A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan’s 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, has been awarded the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Egan was born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco. She is also the author of The Invisible Circus, a novel which became a feature film starring Cameron Diaz in 2001, Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2001, Emerald City and Other Stories, The Keep, and A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the LA Times Book Prize. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, Granta, McSweeney’s and other magazines. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Also a journalist, she has written frequently in the New York Times Magazine. Her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and “The Bipolar Kid” received a 2009 NAMI Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

出版者:Knopf

作者:Jennifer Egan

页数:288

出版时间:2010-06-08

价格:USD 29.95

装帧:Hardcover

isbn号码:9780307592835

图书标签:小说美国文学普利策Pulitzer美国国家书评奖英文原版2010纽约时报十大好书2010

Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.

We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city’s demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life—divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house—and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco’s punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang—who thrived and who faltered—and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou’s far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progress of time—in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.

读后感

马尔克斯说过，但凡还有一点自尊心的记者，谁敢说自己没有文学追求？毫无疑问，珍妮弗•伊根是个有自尊心的记者。她为《纽约时报》撰稿同时也为《纽约客》、《哈泼斯》写短篇小说，再顺手将这些短篇揉成长篇小说《恶棍来访》，而后拿了个普利策文学奖。 伊根说过，这本小说...  

原文链接：http://www.bimuyu.com/blog/archives/117345094.shtml 詹妮弗•伊根（Jennifer Egan）并不是一位十分有名的作家，她的长篇小说《A Visit From the Goon Squad》（姑且试译为《恶棍来访》）却让人眼前一亮。之所以喜欢这本书，也许和笔者在读小说方面的个人趣味有...  

这是一部群像小说，出场人物无论曾经年少轻狂，还是后来进入职业生涯，他们的人生或多或少均与音乐（主要是摇滚）产生衔接，作者因此将人物与故事有意装入A,B两大部分以及其下有标题的具体章节，如同一盘磁带的A,B两面和灌入载体内的一首首歌曲。其结构的别具一格之处，还在于...  

马尔克斯说过，但凡还有一点自尊心的记者，谁敢说自己没有文学追求？毫无疑问，珍妮弗•伊根是个有自尊心的记者。她为《纽约时报》撰稿同时也为《纽约客》、《哈泼斯》写短篇小说，再顺手将这些短篇揉成长篇小说《恶棍来访》，而后拿了个普利策文学奖。 伊根说过，这本小说...  

用户评价

Pulitzer!

叙事手法很有技巧，每个人一段故事，写在磁带上，从A面播放到B面，唱的都是物是人非时光荏苒。在数字时代，再看书中所写的六七十年代的摇滚时代，愈发让人唏嘘。

Post Postmodern? Mixed media. 好像肥皂剧。

大概是过去一年里看的最好的书。#BookClub

神书一本…我甚至都推荐给邓同学了