读书笔记
乌拉圭作家CARLOS MARÍA DOMÍNGUEZ 的一本薄薄的小说，颇好读。篇幅虽然不长，却融合进了各种元素。像是哥特式奇情小说，而另一方面主人公之设为一位走火入魔的爱书狂，再加上作者不时发表关于藏书的看法，怕是只有爱书者才能体会其中三味。这本虽为英译，语言却十分漂亮。书评说得是，无论如何，读了这本书你会久久记得它，尽管它不一定就是本杰作。本书中译本已经出版，译者陈建铭http://www.douban.com/subject/3076529/
摘录：
P1.
One day in the spring of 1998, Bluma Lennon bought a secondhand copy of Emily Dickinson's poems in a bookshop in Soho, and as she reached the second poem on the first street corner, she was knocked down by a car.
Books change people's destinies. Some have read The Tiger of Malaysia and become professors of literature in remote universities. Demian converted tens of thousands of young men to Eastern philosophy, Hemingway made sportsmen of them, Alexandre Dumas complicated the lives of thousands of women, quite a few of whom were saved from suicide by cookery books. Bluma was their victim.
But not the only one. An elderly professor of classical languages, Leonard Wood, was left paralyzed after being struck on the head by five volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that fell from a shelf in his library; my friend Richard broke a leg when he tried to reach William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, which was so awkwardly placed he fell off his stepladder. Another of my friends in Buenos Aires caught TB in the basement of a public archive, and I even knew a dog from Chile that died of indigestion from swallowing the pages of The Brothers Karamazov one afternoon when rage got the better of him.
。。。
Many of the most important people in Cambridge were present for Bluma's funeral. At the service, Professor Robert Laurel made a splendid farewell speech, later published as a pamphlet on account of its academic merit.
P14
It is often much harder to get rid of a book than it is to acqire it. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our lives we will never see again. While they are still there, it is part of us. I have noticed that many people write the day, month and year that they read a book; they build a secret calendar.
P100
Perhaps simply the curiosity to see whether this remote man, with whom she had spent a single night of panting and tequilas in a Monterrey hotel, not only remembered her foundly but was capable of doing something for her.
P56
We joked about adding candlelight to our readingsfor books written before the invention of electric light. That may seem eccentric and completely unnecessary to you, but just try illuminating an oil painting with candlelight and you’ll see it takes on a whole new aspect, however well-lit it normally may be. It becomes a new painting: the shadows come to life, the flames does its work, and it is as though there is no real difference between the light coming from the pigment and oil and the room the work is in. The spaces are immersed in the same light, and you enter into another dimension.
P75
A vase, coffeepot or TV gets broken much more easily than a book. A book does not come apart unless its owner wants it to, tears out its pages, burns them. In the years of the last military dictatorship in Argentina, a lot of people burned books in their toilets and bathtubs, or buried them at the bottom of their garden. Books had become extremely dangerous. Having to choose between them and life itself, Argentina became their own executioners.
摘录：
P1.
One day in the spring of 1998, Bluma Lennon bought a secondhand copy of Emily Dickinson's poems in a bookshop in Soho, and as she reached the second poem on the first street corner, she was knocked down by a car.
Books change people's destinies. Some have read The Tiger of Malaysia and become professors of literature in remote universities. Demian converted tens of thousands of young men to Eastern philosophy, Hemingway made sportsmen of them, Alexandre Dumas complicated the lives of thousands of women, quite a few of whom were saved from suicide by cookery books. Bluma was their victim.
But not the only one. An elderly professor of classical languages, Leonard Wood, was left paralyzed after being struck on the head by five volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that fell from a shelf in his library; my friend Richard broke a leg when he tried to reach William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, which was so awkwardly placed he fell off his stepladder. Another of my friends in Buenos Aires caught TB in the basement of a public archive, and I even knew a dog from Chile that died of indigestion from swallowing the pages of The Brothers Karamazov one afternoon when rage got the better of him.
。。。
Many of the most important people in Cambridge were present for Bluma's funeral. At the service, Professor Robert Laurel made a splendid farewell speech, later published as a pamphlet on account of its academic merit.
P14
It is often much harder to get rid of a book than it is to acqire it. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our lives we will never see again. While they are still there, it is part of us. I have noticed that many people write the day, month and year that they read a book; they build a secret calendar.
P100
Perhaps simply the curiosity to see whether this remote man, with whom she had spent a single night of panting and tequilas in a Monterrey hotel, not only remembered her foundly but was capable of doing something for her.
P56
We joked about adding candlelight to our readingsfor books written before the invention of electric light. That may seem eccentric and completely unnecessary to you, but just try illuminating an oil painting with candlelight and you’ll see it takes on a whole new aspect, however well-lit it normally may be. It becomes a new painting: the shadows come to life, the flames does its work, and it is as though there is no real difference between the light coming from the pigment and oil and the room the work is in. The spaces are immersed in the same light, and you enter into another dimension.
P75
A vase, coffeepot or TV gets broken much more easily than a book. A book does not come apart unless its owner wants it to, tears out its pages, burns them. In the years of the last military dictatorship in Argentina, a lot of people burned books in their toilets and bathtubs, or buried them at the bottom of their garden. Books had become extremely dangerous. Having to choose between them and life itself, Argentina became their own executioners.
有关键情节透露
- 作者: Carlos María Domínguez 著 / Petr Sís 绘
- 出版: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- 定价: USD 18.00
- 装帧: Hardcover
- 页数: 103
- 时间: 2005-11-07