A Discovery of Strangers

出版者:Random House Inc

作者:Wiebe, Rudy

页数:336

出版时间:1995-9

价格:195.59元

装帧:Pap

isbn号码:9780394280837

具体描述

A Discovery of Strangers tells of the meeting of two civilizations – the first encounter of the nomadic Dene people with Europeans – in an imaginative reconstruction of John Franklin’s first map-making expedition in 1819—21 in what is now the Northwest Territories. At the heart of the novel is a love story between twenty-two-year-old midshipman Robert Hood, the Franklin expedition’s artist, and a fifteen-year-old Yellowknife girl known to the British as Greenstockings. A national bestseller, published also in Germany and China, Wiebe’s first novel in eleven years and his twelfth work of fiction won him his second Governor General’s Award for Fiction at the age of sixty, over strong competition from Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro.

It is a story of love, murder, greed and passion in an unforgiving Arctic landscape. French-Canadian voyageurs paddle the small British expedition into the land of the Yellowknives to search for the fabled Northwest Passage. While this trip would not prove as disastrous as Franklin’s third expedition, nevertheless more than half his men did not survive the harsh conditions. The long winter stopover allows for interchange between the cultures. When the son of a Lancashire clergyman and the daughter of a native elder fall in love, they devise a language of their own to cross their wordless divide. Hood will not survive to see the birth of his daughter, perishing in 1821 in an attempt to reach Greenstockings’s band 450 kilometres south. Nor will the Yellowknives survive much longer: within twenty years, they will be all but wiped out by a smallpox epidemic brought by the white men.

The novel is the work of a poetic mind, written in several voices: of the British explorers, of the Tetsot’ine people – named Yellowknife by the strangers – and, most unexpected of all, of the animals that live on the Barrenlands. Wiebe climbs inside the characters, bringing them and the North to life. “Most Canadians have never seen that landscape. Yet I see it as being at the centre of our national psyche. That’s the roots of our world, right there.” He began work on the novel in earnest following a canoe trip between the Coppermine River and the site of Fort Enterprize in 1988, when he was first enraptured by the landscape. The novel contains vivid images, such as stunning descriptions of caribou bursting through snow. In calling the Arctic ‘A Land Beyond Words,’ Wiebe admits how difficult it was to do it justice. “I think there’s always a total contradiction in even trying to do such a novel,” he said in an interview, “and yet it’s the very contradiction out of which any kind of artistic struggle must come. It’s not even worth trying if it doesn’t seem impossible.”

In researching historical sources, Wiebe found letters, earlier accounts of the region such as those of Samuel Hearne, as well as oral stories and mythology told by the Dene elders. “I take the facts, as many of the facts as history gives me, and I use them to tell the story that I believe these facts tell us beyond themselves . . . . How did it happen, why did it happen, what was going on inside people’s heads while it was happening, why did they do what they did?” Franklin’s book on the first expedition contained a small paragraph mentioning Greenstockings as the most beautiful girl of the Dene, and a sketch of her and her father Keskarrah drawn by Robert Hood. Wiebe also discovered a claim made years later by one of the members of the team that Greenstockings had had a child by Hood (these facts are related in his book Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic ). From these details, he created a powerful story of their union. “It’s imagination all right, but it has to be an informed imagination.”

The Kingston Whig-Standard claimed the book “is to the North what Big Bear was to the West – an imaginative, and possibly definitive, evocation of a crucial time, place and situation.” It is part of a body of significant historical fiction by Wiebe, including The Scorched-Wood People , which tells the story of Louis Riel, Gabriel Dumont and the Northwest Rebellion of 1885. The third Franklin expedition has been the subject of works by Margaret Atwood and Mordecai Richler, as well as accounts such as Frozen in Time by John Geiger and forensic anthropologist Owen Beattie. A Discovery of Strangers explores the expedition Wiebe found more fascinating: that of first contact between the Europeans and the Natives, which was so damaging to the Native people in the end, and so essential to the survival of the Europeans. In his acceptance speech for the Governor General’s Award, Wiebe said: “We know too little about our selves. In this enormous, beautiful land we inhabit, we seem to have no eyes to see, no ears to hear, the stories that are everywhere about us and clamouring to be told . . . . Only the stories we tell each other can create us as a true Canadian people.”

用户评价

这本书给我带来了一种久违的阅读上的“冲击感”。它的主题并非轻而易举就能消化的，它迫使我正视一些关于身份、记忆和归属感的根本性问题。叙事视角时不时地在不同人物之间切换，但过渡得异常自然流畅，仿佛是通过一个多棱镜观察同一个事件，从而展现出事件的复杂多面性。我尤其喜欢那些充满张力的对话场景，字里行间充满了未说出口的潜台词，需要读者极高的专注力去解读。这种需要“努力阅读”的作品，往往后劲更足。它不是用来消磨时间的娱乐品，而更像是一次精神上的远足，虽然过程可能略显艰辛，但最终登顶时的视野是无与伦比的开阔。

如果要用一个词来形容我的感受，那便是“震撼”。这不仅仅是一部小说，它更像是一部探讨存在意义的哲学论文，只不过披上了一层引人入胜的故事外衣。作者在探讨宏大主题时，从未牺牲掉故事性，两者找到了一个近乎完美的平衡点。故事的开篇或许需要一点耐心来适应其独特的语境，但一旦被吸入其核心，就很难抽身。人物的命运交织复杂，但作者始终保持着清晰的脉络，没有让读者迷失在繁复的关系网中。结局的处理尤其高明，既给予了某种形式的了结，又留下了足够的想象空间，让人在合上书本后，依旧能与书中的世界保持着一种持续的对话状态。这是一次无愧于给予的时间投入。

我是一个对细节控的人，而这本书在细节处理上的严谨性，绝对达到了专业水准。从历史背景的考据（即使是虚构的历史背景，其内在的自洽性也令人佩服）到日常生活中场景的描绘，都处理得一丝不苟。这使得整个故事的基石异常稳固，即便情节发展出人意料，读者也完全能接受，因为它符合这个世界既定的逻辑。更让我欣赏的是，作者似乎并未急于给出明确的答案或道德判断，而是将选择权交给了读者，鼓励我们去质疑既有的观念。这种开放式的处理方式，极大地提升了作品的深度和耐读性。每次重读，我似乎都能从不同的角度捕捉到先前忽略的伏笔或暗示，这说明作者的布局是多么的深思熟虑。

坦白说，一开始我有些担心故事会不会过于沉闷，毕竟题材听起来似乎比较严肃，但事实证明我的担忧是多余的。这本书的叙事风格非常独特，它不像那种快节奏的商业小说，而是更偏向于一种缓慢而坚定的探索，像是在解开一个层层叠叠的古老谜团。语言的运用达到了近乎诗意的境界，很多段落的措辞都极具画面感，让人忍不住想要停下来，反复咀觎那些精妙的文字组合。它成功地构建了一个让人信服的世界观，其中的规则和逻辑虽然是虚构的，却能让人产生强烈的代入感。阅读过程中，我发现自己不自觉地开始分析作者的写作技巧，那种结构上的精巧安排，简直令人叹为观止。它提供了一种非常高质量的阅读体验，那种智力上的满足感，是许多流水账式的作品无法给予的。

这本小说以其细腻的笔触和引人入胜的情节，着实让人沉醉其中，仿佛身临其境。作者对人物内心的刻画极为深刻，每一个角色的动机和挣扎都描绘得入木三分，让人不禁为他们的命运揪心。故事的节奏把握得恰到好处，时而紧张刺激，时而又回归平静，让读者得以喘息并思考其中的哲理。特别是那些不经意的细节描写，比如环境的渲染、人物的一个眼神、一句不经意的对话，都为整个故事增添了丰富的层次感和真实感。我特别欣赏作者在叙事中展现出的那种对人性复杂性的深刻洞察，它不仅仅是一个简单的故事，更像是一面镜子，映照出我们自身可能未曾察觉的阴影与光辉。读完之后，那种久久不能散去的回味感，让我对其中的一些桥段和哲思进行了反复琢磨，这无疑是一部值得细细品味的佳作。