【双语学习】《纽约时报》精选2017书单TOP10（一）

每年年末，《纽约时报》书评栏目编辑都会为全球读者推荐内含10本“年度图书”的书单。其推荐的书籍包括小说、诗歌和非虚构作品。登上该书单的评审标准，与销售量无关，而是更注重内容。从1972 年起，这项传统已经延续了45年了，2017年的书单也在日前如约而至。阅读使人睿智，能够给人以启迪和力量。2017年《纽约时报》又为我们带来哪些惊喜，一起来看看吧！

1. 《秋天》(Autumn)---阿里·史密斯(Ali Smith)著

 

这本小说的故事时间轴从60年代直到英国脱欧，故事情节在数十年间来回跳跃。核心围绕着一位年长的词曲作者和一个单亲家庭邻居的早熟孩子之间的不寻常友谊。本书是计划中的四卷本系列的第一部，是对想像力的动人探索，巧妙地揭示出许多宏观的概念和细微的启示，但它们都围绕着一个永恒的困境：如何观察，如何存在。

2. 《退出西方》(Exit West)---穆辛·哈米德(Mohsin Hamid)著

 

这是一部反映当下的小说，艺术手法看似简单，却将一对逃离内战的夫妇故事描绘的淋漓尽致，变成对流亡心理的深刻思考。一道道魔法之门将旧世界的已知灾难与新世界的未知风险分隔开来。哈米德的这本小说将真实与荒诞融为一体，要描写这个人们密切相连的星球上发生的政治裂痕，这或许是最诚实的一种方式。

3. 《弹球盘》(Pachinko)---李敏金（Min Jin Lee，音）著

 

该小说是作者系列作品的第二部，讲述了一个韩国家族四代人的大事记，从20世纪初日本占领下的韩国开始一直到1980年代末的日本。这本书围绕着身份、故乡和归属感等核心问题将故事情节慢慢呈现在读者面前。全文的第一句话“历史辜负了我们，但是没有关系。”直击人们内心。作者认为，各式各样的人物表面之下都潜藏着无数私欲、希望与苦难，只要我们有耐心和同情心去细细聆听和观察。

4. 《力量》(The Power)---娜奥米·奥尔德曼(Naomi Alderman)著

 

奥尔德曼想像，女人突然能产生一种致命的“静电力”，从而颠覆全球范围内的性别力量对比，令我们当下所面临的一切——历史、战争和政治政治——变得更加复杂。本书语言精彩刺激，故事引人入胜，真是地探讨权力如何腐蚀一个人：包括那些刚刚获得权力的人和拼命维持权力的人。奥尔德曼认为，历史的恐怖是不可避免的——权力的滥用总会出现，宇宙的发展弧线不会向正义偏移，但也无法绕过正义。书中一个角色指出：“当然，权力的转移很少是平稳的。”

5. 《唱歌，尸魔，唱歌》(Sing Unburied Sing)---杰丝明·沃德(Jesmyn Ward)著

 

继上一部小说《拯救遗骨》(Salvage the Bones)之后，沃德再度回到虚构的小镇——密西西比州的布瓦苏韦奇。讲述那些容易被归类为“农村穷人”、“药物依赖者”、“刑事司法系统的产物”的普通人的故事。这次作者为我们带来的主人公是13岁的卓卓，吸毒的黑人母亲带着他和他的妹妹做了一场公路旅行，去接他们入狱的白人父亲。他们的生存非常艰难。他们的故事感觉很神秘，既有来自过去的幽灵，也涉及南方所有的种族与社会状态，它们全都在这个破碎的家庭中奔涌而过。沃德在小说中营造的这种感情是现实生活中无法达到的，然而却又在这样一位充满诗意想象的作家笔下显得是那样真诚而自然，这是本书最大的成就。

2017年的书单上既有惊险刺激的小说，更有现实主义的作品，下周小编将公布其他5部作品。书籍不仅让我们思考，为我们带来温暖，其强大的力量其实远超我们想象。还不挑两本你喜欢的作品，这个寒假快快读起来吧。

 

【原文】2017 best books, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.

1. <Autumn> ---Ali Smith

The extraordinary friendship of an elderly songwriter and the precocious child of his single-parent neighbor is at the heart of this novel that darts back and forth through the decades, from the 1960s to the era of Brexit. The first in a projected four-volume series, it’s a moving exploration of the intricacies of the imagination, a sly teasing-out of a host of big ideas and small revelations, all hovering around a timeless quandary: how to observe, how to be.

2. <Exit West>---Mohsin Hamid

A deceptively simple conceit turns a timely novel about a couple fleeing a civil war into a profound meditation on the psychology of exile. Magic doors separate the known calamities of the old world from the unknown perils of the new, as the migrants learn how to adjust to an improvisatory existence. Hamid has written a novel that fuses the real with the surreal — perhaps the most faithful way to convey the tremulous political fault lines of our interconnected planet.

3. <Pachinko>---Min Jin Lee

Lee’s stunning novel, her second, chronicles four generations of an ethnic Korean family, first in Japanese-occupied Korea in the early 20th century, then in Japan itself from the years before World War II to the late 1980s. Exploring central concerns of identity, homeland and belonging, the book announces its ambitions right from the opening sentence: “History has failed us, but no matter.” Lee suggests that behind the facades of wildly different people lie countless private desires, hopes and miseries, if we have the patience and compassion to look and listen.

4. <The Power>---Naomi Alderman

Alderman imagines our present moment — our history, our wars, our politics — complicated by the sudden manifestation of a lethal “electrostatic power” in women that upends gender dynamics across the globe. It’s a riveting story, told in fittingly electric language, that explores how power corrupts everyone: those new to it and those resisting its loss. Provocatively, Alderman suggests that history’s horrors are inescapable — that there will always be abuses of power, that the arc of the universe doesn’t bend toward justice so much as inscribe a circle away from it. “Transfers of power, of course, are rarely smooth,” one character observes.

5. <Sing Unburied Sing>---Jesmyn Ward

In her follow-up to “Salvage the Bones,” Ward returns to the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Miss., and the stories of ordinary people who would be easy to classify dismissively into categories like “rural poor,” “drug-dependent,” “products of the criminal justice system.” Instead Ward gives us Jojo, a 13-year-old, and a road trip that he and his little sister take with his drug-addicted black mother to pick up their white father from prison. And there is nothing small about their existences. Their story feels mythic, both encompassing the ghosts of the past and touching on all the racial and social dynamics of the South as they course through this one fractured family. Ward’s greatest feat here is achieving a level of empathy that is all too often impossible to muster in real life, but that is genuine and inevitable in the hands of a writer of such lyric imagination.