绝望的逃逸
绝望的逃逸
绝望的逃逸
两年前，荷兰作家赫布兰德‧巴克（Gerbrand Bakker）以《孪生子》（The Twin）摘得IMPAC都柏林文学奖，引起不小的轰动，文学大师库切以“克制的细腻和精炼的幽默”赞赏这本小说处女作，但如果就此把赫布兰德‧巴克归类为文坛新人，似乎并不确切。巴克与文字有着很深的渊源，他大学主修的是历史语言学，参与编纂过两本词源学辞典，为影视纪录片配写过字幕，而且在《孪生子》之前，已出版过一本青少年小说《梨树盛开白花》（Pear Trees Bloom White）。因此，《孪生子》展现的不是初生牛犊的锋芒，宁静恬淡的文笔，突显作者的自信与沉着。
《迂回》（The Detour）是巴克2010年的新作，也是继《孪生子》后他第二本被翻译成英语的小说。译者仍是大卫·科尔默（David Colmer），他出生在澳大利亚，自九十年代初移居荷兰后，翻译过诗歌、小说等各类作品，获得过多项翻译奖，包括《孪生子》带来的IMPAC奖。
《迂回》的故事主要发生在威尔士偏远的乡村，一名自称叫Emilie的荷兰女子租下一间农庄。她是大学的讲师，因桃色丑闻而逃逸到这里。她随身带了艾米莉·迪金森的诗歌全集和一本迪金森的传记，那是她博士论文的课题。然而，她更多时间是在打理屋子周围的园地，整理草坪，修剪灌木。她初抵农庄时，田里有十只鹅，后来一只只减少，她怀疑是狐狸，于是给这些鹅搭了一圈简易的围栏，可鹅不肯进去。
小说的另一条线索在荷兰，Emilie的丈夫跑去Emilie以前的办公室纵火，由此结识了一位警察，这位警察答应协助他追踪他不告而别的妻子。通过私家侦探的调查，他们得知了Emilie的下落，登上去威尔士的船。临行前，丈夫给Emilie寄了一张明信片，上面只有简单的一句话，“我来了。”这三个字在不同的语境下会产生不同的化学反应。对一心想躲起来的Emilie来说，这如同追捕者的通缉令。
回到Emilie租住的农庄，一个大男孩的出现打破了她孤独平静的生活。男孩起初只是借宿过夜，后来不知怎的就住了下来。他照料Emilie的饮食起居，帮她干园子里的活，与她相约去登山。可是，男孩的纯真朝气让Emilie变得烦躁不安，她几次想赶男孩走，却都徒劳无果。男孩的存在，仿佛令她嗅到自己生命的腐朽，她不断觉得农庄已逝主人、Evans太太留下的气味附着在她身上。此外，暂管农庄的事务所寻到了Evans太太的亲人，租约即将到期，Emilie必须搬走。附近曾与Evans太太有旧交的农夫Rhys Jones还威胁要Emilie赔偿不见的鹅。
Emilie犹如一头困兽，面临来自四面八方的围捕，她能怎么逃出牢笼？在这个意义上，《迂回》是一本绝望的小说。但在前半部分，巴克以大量的日常细节，描绘Emilie离群索居的生活状态，日复一日的园艺工作，把身心沉浸在大自然里，不做任何思考，这样的孤独，甚至有几分迷人。同时，小说塑造了多位令人难忘的配角，连给病人看诊时也抽烟的乖张医生，热情好客、喜欢闲话家常的面包房的老板娘，爱管闲事的农夫，还有Emilie企图在只有齐腰深的池塘里自杀的叔叔。他们有的荒诞而滑稽，有的夸张而逼真，尽显巴克“精炼的幽默”。他以简笔画的方式，让这些独特的形象跃然纸上。
与《孪生子》一样，《迂回》也是一个似乎什么也没发生的故事，描写的都是琐屑的小事，没有跌宕起伏的悬念贯穿其中。但比《孪生子》更甚，《迂回》切断了故事的时间，或者说逻辑脉络，所有的叙述都只集中在当前。对于Emilie的出走，小说只点到她与学生发生关系即止，具体是怎么回事，她与丈夫的婚姻如何等等，都没有展开说明。莫名出现在农庄的大男孩，结果原来是农夫Rhys Jones的儿子，可男孩为何拼命要逃离自己的父亲，小说同样几乎没有交代。这是一个只有现在、没有过去/回忆的故事。相比《孪生子》的清晰晓畅，《迂回》的节制似乎比较难让人亲近，主题也更沉重，可另一方面，它进一步确立了赫布兰德‧巴克具有鲜明个性的小说风格。
《外出偷马》的作者佩尔·帕特森曾说，“如果你是一个挪威作家，在世界文坛上看不到你的身影。对一个挪威作家而言，敲开英语世界的门是非常困难的。”在英美占据主导的国际出版界，很多用非英语写作的作家都面临这样的冷遇。赫布兰德‧巴克作品的命运与佩尔·帕特森的颇相似，它们都因获IMPAC文学奖而受到英语文坛的关注。但比起帕特森，巴克的《孪生子》在美国仍是一本不太为人知的小说，而《迂回》还尚未出版。也许市场和读者都需要时间，接受一个新的声音。
（《书城》）
英国《卫报》评荷兰赫尔布兰德·巴克的小说《迂回》
The Detour by Gerbrand Bakker - review
A haunting tale of solitude from the Impac winner
When Gerbrand Bakker's first book, The Twin, won the Impac Award, it was clear that an assured and mature new voice had emerged in European fiction. A study of grief and loneliness in which a young man loses his twin brother, the novel was universally praised for its restraint, its quiet beauty and its undercurrent of dry humour – elements which are certainly carried forward into The Detour. Yet, as accomplished a work as The Twin was, its successor is even more powerful.
The Detour
by Gerbrand Bakker
One of Bakker's gifts is an ability to place us in a landscape so utterly that the damp begins to seep through the soles of our shoes, yet the terrain is never romanticised and his descriptions are at once attentive and economical. This is vital for a writer whose work deals so intimately with the physical and mental fabric of grief: the natural world may offer some consolation to those who, for whatever reason, suddenly confront the existential nature of their pain, but it would be absurd to suggest, as a single superfluous stroke of colour or light might do, that anything in the garden is, or could be, no more than lovely.
So when a Dutchwoman calling herself Emily moves into a rundown cottage in north Wales, we see that she is looking for solace when she begins work on the overgrown garden, but we are highly aware throughout, not only of the backbreaking nature of her labour, but also of its futility. The cottage does not belong to the woman, and it soon transpires that her tenancy will be brief; any work she does will, it seems, be wasted. This "Emily" may be on the run from her old life, but she is not looking for a new one; she is simply passing the time. At first, she is alone, and she plans her routines to maximise that solitude, partly because she wants to be left to her own devices, but also because she is eager to avoid drawing attention to herself.
As the novel progresses, however, a variety of male characters – a local farmer who invites himself into her house and sits eating her cake while she bristles with barely concealed anger, a young man who claims to be mapping a scenic pathway through the north Wales countryside, a local doctor, her abandoned husband – intrude upon her silence. Meanwhile, from somewhere inside the house, or inside herself, faint traces of an old woman slowly form into a possessive ghost who is partly the previous occupant of the cottage, and partly the ghost of Emily Dickinson, about whom the Dutchwoman had been writing a thesis before she fled her former, seemingly normal existence. Meanwhile, an invisible predator is making off with the flock of geese that came with the cottage and, in spite of her best efforts, the birds refuse to adopt the shelter the Dutchwoman builds for them.
It would give too much away to say more than this about the narrative, or about how and why this woman abandoned everything and ended up alone in rural Wales, almost in the shadow of Snowdon. What is essential to The Detour is the question of ordinary grief, which seems to begin with some trigger – a death, a betrayal, the end of a love affair – but gradually reveals itself to have been there all along, waiting to be revealed. It is in the fabric of our daily routines, which turn out to have been little more than distractions, and in our exchanges with others, who sometimes see into our most secret selves and casually reveal what they have learned in some offhand remark and, at other times, seem unable to decipher the clear signs of hurt and dismay inscribed in our faces and gestures for all to see.
Throughout the book, "Emily" is haunted by a favourite uncle whose pathetic and inept attempt at suicide had bewildered those who knew him, even though he was, quite clearly, one of those people who "have no idea what to do next, how to move backward or forward". Now, she is in the same predicament: the grief that accumulates throughout a commonplace existence has found her out, and she can do nothing but watch and wait while her geese disappear one by one, and the men around her enact their absurd rituals of possession and power. Yet, while it offers no other balm than dry humour and the strange pleasure of at last comprehending the nature of pain, The Detour is a beautiful, oddly moving work of fiction, a quiet read that lingers long in the mind, like the ghosts that linger in our homes, and in the land around us.
• John Burnside's Black Cat Bone is published by Jonathan Cape.
赫布兰德·巴克
《迂回》
在赫布兰德·巴克相对较少的作品总量中，自然界占据着突出的地位。作为农民的儿子，现在又担任园艺师，所以他详尽地掌握有关该主题的知识。在其作品中，自然不是浪漫的背景，而是一项只有通过辛勤劳动才能战胜的挑战。
在《上面很安静》这部为他带来国际声誉的小说中，主人公命中注定要在逐渐衰老的父亲那挑剔的目光注视下接管家庭农场。
小说《迂回》里的主人公阿赫奈丝，一个不久前还在阿姆斯特丹大学教书的已婚女人，如今选择了在威尔士乡下孤独而艰苦的生活。试图对她作出这种选择的原因进行解密的读者一路被置于悬念之中，直至戏剧性的结局。
但到了那一刻，阿赫奈丝为之逃遁的一切——失败的婚姻、一个导致她被解雇的痴迷男生的恶意报复、医疗检查结果等等——都变得无足轻重。《迂回》的核心，在于一个女人在受到人类和自然双重威胁的环境中如何保全自己。只有迂回而行，主人公才得以心甘情愿地接受自己的死亡。
《上面很安静》于2005年的面世，使赫尔布兰德·巴克尔摇身变为荷兰文学最重要的人物之一。国际荣誉接踵而至，他摘取了享有盛名的都柏林文学奖桂冠。巴克尔在成为园艺家之前， 专修荷兰语言文学，1999年发表其处女作：少年小说《梨树绽放白花》。《迂回》是继《上面很安静》和《六月》 (2009)发表后的第三部成年人小说。
一部美丽、令人信服和淡雅的小说，其简约和表现力不禁令人回忆起 J.M. 库切。
《忠诚报》
译本 英语(Harvill Secker, Scribe)
绝望的逃逸
两年前，荷兰作家赫布兰德‧巴克（Gerbrand Bakker）以《孪生子》（The Twin）摘得IMPAC都柏林文学奖，引起不小的轰动，文学大师库切以“克制的细腻和精炼的幽默”赞赏这本小说处女作，但如果就此把赫布兰德‧巴克归类为文坛新人，似乎并不确切。巴克与文字有着很深的渊源，他大学主修的是历史语言学，参与编纂过两本词源学辞典，为影视纪录片配写过字幕，而且在《孪生子》之前，已出版过一本青少年小说《梨树盛开白花》（Pear Trees Bloom White）。因此，《孪生子》展现的不是初生牛犊的锋芒，宁静恬淡的文笔，突显作者的自信与沉着。
《迂回》（The Detour）是巴克2010年的新作，也是继《孪生子》后他第二本被翻译成英语的小说。译者仍是大卫·科尔默（David Colmer），他出生在澳大利亚，自九十年代初移居荷兰后，翻译过诗歌、小说等各类作品，获得过多项翻译奖，包括《孪生子》带来的IMPAC奖。
《迂回》的故事主要发生在威尔士偏远的乡村，一名自称叫Emilie的荷兰女子租下一间农庄。她是大学的讲师，因桃色丑闻而逃逸到这里。她随身带了艾米莉·迪金森的诗歌全集和一本迪金森的传记，那是她博士论文的课题。然而，她更多时间是在打理屋子周围的园地，整理草坪，修剪灌木。她初抵农庄时，田里有十只鹅，后来一只只减少，她怀疑是狐狸，于是给这些鹅搭了一圈简易的围栏，可鹅不肯进去。
小说的另一条线索在荷兰，Emilie的丈夫跑去Emilie以前的办公室纵火，由此结识了一位警察，这位警察答应协助他追踪他不告而别的妻子。通过私家侦探的调查，他们得知了Emilie的下落，登上去威尔士的船。临行前，丈夫给Emilie寄了一张明信片，上面只有简单的一句话，“我来了。”这三个字在不同的语境下会产生不同的化学反应。对一心想躲起来的Emilie来说，这如同追捕者的通缉令。
回到Emilie租住的农庄，一个大男孩的出现打破了她孤独平静的生活。男孩起初只是借宿过夜，后来不知怎的就住了下来。他照料Emilie的饮食起居，帮她干园子里的活，与她相约去登山。可是，男孩的纯真朝气让Emilie变得烦躁不安，她几次想赶男孩走，却都徒劳无果。男孩的存在，仿佛令她嗅到自己生命的腐朽，她不断觉得农庄已逝主人、Evans太太留下的气味附着在她身上。此外，暂管农庄的事务所寻到了Evans太太的亲人，租约即将到期，Emilie必须搬走。附近曾与Evans太太有旧交的农夫Rhys Jones还威胁要Emilie赔偿不见的鹅。
Emilie犹如一头困兽，面临来自四面八方的围捕，她能怎么逃出牢笼？在这个意义上，《迂回》是一本绝望的小说。但在前半部分，巴克以大量的日常细节，描绘Emilie离群索居的生活状态，日复一日的园艺工作，把身心沉浸在大自然里，不做任何思考，这样的孤独，甚至有几分迷人。同时，小说塑造了多位令人难忘的配角，连给病人看诊时也抽烟的乖张医生，热情好客、喜欢闲话家常的面包房的老板娘，爱管闲事的农夫，还有Emilie企图在只有齐腰深的池塘里自杀的叔叔。他们有的荒诞而滑稽，有的夸张而逼真，尽显巴克“精炼的幽默”。他以简笔画的方式，让这些独特的形象跃然纸上。
与《孪生子》一样，《迂回》也是一个似乎什么也没发生的故事，描写的都是琐屑的小事，没有跌宕起伏的悬念贯穿其中。但比《孪生子》更甚，《迂回》切断了故事的时间，或者说逻辑脉络，所有的叙述都只集中在当前。对于Emilie的出走，小说只点到她与学生发生关系即止，具体是怎么回事，她与丈夫的婚姻如何等等，都没有展开说明。莫名出现在农庄的大男孩，结果原来是农夫Rhys Jones的儿子，可男孩为何拼命要逃离自己的父亲，小说同样几乎没有交代。这是一个只有现在、没有过去/回忆的故事。相比《孪生子》的清晰晓畅，《迂回》的节制似乎比较难让人亲近，主题也更沉重，可另一方面，它进一步确立了赫布兰德‧巴克具有鲜明个性的小说风格。
《外出偷马》的作者佩尔·帕特森曾说，“如果你是一个挪威作家，在世界文坛上看不到你的身影。对一个挪威作家而言，敲开英语世界的门是非常困难的。”在英美占据主导的国际出版界，很多用非英语写作的作家都面临这样的冷遇。赫布兰德‧巴克作品的命运与佩尔·帕特森的颇相似，它们都因获IMPAC文学奖而受到英语文坛的关注。但比起帕特森，巴克的《孪生子》在美国仍是一本不太为人知的小说，而《迂回》还尚未出版。也许市场和读者都需要时间，接受一个新的声音。
（《书城》）
英国《卫报》评荷兰赫尔布兰德·巴克的小说《迂回》
The Detour by Gerbrand Bakker - review
A haunting tale of solitude from the Impac winner
When Gerbrand Bakker's first book, The Twin, won the Impac Award, it was clear that an assured and mature new voice had emerged in European fiction. A study of grief and loneliness in which a young man loses his twin brother, the novel was universally praised for its restraint, its quiet beauty and its undercurrent of dry humour – elements which are certainly carried forward into The Detour. Yet, as accomplished a work as The Twin was, its successor is even more powerful.
The Detour
by Gerbrand Bakker
One of Bakker's gifts is an ability to place us in a landscape so utterly that the damp begins to seep through the soles of our shoes, yet the terrain is never romanticised and his descriptions are at once attentive and economical. This is vital for a writer whose work deals so intimately with the physical and mental fabric of grief: the natural world may offer some consolation to those who, for whatever reason, suddenly confront the existential nature of their pain, but it would be absurd to suggest, as a single superfluous stroke of colour or light might do, that anything in the garden is, or could be, no more than lovely.
So when a Dutchwoman calling herself Emily moves into a rundown cottage in north Wales, we see that she is looking for solace when she begins work on the overgrown garden, but we are highly aware throughout, not only of the backbreaking nature of her labour, but also of its futility. The cottage does not belong to the woman, and it soon transpires that her tenancy will be brief; any work she does will, it seems, be wasted. This "Emily" may be on the run from her old life, but she is not looking for a new one; she is simply passing the time. At first, she is alone, and she plans her routines to maximise that solitude, partly because she wants to be left to her own devices, but also because she is eager to avoid drawing attention to herself.
As the novel progresses, however, a variety of male characters – a local farmer who invites himself into her house and sits eating her cake while she bristles with barely concealed anger, a young man who claims to be mapping a scenic pathway through the north Wales countryside, a local doctor, her abandoned husband – intrude upon her silence. Meanwhile, from somewhere inside the house, or inside herself, faint traces of an old woman slowly form into a possessive ghost who is partly the previous occupant of the cottage, and partly the ghost of Emily Dickinson, about whom the Dutchwoman had been writing a thesis before she fled her former, seemingly normal existence. Meanwhile, an invisible predator is making off with the flock of geese that came with the cottage and, in spite of her best efforts, the birds refuse to adopt the shelter the Dutchwoman builds for them.
It would give too much away to say more than this about the narrative, or about how and why this woman abandoned everything and ended up alone in rural Wales, almost in the shadow of Snowdon. What is essential to The Detour is the question of ordinary grief, which seems to begin with some trigger – a death, a betrayal, the end of a love affair – but gradually reveals itself to have been there all along, waiting to be revealed. It is in the fabric of our daily routines, which turn out to have been little more than distractions, and in our exchanges with others, who sometimes see into our most secret selves and casually reveal what they have learned in some offhand remark and, at other times, seem unable to decipher the clear signs of hurt and dismay inscribed in our faces and gestures for all to see.
Throughout the book, "Emily" is haunted by a favourite uncle whose pathetic and inept attempt at suicide had bewildered those who knew him, even though he was, quite clearly, one of those people who "have no idea what to do next, how to move backward or forward". Now, she is in the same predicament: the grief that accumulates throughout a commonplace existence has found her out, and she can do nothing but watch and wait while her geese disappear one by one, and the men around her enact their absurd rituals of possession and power. Yet, while it offers no other balm than dry humour and the strange pleasure of at last comprehending the nature of pain, The Detour is a beautiful, oddly moving work of fiction, a quiet read that lingers long in the mind, like the ghosts that linger in our homes, and in the land around us.
• John Burnside's Black Cat Bone is published by Jonathan Cape.
赫布兰德·巴克
《迂回》
在赫布兰德·巴克相对较少的作品总量中，自然界占据着突出的地位。作为农民的儿子，现在又担任园艺师，所以他详尽地掌握有关该主题的知识。在其作品中，自然不是浪漫的背景，而是一项只有通过辛勤劳动才能战胜的挑战。
在《上面很安静》这部为他带来国际声誉的小说中，主人公命中注定要在逐渐衰老的父亲那挑剔的目光注视下接管家庭农场。
小说《迂回》里的主人公阿赫奈丝，一个不久前还在阿姆斯特丹大学教书的已婚女人，如今选择了在威尔士乡下孤独而艰苦的生活。试图对她作出这种选择的原因进行解密的读者一路被置于悬念之中，直至戏剧性的结局。
但到了那一刻，阿赫奈丝为之逃遁的一切——失败的婚姻、一个导致她被解雇的痴迷男生的恶意报复、医疗检查结果等等——都变得无足轻重。《迂回》的核心，在于一个女人在受到人类和自然双重威胁的环境中如何保全自己。只有迂回而行，主人公才得以心甘情愿地接受自己的死亡。
《上面很安静》于2005年的面世，使赫尔布兰德·巴克尔摇身变为荷兰文学最重要的人物之一。国际荣誉接踵而至，他摘取了享有盛名的都柏林文学奖桂冠。巴克尔在成为园艺家之前， 专修荷兰语言文学，1999年发表其处女作：少年小说《梨树绽放白花》。《迂回》是继《上面很安静》和《六月》 (2009)发表后的第三部成年人小说。
一部美丽、令人信服和淡雅的小说，其简约和表现力不禁令人回忆起 J.M. 库切。
《忠诚报》
译本 英语(Harvill Secker, Scribe)
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