The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

出版者:Scribner

作者:Eric Roth

页数:211

出版时间:2008-12-23

价格:128.00元

装帧:Paperback

isbn号码:9781439117002

具体描述

F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the great voices in the history of American literature, is best known today for his novels, but during his lifetime his fame stemmed primarily from his prolific achievements as one of America's most gifted short story writers. "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is one of his most memorable creations.

"I was born under unusual circumstances." And so begins the film "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," adapted from the 1920s story by F. Scott Fitzgerald about a man whois born in his eighties and ages backwards. A man, like any of us, unable to stop time. We follow his story set in New Orleans from the end of World War I in 1918, into the twenty-first century, following his journey that is as unusual as any man's life can be. Directed by David Fincher, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is a time traveler's tale of the people and places Benjamin Button bumps into along the way, the loves he loses and finds, the joys of life and the sadness of death, and what lasts beyond time.

Included in this volume is F. Scott Fitzgerald's provocative story, as well as Eric Roth's stunning screenplay, a bold re-imagining of this classic tale.

作者简介

F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the major American writers of the twentieth century -- a figure whose life and works embodied powerful myths about our national dreams and aspirations. Fitzgerald was talented and perceptive, gifted with a lyrical style and a pitch-perfect ear for language. He lived his life as a romantic, equally capable of great dedication to his craft and reckless squandering of his artistic capital. He left us one sure masterpiece, The Great Gatsby; a near-masterpiece, Tender Is the Night; and a gathering of stories and essays that together capture the essence of the American experience. His writings are insightful and stylistically brilliant; today he is admired both as a social chronicler and a remarkably gifted artist.

Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, was descended from Maryland gentility; he was dapper and well bred but lacked commercial acumen and, after a series of business failures, was forced to rely on support from his wife's family. Fitzgerald's mother was Mollie McQuillan, an intelligent, eccentric woman whose Irish immigrant father had made a success in St. Paul as a wholesale grocer. The Fitzgeralds lived conventionally -- "In a house below the average / On a street above the average," wrote young Fitzgerald in a poem. As a boy he was precocious: handsome and socially observant, he wrote plays for the local dramatic society and produced fiction and poetry for the school newspaper. In 1911 his parents sent him east to a Catholic prep school, the Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey, where he came under the influence of a sophisticated priest, Monsignor Sigourney Fay, and an Anglo-Irish author named Shane Leslie. These two men ignited his literary ambitions and encouraged him to develop his considerable talent as a writer. Fitzgerald entered Princeton in the fall of 1913. He was captured immediately by the great beauty of the university and by its aura of high striving and achievement. He labored under social disadvantages there -- he was a midwesterner and an Irish Catholic -- but his enthusiasm and literary talent won him some successes during his first two years. He wrote musical comedies for the Triangle Club, published fiction and poetry in the Nassau Literary Magazine, and accepted a bid to the prestigious Cottage Club. He was an indifferent student, though, and his poor marks eventually caught up with him, denying him the awards he had dreamed of. Fitzgerald never took a degree from Princeton; he made a semi-honorable exit from the university in 1917, answering the call to colors and serving as an army officer in World War I.

To his great regret, Fitzgerald "didn't get over." His battalion was waiting in New York to embark for Europe just as the armistice was signed in November 1918. Fitzgerald never saw the front, but the war years were momentous for him in other ways. In the summer of 1918, while in a training camp near Montgomery, Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a beautiful and unconventional belle, the daughter of a prominent local judge. Fitzgerald fell in love with her -- with her passionate nature and adventurous spirit -- and they became engaged. After his discharge from the army he took a job in advertising in New York City, determined to make a success in business so that they might marry. Fitzgerald was a failure as an ad man, though, hating the work and chafing at his separation from Zelda. She lost faith in him, believing that he could not support her, and broke off their engagement in June 1919. After an epic bender, Fitzgerald quit his advertising job and spent his last few dollars on a train ticket home to St. Paul. He meant to prove himself to Zelda by writing a novel: "I was in love with a whirlwind," he later recalled, "and I must spin a net big enough to catch it out of my head."

Fitzgerald began this improbable quest by resurrecting the typescript of a novel that he was calling "The Romantic Egotist." He had finished the narrative during army training camp, working on it in the officers club during nights and weekends. The book had been rejected twice by Charles Scribner's Sons, a prestigious New York publishing house, but a young editor there named Maxwell Perkins had recognized Fitzgerald's promise and had told him to keep trying. During the summer of 1919, working diligently in the attic of his parents' home in St. Paul, Fitzgerald reconceived "The Romantic Egotist" and transformed it into This Side of Paradise, a daring and experimental novel. Perkins accepted the book in September for publication the following spring.

Backed by this success, Fitzgerald rekindled his romance with Zelda. They renewed their engagement and were married in St. Patrick's cathedral in New York on April 3, 1920, just a week after publication of This Side of Paradise. The novel was an immediate hit, with enthusiastic reviews and excellent sales, and the Fitzgeralds became famous overnight. Fitzgerald found that he was in demand as a writer; his price for stories rose quickly, and he began to write much commercial short fiction -- a dependable source of money for the extravagant life that he and Zelda now were leading. These triumphs in literature, love, and finances gave Fitzgerald great faith in his talent and luck. "The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter," he later wrote. "In the best sense one stays young."

For Fitzgerald the early 1920s were productive. He published a second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, in 1922; it marked an advance over This Side of Paradise in form and style, though it lacked the energy and charm of the earlier book. Fitzgerald also wrote some of his best short stories during these years -- prophetic tales like "May Day" and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" and perceptive character studies like "Dalyrimple Goes Wrong" and "The Ice Palace." He and Zelda lived near New York City, in a cottage in Westport, Connecticut; later they rented a house on Great Neck, Long Island, where they socialized with the Manhattan literati and the Broadway theater crowd of the day. In the spring of 1924 the Fitzgeralds and their young daughter Scottie, born in 1921, traveled to Europe and settled on the French Riviera. Fitzgerald needed quiet and freedom from distraction in order to compose his third novel. He labored through the summer and by October had completed a narrative called "Trimalchio" -- a short, well-crafted novel of manners set on Long Island. His hero was a hazily depicted parvenu from the Midwest named Jay Gatsby. Fitzgerald mailed the novel to Perkins in New York, and Perkins had it set in type for spring publication. Fitzgerald continued to work on the text in galley proofs, however, rewriting two chapters, focusing Jay Gatsby's character more sharply, and infusing the story with an aura of myth and wonder. The novel, now titled The Great Gatsby, was published in April 1925. Reviews were good but sales disappointing. In the years that followed, however, Gatsby would win much praise and ascend to a very high place in the American literary canon. Today it is probably the most widely read American novel of the twentieth century.

The Great Gatsby established Fitzgerald as a skilled professional. This is one of the paradoxes of his life: though he was sometimes frivolous and irresponsible in his personal behavior, he was thoroughly serious as an artist. He had a good understanding of the marketplace and was ambitious and self-critical, aiming to create a body of writing that would survive him. His struggles to balance work against amusement, popular appeal against literary artistry, energized his career and gave complexity to the fiction he wrote. The Fitzgeralds remained in Europe during the late 1920s. These were years of growth for Fitzgerald; he read and traveled and observed, "seeking the eternal Carnival by the Sea" and capturing in his fiction the exoticism of the great European cities. He knew James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Sinclair Lewis, and Archibald MacLeish; his and Zelda's closest friends were Gerald and Sara Murphy, a sophisticated American couple who later served as partial models for Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald also met a talented young writer named Ernest Hemingway, and they became intimate friends for a time. Their relationship, however, was eventually eroded by competition and jealousy, mostly on Hemingway's part.

The Fitzgeralds' marriage began to disintegrate during their last few years in Europe. Fitzgerald's drinking increased as he struggled to produce a new novel; he managed to write some excellent short fiction, including the Basil Duke Lee stories of 1928 and 1929, but failed to make much progress on the manuscript of his book. Zelda's health deteriorated as she worked fervently to construct a life of her own as a ballet dancer. Talented and restless, she wanted an identity apart from her role as Fitzgerald's wife. The strain of ballet training helped to bring about a mental breakdown in 1930 from which she never entirely recovered.

The family returned to America in 1931. Fitzgerald managed to complete his novel Tender Is the Night while living in Baltimore. Scribners published the book in April 1934 to generally good reviews but, again, to only moderate sales. Fitzgerald was greatly disappointed; he had worked on the book over a nine-year period, putting the manuscript through some seventeen drafts. Tender Is the Night shows evidence of this labor on every page; it is a brilliantly written study of expatriate life, but its flashback structure causes difficulty for readers, and the fall of its hero, Dick Diver, seems overly precipitate.

Fitzgerald's personal life went into decline after the novel was published. His health, never strong, had been damaged by the push to finish the novel, and his personal troubles had left him creatively and financially drained. Zelda was being treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital and later in clinics near Asheville, North Carolina. In good periods she and Fitzgerald lived toge...

读后感

Not that the Movie is not sober, but the novel is more of a satirical tone (may be just for me), and warning: the figures and plot in the novel are weaker and simpler...  

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who is considered not only a member of the “Lost Generation” of the 1920s but also one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. The story was published in 1922, and ...  

其实我觉得还是小说更好看，更有味道值得去思考一些。 但每个人地喜好不同，如果你喜欢浪漫的故事，那就不要让这部小说来搅乱你对benjamin button故事的美好联想了。

用户评价

这本书让我思考了“正常”与“异常”的界限。在本杰明的世界里，他才是那个“正常”的“异常”，而我们这些“顺向生长”的人，反而成为了那个“异常”的“正常”。这种视角上的转换，迫使我重新审视自己对生命进程的理解。我们所认为的“应该”的人生轨迹，真的是唯一的、正确的方式吗？菲茨杰拉德通过本杰明的经历，温柔地质疑了这种普适性的认知，并展现了生命多样化的可能性。

我被本杰明·巴顿的内心世界深深吸引。作为一个拥有独特生命轨迹的人，他必定经历着常人难以想象的孤独和困惑。他的童年，在与他年龄不符的身体里度过；他的成年，在不断“返老还童”的过程中摸索。然而，尽管承受着如此巨大的差异，本杰明却始终保持着一种平和的心态，以及对生活的热爱。他懂得珍惜每一个时刻，懂得感受生命的美好，懂得爱与被爱。他的这种豁达与坚韧，是我从他身上学到的宝贵一课。

我非常享受菲茨杰拉德在描绘本杰明与他父亲的关系时所表现出的那种微妙的情感张力。一位出生就看起来像个老人的婴儿，如何面对自己的父亲？而那位父亲，又如何接受并抚养这样一个“非正常”的孩子？作者用一种非常不动声色的方式，展现了父子之间那种深沉却又难以启齿的爱。本杰明逐渐变年轻，而他的父亲却在时间的洪流中老去，这种角色的反转，充满了戏剧性，也深刻地揭示了亲情的本质——它无关年龄，无关外貌，而是生命中最纯粹、最坚韧的情感连接。

《本杰明·巴顿的奇特病例》带给我的，不仅仅是一次阅读的享受，更是一次深刻的灵魂洗礼。它让我更加珍惜当下，更加理解生命的脆弱与珍贵，也更加包容生命中那些“不一样”的存在。本杰明的生命，虽然以一种奇特的方式结束，但他的存在本身，就如同一次伟大的生命实验，为我们留下了无尽的思考和启示。我向所有热爱文学，热爱探索生命意义的读者推荐这本书，它一定会带给你意想不到的惊喜。

在阅读过程中，我常常会陷入沉思。本杰明·巴顿的生命轨迹，仿佛是对我们对“正常”生命节奏的一种颠覆和挑战。我们习惯于线性的人生观，认为时间是单向的，生命是从年轻走向衰老。但本杰明的出现，让我们不得不重新审视这种根深蒂固的认知。他的存在，本身就是对时间概念的一次大胆实验。随着他的身体越来越年轻，他的心智却在不断成熟，这种“逆生长”带来的矛盾与和谐，构成了故事最引人入胜的部分。我曾设想，如果我的人生也能以这样的方式展开，又会是怎样的景象？这种代入感，让这本书不仅仅是阅读，更是一种自我探索的旅程。

这本书的语言风格也极具特色。菲茨杰拉德的文字，如同他所描绘的那个时代一样，带着一种优雅、精致，甚至有些许颓废的气息。他善于运用比喻和象征，将抽象的概念具象化，使得那些关于生命、时间和命运的思考，不再是枯燥的说教，而是融入到生动的故事情节之中。我尤其欣赏他对于环境和场景的描绘，那些十九世纪末二十世纪初美国社会的缩影，通过他的笔触栩栩如生地展现在读者眼前，为故事增添了浓厚的时代感。

终于读完了《本杰明·巴顿的奇特病例》，合上书页的那一刻，内心涌动着一股难以言喻的复杂情绪，像是经历了一场漫长而又奇幻的人生旅程。故事围绕着一个出生时便衰老，却随着时间推移越来越年轻的男人展开，这个设定本身就充满了魔幻现实主义的色彩，足以吸引任何对生命、时间和命运抱有好奇心的人。从最初的惊叹于这种“反向生长”的设定，到逐渐沉浸在本杰明的独特人生轨迹中，我被作者弗朗西斯·斯科特·菲茨杰拉德的文字深深吸引。他笔下的本杰明，虽然身处一个与世人截然不同的生命周期，但他的情感、他的经历、他的困惑，却又如此真实地触动着我们内心深处的情感共鸣。

阅读《本杰明·巴顿的奇特病例》的过程，更像是在品味一杯陈年的佳酿。初尝时，或许会因其独特的风味而感到惊奇，但随着时间的推移，那醇厚而复杂的滋味便会在舌尖和心间缓缓散开，留下悠长的回味。我常常会在读完一个章节后，停下来思考作者所要传达的深层含义。他并非直接给出答案，而是通过本杰明的人生经历，引导读者自行探索关于生命本质的疑问。这种启发式的叙事，让这本书具有了超越故事本身的持久生命力。

菲茨杰拉德的叙事技巧堪称大师级别，他用一种疏离却又充满魅力的笔触，描绘了本杰明·巴顿非同寻常的一生。这种叙事方式，既让读者保持了一种审视的距离，又能敏锐地捕捉到本杰明内心深处的情感波动。我特别欣赏作者对于细节的描绘，无论是本杰明出生时身体的衰老程度，还是他逐渐恢复年轻时的生理变化，都刻画得细致入微，充满了想象力。更重要的是，作者并没有将这个奇特的病例仅仅停留在猎奇的层面，而是借由本杰明的人生，深刻地探讨了生命中的诸多哲学命题：时间的流逝、青春与衰老的相对性、爱情的永恒与短暂、以及个体在社会洪流中的存在意义。

我尤其喜欢菲茨杰拉德在描绘本杰明与黛西的感情时所展现出的细腻和克制。爱情，在这本书中，不再是轰轰烈烈的激情，而是一种超越了时间、超越了年龄的深刻羁绊。本杰明在年轻时遇见黛西，那时他拥有着衰老的身体，而黛西则是一个充满活力的少女。他们的相遇，充满了宿命般的奇特，却也饱含着真挚的情感。随着本杰明变得越来越年轻，他们的关系也随之改变，这种变化既是自然的，又是充满悲剧色彩的。作者并没有强行制造冲突，而是用一种淡淡的笔触，描绘了两人之间那份无法言说的依恋和最终的分别，令人唏嘘。

纵使时间逆向流转，只要真爱亦会永恒

故事还是电影好

原著与电影情节差距不小

纵使时间逆向流转，只要真爱亦会永恒

这书原就是台词本好吧