李昌來新書“the surrendered”

聽說過海明威獎得主、韓裔美國作家李昌來（Lee, Chang-rae）嗎？今天收到的《紐約客》，力推他剛出版的英文小說 the surrendered. 小說是有關受韓戰影響進了孤兒院的11歲小女孩的......



《紐約客》的書評太長了，給個鏈接，有興趣的同學自己去看全文吧：）

Keeping It Real
Conflict, convention, and Chang-Rae Lee’s “The Surrendered.”
by James Wood

Does literature progress, like medicine or engineering? Nabokov seems to have thought so, and pointed out that Tolstoy, unlike Homer, was able to describe childbirth in convincing detail. Yet you could argue the opposite view; after all, no novelist strikes the modern reader as more Homeric than Tolstoy. And Homer does mention Hector’s wife getting a hot bath ready for her husband after a long day of war, and even Achilles, as a baby, spitting up on Phoenix’s shirt. Perhaps it is as absurd to talk about progress in literature as it is to talk about progress in electricity—both are natural resources awaiting different forms of activation. The novel is peculiar in this respect, because while anyone painting today exactly like Courbet, or composing music exactly like Brahms, would be accounted a fraud or a forger, much contemporary fiction borrows the codes and conventions—the basic narrative grammar—of Flaubert or Balzac without essential alteration.

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