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)
Pulitzer proofed quality. Even it’s not the same level of “detour” we’re speaking of, but still, the feeling is strongly relatable. We would travel half of the world (not even figuratively) to get awa...Pulitzer proofed quality. Even it’s not the same level of “detour” we’re speaking of, but still, the feeling is strongly relatable. We would travel half of the world (not even figuratively) to get away from someone that we think could potentially kill us, still at last we find the “earth-shattering” thing Zohra said is essentially unescapable. (展开)
A gay Odyssey. An attribute to Proust. A love story crafted with polyphony narrative. Beautiful language and lovely to read but is it too readable to be a prize winner?
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
5 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。
1 有用 weidu 2020-11-04 20:44:39
Pulitzer proofed quality. Even it’s not the same level of “detour” we’re speaking of, but still, the feeling is strongly relatable. We would travel half of the world (not even figuratively) to get awa... Pulitzer proofed quality. Even it’s not the same level of “detour” we’re speaking of, but still, the feeling is strongly relatable. We would travel half of the world (not even figuratively) to get away from someone that we think could potentially kill us, still at last we find the “earth-shattering” thing Zohra said is essentially unescapable. (展开)
13 有用 于管中 2018-05-06 18:24:57
A gay Odyssey. An attribute to Proust. A love story crafted with polyphony narrative. Beautiful language and lovely to read but is it too readable to be a prize winner?
2 有用 瑞尔 2018-08-04 19:25:50
So many great quotes, and such flowery language. 😂
31 有用 Y门食客 2018-11-18 07:31:19
完全不解这部小说是凭借什么获了普利策奖的。除了零星乍现的几个高亮点，全书都很无聊，忍着读完。陈述者一直在说男主人公很天真，虽然已五十岁，但没有任何章节断落是描述他如何天真的。最不能容忍的，就是靠一个陈述句刻画人物，我要的是，描述。我要证据，我不要作者丢给我一个结论。男主人公，行将五十岁，一个没什么名气的三流作家，被相处了很多年的小男友抛弃，被人提到时的标签永远是某著名诗人曾经的恋人，在收到前男友的... 完全不解这部小说是凭借什么获了普利策奖的。除了零星乍现的几个高亮点，全书都很无聊，忍着读完。陈述者一直在说男主人公很天真，虽然已五十岁，但没有任何章节断落是描述他如何天真的。最不能容忍的，就是靠一个陈述句刻画人物，我要的是，描述。我要证据，我不要作者丢给我一个结论。男主人公，行将五十岁，一个没什么名气的三流作家，被相处了很多年的小男友抛弃，被人提到时的标签永远是某著名诗人曾经的恋人，在收到前男友的结婚请柬后，决定环游世界。法国，德国，意大利，摩洛哥，印度，日本。在旅程中，没什么事情发生，他的旅程实在是太枯燥乏味了。少有关于他情绪的描写，作者没有提供给读者可与之主人公发生情绪共鸣的通道。读着关于他的故事，却如同一个旁观者，看着与自己擦肩而过的路人，你对他一无所知。作者的讲述，太糟糕了。 (展开)