The Reasons I Won't Be Coming

出版者:Berkley Pub Group

作者:Perlman, Elliot

页数:323

价格:$ 14.00

装帧:Pap

isbn号码:9781594482236

具体描述

The stories in this collection explore the complex worlds of lovers, poets, lawyers, immigrants, students, and murderers. They tell of corporate betrayals and lost opportunities, and of the obsessions, hopes, fears, and vagaries of desire.

作者简介

Elliot Perlman's new book, The Reasons I Won't Be Coming, isn't so much a collection of stories as a collection of narrators. Well, okay, it is a collection of stories, too -- there are nine here, some quite short, some novella-length -- but the voices are what make a lasting impression. Perlman, the Australian author of the much-praised behemoth Seven Types of Ambiguity, puts to use his experience as a barrister by placing the reader inside the minds of jurors, trial witnesses, a law professor and an employee with the Office of Probate, but the world of law is a subterfuge for the book's real subject: love gone sour. The voices that we are left with, sometimes as detached as a legal brief, are those of sorrowful ex-lovers (usually men) still sorting though the past, trying to figure out what the hell went wrong.

In "Good Morning, Again," the book's opener and one of its stronger entries, a middle-aged man carries on an internal monologue with his former lover even while he's in bed with a younger woman who's trying out older men. The narrator's observations are quirky but credible, as when he ruminates on the protocol of one-night stands after the young woman has drifted to sleep: "You have to feign at least a little surprise at being in this position with someone when you've never known them this way before. On the other hand, you have to behave as if you're under the influence of the other person's body with an insatiable hunger to know their soft and hidden parts, as though this person was the apotheosis of everyone you had ever lusted after." Internal monologue is used to good effect here, but it's so distinct that when Perlman employs it in three more stories, he risks monotony.

"In the Time of the Dinosaurs," the most successful story, is unlike the others in that the narrator is a child instead of a jilted or gloomy lover. Not that Perlman abandons his love-gone-sour theme: The young boy's attempts to impress his teacher with a science project on dinosaurs coincide with the dissolution of his parents' marriage. The boy, however, is never aware that his parents' marriage has gone south, making this a kind of detective story in which the boy consistently misinterprets the clues he's presented with. The details are perfect throughout: the dinosaur made out of beer cans; the much-coveted gold stars awarded to the best project; the chocolate-scented winds from the nearby factories.

In many of the stories, Perlman excels at creating tension. In "I Was Only in a Childish Way Connected to the Established Order," the story of an inept poet who wakes up in a psychiatric hospital, we learn early on that the narrator is unstable and that something terrible has probably happened. Perlman teases us with such sentences as "I am not well and I make no bones about it," but then holds off on the details of how he came to be institutionalized. Other times, the tension is created out of vagueness. "The Hong Kong Fir Doctrine," the story of a retired law professor who has an affair with a married former student, begins, "A momentary loss of muscle control and now you don't speak." What, we wonder, does this mean? And so we read on.

My chief complaint with these stories is that their endings are more inevitable than surprising. The revelations aren't always as startling as we were led to believe, and so the stories read like domestic fiction written by Edgar Allan Poe. "The Hong Kong Fir Doctrine" ends with a heavy-handed metaphor that ties together the meaning of the doctrine and its application to the two lovers. "Your Niece's Speech Night," the story of an interoffice romance, hinges on a plot contrivance that involves e-mail passwords. "The Reasons I Won't Be Coming," a marriage-at-a-crossroads story, pivots on the husband's misunderstanding of a conversation he and his wife had years earlier. The endings almost always feel forced, not organic.

The least successful story is "Manslaughter," a courtroom drama about a killer who is acquitted. The setting, the testimony, the drifting in and out of various points-of-view -- all of this creates a distance between the reader and the story's action. It's the reason I prefer watching Hitchcock's psychological thriller "Vertigo" to his courtroom drama "The Paradine Case." The former is intense, immediate and complex; the latter is static and dull.

At their best, these stories are like walking down the hallway of an old hotel and eavesdropping on sad confessions. It's hard not to be moved when the aging ex-professor of "The Hong Kong Fir Doctrine" silently addresses the former student whom he has impregnated: "So now I sit here alone, while in your house you make grilled cheese on toast for your children, your husband watches television and inside you something of ours lives." These stories are love letters, really, and their protagonist, we come to learn, is none other than the human heart.

用户评价

这本书的开篇就给我一种强烈的疏离感，仿佛作者正透过一层厚厚的、沾满灰尘的玻璃窗审视着这个世界。叙事者的声音极其克制，每一个词语的选择都像是经过精密的计算，旨在传达一种不易察觉的、潜藏在日常表象之下的巨大虚无。我尤其欣赏作者处理“时间”的方式，它不是线性的流动，而更像是一堆散落的碎片，偶尔被记忆的强光照亮，随即又陷入无尽的晦暗。故事的背景设定在一个我从未踏足过的，带着潮湿和霉味的北方小城，那里的一切都慢得令人窒息，连空气似乎都被凝固了。人物之间的对话充满了“言未尽”的张力，那些没有说出口的话语，比任何激烈的争吵都更能撕扯人心。初读时，我感到有些困惑，仿佛被扔进了一个没有地图的迷宫，但随着阅读的深入，我开始沉醉于这种迷茫之中，享受那种被叙事者引导着，去探索那些被主流叙事所忽略的、阴影角落的体验。这本书需要你投入极大的耐心，去捕捉那些微小的、转瞬即逝的情感波动，它不是一本让你轻松度过的读物，更像是一次漫长而私密的心理冥想。

这是一本挑战阅读习惯的力作，它完全打破了我对传统小说叙事模式的所有预期。作者似乎对“对话”这一文学工具有着一种近乎反叛的态度，大量的场景是通过内心独白和对静态画面的详尽描绘来推动的，使得情节的推进显得缓慢而沉重。我注意到，书中人物的动机常常是模糊不清的，他们似乎被某种更宏大、更不可名状的力量所驱使，而不是出于简单的情感冲动。这种处理方式，营造出一种深刻的疏离感和宿命论的色彩。从文学技巧上讲，我对作者如何用如此有限的场景（例如，几乎所有的重要事件都发生在三个固定的室内空间）来构建如此广阔的精神世界感到惊叹。这本书的文字密度极高，几乎没有一句是多余的，每一句话都承载着多重含义，需要逐字逐句地去咀嚼和体会。它不是为了娱乐而生，更像是对存在本身的一次严肃而略带讥讽的探讨。

拿起这本书，我立刻被一种独特的时间感所吸引，它不像时钟的滴答声，更像是旧照片褪色的过程——缓慢、不可逆转，且带着一种无法言喻的哀愁。这本书的叙事视角在不同人物间游移时，其流畅度和逻辑性并非传统意义上的平滑，反而充满了意识流的跳跃和错位，这使得初次接触的读者可能会感到不适，但我发现这恰恰模拟了人类记忆混乱、碎片化的真实体验。书中对“身份”的探讨是极其深刻的，角色们似乎都在努力扮演一个自己并不完全认同的角色，而这本书的内容，就是揭示这些角色面具之下的空洞。作者的笔触非常细腻，尤其擅长描绘“沉默”的力量，那些长时间的停顿、未接的电话、未发出的短信，比任何喧嚣的场景都更具戏剧张力。它要求读者放下对清晰情节的执念，转而关注那些潜伏在语言和行动之下的“未被言说”的部分，是一次真正意义上的“读心”之旅。

读完之后，我的内心久久不能平静，感觉像是经历了一场突如其来的暴风雨洗礼。这本书的结构是如此的精巧，每一个章节的切换都像是一次精准的外科手术，将人物内心最深处的恐惧和渴望毫不留情地剖开。我特别被主角面对困境时的那种近乎荒谬的坦然所吸引。他似乎早就接受了生活的残酷本质，以一种近乎哲学的超脱态度来面对接二连三的打击。作者运用了大量的意象，比如反复出现的废弃工厂和永不停歇的雨声，这些元素不仅构建了环境，更成为了人物内心世界的具象化体现。这本书的语言风格充满了后现代主义的冷峻和诗意，句子结构常常出人意料，有时冗长复杂，有时又短促得像一声枪响。最让我震撼的是对“选择”与“宿命”之间界限的探讨，它模糊了主动与被动的区别，让人开始质疑，我们生活中所谓的自由意志，究竟有多少是早已被设定好的剧本。这是一部需要反复品读的作品，每次重温，都能从不同的角度解读出新的层次。

这本书给我的感觉就像是阅读一位老派侦探小说家在晚年写下的自传，充满了对过往的审视，却又刻意地隐藏了所有的关键线索。它有着一种迷人的、近乎自恋的叙事腔调，但这种腔调又被作者高超的叙事技巧所驯服，不至于沦为矫揉造作。故事里的社会观察极其敏锐，它不动声色地揭露了现代都市人关系中的脆弱和虚伪。我尤其关注作者对环境细节的捕捉，那些关于光影、气味和声音的描写，精准得仿佛我本人就坐在那个场景之中，能感受到空气中弥漫的紧张感。这本书的魅力在于它的“不完整性”，它留下了大量的空白和问号，把解释和填充的任务交给了读者。这是一种非常大胆的处理方式，它拒绝提供廉价的答案或情感上的安慰，而是强迫读者直面自身的理解局限。这种挑战性，恰恰是我热爱这本书的原因，它让阅读变成了一种积极的、需要智力投入的活动，而不是被动的接受。