Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes--it would be too awkward--and you can't say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the wo...
Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes--it would be too awkward--and you can't say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world.
QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town?
ANSWER: You accept them all.
What would possibly go wrong? Arthur Less will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Saharan sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and encounter, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to face. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. Through it all, there is his first love. And there is his last.
Because, despite all these mishaps, missteps, misunderstandings and mistakes, Less is, above all, a love story.
A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, a bittersweet romance of chances lost, by an author The New York Times has hailed as "inspired, lyrical," "elegiac," "ingenious," as well as "too sappy by half," Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.
Andrew Sean Greer (born 1970) is an American novelist and short story writer.
He is the bestselling author of The Story of a Marriage, which The New York Times has called an “inspired, lyrical novel,” and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named one of the best books of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and received a California Book Award.
Andrew Sean Greer (born 1970) is an American novelist and short story writer.
He is the bestselling author of The Story of a Marriage, which The New York Times has called an “inspired, lyrical novel,” and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named one of the best books of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and received a California Book Award.
The child of two scientists, Greer studied writing with Robert Coover and Edmund White at Brown University, where he was the commencement speaker at his own graduation, where his unrehearsed remarks, critiquing Brown's admissions policies, caused a semi-riot. After years in New York working as a chauffeur, theater tech, television extra and unsuccessful writer, he moved to Missoula, Montana, where he received his Master of Fine Arts from The University of Montana, from where he soon moved to Seattle and two years later to San Francisco where he now lives. He is currently a fellow at the New York Public Library Cullman Center. He is an identical twin.
While in San Francisco, he began to publish in magazines before releasing a collection of his stories, How It Was for Me. His stories have appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, The New Yorker and other national publications, and have been anthologized most recently in The Book of Other People, and The PEN/ O. Henry Prize Stories 2009. His first novel, The Path of Minor Planets, was published in 2001.
It’s that they’ve survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here. (查看原文)
If a band stays together twenty years, it’s a miracle. If a comedy duo stays together twenty years, they’re triumph. Is this night a failure because it will end in an hour? I’d the sun a failure because it’s going to end in a billion years? No, it’s the fucking sun. Why does a marriage not count? (查看原文)
英文原版书，7.8-7.15，历时8天。
普利策奖名副其实。能把我们无法描述的用比喻和排比淋漓尽致表达出来的段落比比皆是。双关和黑色幽默恰到好处，不同场景的转场更是有如电影般奇妙。前两章几近完美，不过后面略有重复累赘。但纵观全书偶尔就会有几个片段迸发出惊人的力量。本书最大的技巧是叙述者的隐藏，最后一页将这一伏笔回收，留下浪漫至极的结尾。关于变老、时间、错误、文学与爱情。怎样与过去的人、事和自己和解...英文原版书，7.8-7.15，历时8天。
普利策奖名副其实。能把我们无法描述的用比喻和排比淋漓尽致表达出来的段落比比皆是。双关和黑色幽默恰到好处，不同场景的转场更是有如电影般奇妙。前两章几近完美，不过后面略有重复累赘。但纵观全书偶尔就会有几个片段迸发出惊人的力量。本书最大的技巧是叙述者的隐藏，最后一页将这一伏笔回收，留下浪漫至极的结尾。关于变老、时间、错误、文学与爱情。怎样与过去的人、事和自己和解，是我们在每个年龄都要面对的问题。最纯粹的是其中的爱情。这是Less的故事，但同时也属于他爱的那个人——Less经历的，也是Freddy同样在经历的。That is how it goes with love stories, isn't it?(展开)
I really like the tone of this novel. On the one hand, It was told in a direct and detailed way that as a reader, I could depict the scense with flesh in my mind. On the other hand, despite the closeness, all the emotions in the story are still slightly det...
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When Robert won the prize, it came to him, at that very moment, that the prononciation per se was not /pju/ for the first syllable of the famous literary award plitzer. And he sighed to his lover Arthur Less, "Prizes are not love. Because people who never m...
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安德鲁·西恩·格利尔 作者
liechtenstein
Jimmy47
轻松小熊
3 有用 热腾De小笼包 2019-07-15 15:54:17
英文原版书，7.8-7.15，历时8天。 普利策奖名副其实。能把我们无法描述的用比喻和排比淋漓尽致表达出来的段落比比皆是。双关和黑色幽默恰到好处，不同场景的转场更是有如电影般奇妙。前两章几近完美，不过后面略有重复累赘。但纵观全书偶尔就会有几个片段迸发出惊人的力量。本书最大的技巧是叙述者的隐藏，最后一页将这一伏笔回收，留下浪漫至极的结尾。关于变老、时间、错误、文学与爱情。怎样与过去的人、事和自己和解... 英文原版书，7.8-7.15，历时8天。 普利策奖名副其实。能把我们无法描述的用比喻和排比淋漓尽致表达出来的段落比比皆是。双关和黑色幽默恰到好处，不同场景的转场更是有如电影般奇妙。前两章几近完美，不过后面略有重复累赘。但纵观全书偶尔就会有几个片段迸发出惊人的力量。本书最大的技巧是叙述者的隐藏，最后一页将这一伏笔回收，留下浪漫至极的结尾。关于变老、时间、错误、文学与爱情。怎样与过去的人、事和自己和解，是我们在每个年龄都要面对的问题。最纯粹的是其中的爱情。这是Less的故事，但同时也属于他爱的那个人——Less经历的，也是Freddy同样在经历的。That is how it goes with love stories, isn't it? (展开)
4 有用 ways and means 2018-06-22 09:21:06
这么看的话，Less这一生的故事真的不坏。要形容他，也无非是一颗永远长不大的心，没有盔甲，没有防备，即使到了五十岁，仍然与这世界赤裸相对。这笔触的幽默和温柔，也在最后揭开答案。所以爱的本质是什么。如果你花了几个月穿越半个地球，并没能走出去，反而明白过来，谁能说你不爱他呢。
2 有用 瑞尔 2018-08-04 19:25:50
So many great quotes, and such flowery language. 😂
1 有用 摩诘 2019-11-04 08:01:48
"Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit."
1 有用 楚。 2019-10-14 06:29:43
作者的文笔真的是我读过的有限的英语文学里最能引起共鸣之一了 故事情节相对轻松简单 整个阅读体验还是很愉悦的