Library 2007 - 1
A work of great personal courage and a literary tour de force, this bestseller is Styron's true account of his descent into a crippling and almost suicidal depression. Styron is perhaps the first writer to convey the full terror of depression's psychic landscape, as well as the illuminating path to recovery.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
2015年1月30日 已读
美国著名作家William Styron从老年男性和艺术家的切身角度解读单相抑郁症,相当写实。从书中可见仅仅在三十年前,美国人——书中表现的是知识阶层——也羞于谈论心理疾患,更不愿意将自杀与忧郁症联系在一起。Depression到底是illness还是weakness,在今天的美国社会已不是一个问题。有感于很多国人对精神卫生的漠视,所以希望看到越来越多相关的中文书籍。
外国文学 心理学 文学 美国 英语文学
1984 豆瓣
作者: George Orwell Random House Inc 1992 - 11
Nineteen Eighty-Four revealed George Orwell as one of the twentieth century’s greatest mythmakers. While the totalitarian system that provoked him into writing it has since passed into oblivion, his harrowing cautionary tale of a man trapped in a political nightmare has had the opposite fate: its relevance and power to disturb our complacency seem to grow decade by decade. In Winston Smith’s desperate struggle to free himself from an all-encompassing, malevolent state, Orwell zeroed in on tendencies apparent in every modern society, and made vivid the universal predicament of the individual.
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
The Bookshop 豆瓣
作者: Penelope Fitzgerald Mariner Books 1997 - 9
In 1959 Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop - the only bookshop - in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town's less prosperous shopkeepers. By daring to enlarge her neighbors' lives, she crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne. Florence's warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and the shop is apparently haunted. Only too late does she begin to suspect the truth: a town that lacks a bookshop isn't always a town that wants one.
2015年1月1日 已读
比故事更值得玩味的是Penelope Fitzgerald的语言,带有一种英式的老派,又充满直接、有冲击力的淳朴质地,不像我所喜欢的其他英语作家,能让我很快熟悉并接受他们的语感。但这种新鲜感是以前的阅读中没有过的,并且她捕捉和展示细节的能力相当令人赞叹。
外国文学 小说 文学 英国 英语文学
REVOLUTIONARY ROAD 豆瓣
作者: Richard Yates Vintage 2008 - 11
In the hopeful 1950s, Frank and April Wheeler appear to be a model couple: bright, beautiful, talented, with two young children and a starter home in the suburbs. Perhaps they married too young and started a family too early. Maybe Frank's job is dull. And April never saw herself as a housewife. Yet they have always lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. But now that certainty is about to crumble.
With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves.
2014年12月4日 已读
一本拿起来后就很难放下的书,这应该是今年令我享受到最大阅读乐趣的一部小说。没有任何花哨的叙事技巧,可是却能毫无遗漏、掘地三尺般地讲述出一个平凡故事的惊心动魄之处。相形之下,同名影片硬是将这本一流的小说拍成了千篇一律的好莱坞家庭伦理片。耶茨的语言灵动、跳跃、富于描述性,极其有魅力。尽管这本小说完全采用男性视角,却有力量让女性读者认同它的主人公,我现在还不清楚耶茨是怎样做到的。一本书足以令人变脑残粉丝。
Richard_Yates 外国文学 小说 文学 美国
The Remains of the Day 豆瓣
8.9 (34 个评分) 作者: [英] 石黑一雄 Vintage International 1990 - 9
The Remains of the Day is a profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world postwar England. At the end of his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, Stevens embarks on a country drive, during which he looks back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving ;a great gentleman. ; But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington's ;greatness ; and graver doubts about his own faith in the man he served. A tragic, spiritual portrait of a perfect English butler and his reaction to his fading insular world in post-war England. A wonderful, wonderful book.
All the Light We Cannot See 豆瓣 Goodreads Goodreads
All the Light We Cannot See
8.1 (16 个评分) 作者: Anthony Doerr Scribner 2014 - 5
From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the beautiful, stunningly ambitious instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.
Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.
In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.
Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).
Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction
The Heart of the Matter 豆瓣
作者: Graham Greene Penguin Classics 2004 - 9
With a new introduction by James Wood
Scobie, a police officer serving in a wartime west-African state, is distrusted — being scrupulously honest and immune to bribery. But then he falls in love, and in so doing, he is forced to betray everything he believes in, with drastic and tragic consequences.
2014年5月22日 已读
开始喜欢格林。跟《恋情的终结》一样,我对故事的情节不怎么有兴趣,但被主题所吸引。比伯格曼的“上帝的沉默”深入了一个层次,这本书探讨的是宗教在实践层面上的问题:如何在实行责任与同情的时候不去违反教义呢?主人公就死于这样的追问,因为他发现不可能有圆满的答案,便只好选择了为他所违反了的那些教义而殉道——以自杀入地狱为代价,让自己的困境不再困扰他所爱的人和上帝。那些涉及宗教情绪的心理描写抓人并且可信,而且格林对英语的运用相当看似随意而实则精妙,他的修辞能力相当地强大。这是一本可以反刍很久的书。
外国文学 宗教 小说 文学 经典
The Power and the Glory 豆瓣
作者: Graham Greene Penguin Classics 2003 - 2
Unabridged on mp3 audio disk. How does good spoil, and how can bad be redeemed? In his penetrating novel The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene explores corruption and atonement through a priest and the people he encounters. In the 1930s one Mexican state has outlawed the Church, naming it a source of greed and debauchery. The priests have been rounded up and shot by firing squad--save one, the whisky priest. On the run, and in a blur of alcohol and fear, this outlaw meets a dentist, a banana farmer, and a village woman he knew six years earlier. For a while, he is accompanied by a toothless man--whom he refers to as his Judas and does his best to ditch. Always, an adamant lieutenant is only a few hours behind, determined to liberate his country from the evils of the church. On the verge of reaching a safer region, the whisky priest is repeatedly held back by his vocation, even though he no longer feels fit to perform his rites: "When he was gone it would be as if God in all this space between the sea and the mountains ceased to exist. Wasn't it his duty to stay, even if they despised him, even if they were murdered for his sake? even if they were corrupted by his example?" As his sins and dangers increase, the broken priest comes to confront the nature of piety and love. Still, when he is granted a reprieve, he feels himself sliding into the old arrogance, slipping it on like the black gloves he used to wear. Greene has drawn this man--and all he encounters--vividly and viscerally. He may have said The Power and the Glory was "written to a thesis," but this brilliant theological thriller has far more mysteries--and troubling ideals--than certainties. --Joannie Kervran Stangeland