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[Bookish Weekend] A Novel of the “Post-Wounded Woman”
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This is how much I liked Catherine Lacey’s début novel, “Nobody Is Ever Missing”: I read it over a summer weekend, mostly transfixed, earmarking nearly every other page to identify perceptions or turns of phrase I might wish to return to. The novel is an unlikely page-turner, since it takes place almost entirely in the narrator’s head, and it will not appeal to everyone, least of all to those who are interested in intricate plot development. Then again, even voracious readers read for amorphous and not easily articulated reasons, and this particular book satisfies all my inchoate readerly impulses—including the primary one of getting out of my own skin and into someone else’s—in a way that, say, Donna Tartt’s more explicitly pitched “The Goldfinch” decidedly does not.
以下这段话说明了我有多喜欢Catherine Lacey的处女作《Nobody Is Ever Missing》：我在夏天的一个周末读完了它，满怀惊喜。我想要标记那些我觉得自己可能会再回过头看的观点或语句，于是书上几乎每隔一页都有折角。它不是那种让人有欲望一页页迅速往下翻的书，因为书的内容全部是在讲主人公的精神世界；它也不是一本老少咸宜的大众读物，更吸引不了那些渴望曲折复杂情节的读者。但话说回来，读者是贪婪的，有时候读一本书，可以没有原因，也可以说不出原因。这本书满足了我原始的阅读冲动，就连最基本的跳出自己、代入角色的冲动也能够满足，而类似书中，Donna Tartt的《The Goldfinch》虽然向这一方向定位，却没有做到这一点。
“Nobody Is Ever Missing” takes its title from John Berryman’s poem “Dream Song 29,” which also contains one of my all-time favorite lines, “All the bells say: too late”—an expression of belatedness that captures the psychic tense in which the novel’s story is told. The book begins breathlessly, mid-thought, as though we are in the midst of a conversation with the narrator and our interest has already been whetted: “There might be people in this world who can read minds against their will and if that kind of person exists I am pretty sure my husband is one of them.” The story’s protagonist is named, a bit fussily, Elyria, in commemoration of “a town in Ohio that my mother had never visited,” but the novel, although consumingly pensive, is anything but fussy.
《Nobody Is Ever Missing》书名源自John Berryman的诗《Dream Song 29》，而这首诗也是我一直以来非常喜欢的。“无数钟声大作，高唱：回首已太迟”——这样一句表达追悔的诗明确体现了这本小说的精神气质。故事从一半的地方开始，几乎教读者无法喘息。读者仿佛是在主人公谈话，而这样的开头显然也撩起了读者的兴趣。“世界上或许真的有人虽然不想，但看一眼就能读到别人的心吧。如果这样的人存在，我想我丈夫应该是他们中的一员。”主角的名字听上去是个容易大惊小怪的人，叫Elyria，是对“我母亲从没能够去到的小镇俄亥俄”的纪念，但回到这本书而言，虽然内容非常惹人深思，却并非无病呻吟小题大做。
Elyria (known to intimates as Elly), a Barnard graduate who appears to be in her late twenties, has abruptly abandoned her life in New York, where she wrote soap-opera scripts, for the open roads of New Zealand, where she knows not a soul and spends much of her time hitchhiking. (We never discover a reason for Elyria’s departure beyond her pervasive sense of life-bereavement—her feeling that “nothing is clear or easy to me anymore”—and her wish to leave the “concrete wasps’ nest” of the city). The strangers she meets keep warning her about the dangers of this mode of travel; one tells her about an American girl who was picked up a year earlier by a “bloke” who “chopped her up into about fifty-five pieces and left her all over the country.” But this is the way Elyria chooses to move around, despite the risks: “A woman wearing a backpack, a cardigan, green sneakers. And young-seeming, of course, because you must seem young to get away with this kind of vulnerability, standing on a road’s shoulder, showing the pale underside of your arm. You must seem both totally harmless and able, if necessary, to push a knife through any tender gut.” The latent violence on the novel’s periphery eventually erupts in an unexpected way, when Elyria is attacked by a stingray and ends up hospitalized.
Elyria（昵称Elly）是巴纳德学院的一名毕业生，快三十的年纪，却突然抛下了在纽约的生活。她放弃了给肥皂剧写剧本的工作，去往毫无亲戚故旧的新西兰，在那里搭车野营旅行。（除了因为丧亲之痛而对生活有了新的感悟以外，读者对Elyria离开纽约的原因一无所知，只知道她觉得“生活中的一切都不再清晰简单”，她只想离开这座“水泥筑成的蜂巢”。）她遇到的陌生人不断告诫她，这样搭车有多危险，有个人还和她讲了一个一年前发生的事儿，说是一个美国女孩儿搭了个男人的车，却被这男的砍成五十五段，散布在了全国各地。但这Elyria选择的旅行方式，就算有危险也要前行。“一个女人穿着羊绒毛衫绿球鞋，背后背着个大背包，看起来年轻轻的。不年轻当然不行，要站在路边，看起来弱不禁风，抬手招呼搭车，露出胳膊下晒不到的白色，不年轻怎么做得到。要搭车旅行，得同时看上去无害，却也干练，必要的时候，有胆子把刀插进任何一个柔软的胸膛。”这种字里行间流露出的隐藏的暴力倾向最终突然爆发，Elyria对一条黄貂鱼开战，最后把自己弄得住院了。
Elyria’s ostensible destination is the farm of Werner, a well-known poet (“Novelists and filmmakers cited him as a major influence”) whom she meets once in New York, at a reading; afterwards, he off-handedly invites her to stay at his place in New Zealand, scrawling an address on a scrap of paper. By the time Elyria actually arrives at Werner’s home, more than a hundred pages into the novel, we have learned quite a bit about her: the odd circumstances of her marriage to an older man, a math professor, from whom she feels increasingly estranged; the suicide of her adopted Korean sister, Ruby; her unhappy relationship with her erratic, out-of-it mother; her immersion in the novel “Mrs. Bridge,” by Evan Connell, whose casually ominous tone suits her mood. But what we have come to understand more than her motives for escaping her own existence is the pattern of her thoughts, the nuanced yet elliptical way she takes in the world around her, whether it’s “a small and brutally lit waiting area in the university police office,” a “wisp thin crack in the ceiling,” or “the unnerving precision” with which a woman slides a pile of diced onions into a hot skillet. We also come to understand that nothing in Elyria’s life—not the various people she meets on her trip, such as Jaye, a transsexual flight attendant who provides her with temporary lodging and sympathy, nor the distilled memories of her childhood and her marriage—means as much to her as keeping the demons inside her (she calls them “the wildebeest”) at bay. Although she is literally running away from herself by going on the road, she is also homing in on the root cause of her terror: her fear that she has done “everything wrong.”
Elyria表面上说自己要去的是Werner的农场。Werner是她从前在纽约遇到的一个著名诗人（“会被小说家和电影制作人称为曾经给他们以巨大影响的那种”），他们在一次读书会上认识，之后他随口邀请她去自己在新西兰的家里做客，在一小片纸上草草写下了一个地址。而等到Elyria真的到了Werner的家中，小说已经写了有一百多页，读者已经对主人公有了相当的了解：她嫁给了一个比她年长的男人，是为数学教授，他们的婚姻处于奇怪的境地，对于丈夫，她日益感觉疏离；她父母收养的女儿，韩国裔的Ruby自杀；她与行踪不定、昏沉度日的母亲的关系；她对Evan Connel所著小说《Mrs. Bridge》的沉迷，以为那种充满预兆却平淡如家常的语言很对她的口味。但读者理解更多的，不是她逃离的动机，而是她思维的方式，是她观察周围世界的那种精细却又圆滑的方式，无论是她眼中“照明刺眼的狭小大学警察局等候室”，“天花板上几条放射开来的细小裂纹”，还是一个女人把切成小块的洋葱丢进热锅里那“使人气馁的精准”，都体现了这一点。读者渐渐也了解了Elyria的生活中没有任何事情比困守住她的心魔（她称之为“那野兽”）更重要——无论是旅途上遇见的毒舌的人，比如那个给她提供暂时食宿与同情的变性飞行乘务员Jaye，还是她畸变的童年与婚姻，都不行。尽管旅行其实是她逃避自己的方式，但因着恐惧，她所踏上的其实也是归根之路：她怕自己之前所做的“一切都是错的”。
“Nobody is Ever Missing” has its longueurs, to be sure, and some of its lineaments seem a bit wobbly—I was never quite persuaded of the reality of Elyria’s New York life. But it is never less than strikingly original. By the novel’s end—which is blessedly free of even a whiff of so-called closure, and leaves us entangled in Elyria’s thoughts as she sits in a diner back in New York, “watching the rippled surface of my coffee quiver”—we have reached the idiosyncratic heart of the human mystery: we know this person profoundly well, but she might surprise us at any minute. Elyria has become interesting in the way that our dearest friends are, both familiar and profoundly not-us. I wanted to go on hearing her every passing observation, as though I might find salvation in the free-floating, embracing specificity of her details. For instance: “I walked into the library and the library smelled like every library I’d ever been in and Dewey decimals were on all the spines, same tiny font, tiny numbers, and I thought, for a moment, that there actually were things you could count on in this world until I realized that the most dependable things in the world are not of any significant use to any substantial problems.”
当然，《Nobody is Ever Missing》也有乏味的地方，有些故事线显得不清不楚——我个人就觉得Elyria在纽约的生活情况有点不太现实。但这不影响这本书的好，它仍然一样令人惊喜。令人庆幸的是，这本小说没有一点点近似于结局的东西，Elyria回到纽约坐在晚餐桌前“看着咖啡杯里咖啡表面泛起的涟漪”，读者继续与她的思绪纠缠。在书的结尾出我们碰触到了人类之迷的怪异内核：我们以为可以很深入地了解一个人，但她却可能在下一刻让我们惊讶到合不拢嘴。Elyria就好像我们最亲密的朋友一样散发着吸引力，熟悉，却不是我们中的一员。我想继续倾听她的每一点细小的观察体验，不放过她所独有的每个细节，仿佛在这样的自由漂浮中能得到救赎。比如“我走进图书馆，闻到了这图书馆里和每个我去过的图书馆一样的味道，杜威的十进制图书编号标签在每个书架上贴着，连字体都一样，小小的字母，小小的数字。有那么一刻我曾想，这世界上还是有能够数清楚的东西的，但后来我意识到，这世界上最可靠的东西，其实都不能解决任何实质性问题。”
Lacey has written a postmodern existential novel, featuring what Leslie Jamison, in her recent essay collection, “The Empathy Exams,” terms a “post-wounded woman”—one with a brain on overdrive and emotions that are slow to form, if not quite stalled. These are women, Jamison explains, who “are wary of melodrama so they stay numb or clever instead. Post-wounded women make jokes about being wounded or get impatient with women who hurt too much.” In this sense, the novel is very contemporary, I suppose, but it is also classical in its delineation of the youthful impulse to define oneself; among other things, I was thrilled to read a book in which the main character doesn’t own a cell phone and no one writes emails. Mostly, though, I was excited by its sustained attunement to the disjunctive universe its protagonist inhabits, and the way the writer nimbly hop-skips around, cutting squibs of arresting dialogue into the meditative sections and gimlet-eyed details (“The front desk sent flowers and a balloon and a stuffed bear—the string noosed around his neck”). Lacey is a very gifted writer and thinker, and if this is what post-wounded women sound like—diffident about the pain of being alive, funny and dead-on about the obstacles to being their best selves—I say bring ’em on.
Lacey所创作的这本后现代存在主义小说中描写的女性，正是Leslie Jamison最近在她题为《The Emphathy Exams》的散文集中所说的“后创伤女性”。她用这个词来指那些大脑飞速运转，感情却不能成形，或成形缓慢的女人。Jamison说这种女性往往“因为高度警惕戏剧性事件而选择麻木，或变得聪明。后创伤女性用自己的伤口调侃，对深受伤害的女性却不甚耐心。”从这个意义上讲，Lacey这本小说具有很强的现时意义，但其中对那种想要定义自己的青春冲动的非线性描写却又深深扎根于传统。不说别的，现在还能看到一部主角没有手机，所有人都不发电子邮件的小说，我就已经很激动了。但我之所以激动，其实大部分还是因为主人公所在的独立世界在作者笔下保持了和谐，而作者对跳跃描写的运用手法也让人印象深刻，她把引人入胜的对话切割成小段，插入到主人公的心理活动和锐利观察之中（如“前台送了一束花和一个气球，还有一只玩具熊——气球的绳子绕着玩具熊的脖子勒了一圈”）。Lacey是一位很有才华的作家、思想者，如果后创伤女性就是这样——低调面对对活着的痛苦，风趣却又明确知道要成为更好的自己需要克服什么——那么要我说，就让后创伤来得更猛烈一些。
以下这段话说明了我有多喜欢Catherine Lacey的处女作《Nobody Is Ever Missing》：我在夏天的一个周末读完了它，满怀惊喜。我想要标记那些我觉得自己可能会再回过头看的观点或语句，于是书上几乎每隔一页都有折角。它不是那种让人有欲望一页页迅速往下翻的书，因为书的内容全部是在讲主人公的精神世界；它也不是一本老少咸宜的大众读物，更吸引不了那些渴望曲折复杂情节的读者。但话说回来，读者是贪婪的，有时候读一本书，可以没有原因，也可以说不出原因。这本书满足了我原始的阅读冲动，就连最基本的跳出自己、代入角色的冲动也能够满足，而类似书中，Donna Tartt的《The Goldfinch》虽然向这一方向定位，却没有做到这一点。
“Nobody Is Ever Missing” takes its title from John Berryman’s poem “Dream Song 29,” which also contains one of my all-time favorite lines, “All the bells say: too late”—an expression of belatedness that captures the psychic tense in which the novel’s story is told. The book begins breathlessly, mid-thought, as though we are in the midst of a conversation with the narrator and our interest has already been whetted: “There might be people in this world who can read minds against their will and if that kind of person exists I am pretty sure my husband is one of them.” The story’s protagonist is named, a bit fussily, Elyria, in commemoration of “a town in Ohio that my mother had never visited,” but the novel, although consumingly pensive, is anything but fussy.
《Nobody Is Ever Missing》书名源自John Berryman的诗《Dream Song 29》，而这首诗也是我一直以来非常喜欢的。“无数钟声大作，高唱：回首已太迟”——这样一句表达追悔的诗明确体现了这本小说的精神气质。故事从一半的地方开始，几乎教读者无法喘息。读者仿佛是在主人公谈话，而这样的开头显然也撩起了读者的兴趣。“世界上或许真的有人虽然不想，但看一眼就能读到别人的心吧。如果这样的人存在，我想我丈夫应该是他们中的一员。”主角的名字听上去是个容易大惊小怪的人，叫Elyria，是对“我母亲从没能够去到的小镇俄亥俄”的纪念，但回到这本书而言，虽然内容非常惹人深思，却并非无病呻吟小题大做。
Elyria (known to intimates as Elly), a Barnard graduate who appears to be in her late twenties, has abruptly abandoned her life in New York, where she wrote soap-opera scripts, for the open roads of New Zealand, where she knows not a soul and spends much of her time hitchhiking. (We never discover a reason for Elyria’s departure beyond her pervasive sense of life-bereavement—her feeling that “nothing is clear or easy to me anymore”—and her wish to leave the “concrete wasps’ nest” of the city). The strangers she meets keep warning her about the dangers of this mode of travel; one tells her about an American girl who was picked up a year earlier by a “bloke” who “chopped her up into about fifty-five pieces and left her all over the country.” But this is the way Elyria chooses to move around, despite the risks: “A woman wearing a backpack, a cardigan, green sneakers. And young-seeming, of course, because you must seem young to get away with this kind of vulnerability, standing on a road’s shoulder, showing the pale underside of your arm. You must seem both totally harmless and able, if necessary, to push a knife through any tender gut.” The latent violence on the novel’s periphery eventually erupts in an unexpected way, when Elyria is attacked by a stingray and ends up hospitalized.
Elyria（昵称Elly）是巴纳德学院的一名毕业生，快三十的年纪，却突然抛下了在纽约的生活。她放弃了给肥皂剧写剧本的工作，去往毫无亲戚故旧的新西兰，在那里搭车野营旅行。（除了因为丧亲之痛而对生活有了新的感悟以外，读者对Elyria离开纽约的原因一无所知，只知道她觉得“生活中的一切都不再清晰简单”，她只想离开这座“水泥筑成的蜂巢”。）她遇到的陌生人不断告诫她，这样搭车有多危险，有个人还和她讲了一个一年前发生的事儿，说是一个美国女孩儿搭了个男人的车，却被这男的砍成五十五段，散布在了全国各地。但这Elyria选择的旅行方式，就算有危险也要前行。“一个女人穿着羊绒毛衫绿球鞋，背后背着个大背包，看起来年轻轻的。不年轻当然不行，要站在路边，看起来弱不禁风，抬手招呼搭车，露出胳膊下晒不到的白色，不年轻怎么做得到。要搭车旅行，得同时看上去无害，却也干练，必要的时候，有胆子把刀插进任何一个柔软的胸膛。”这种字里行间流露出的隐藏的暴力倾向最终突然爆发，Elyria对一条黄貂鱼开战，最后把自己弄得住院了。
Elyria’s ostensible destination is the farm of Werner, a well-known poet (“Novelists and filmmakers cited him as a major influence”) whom she meets once in New York, at a reading; afterwards, he off-handedly invites her to stay at his place in New Zealand, scrawling an address on a scrap of paper. By the time Elyria actually arrives at Werner’s home, more than a hundred pages into the novel, we have learned quite a bit about her: the odd circumstances of her marriage to an older man, a math professor, from whom she feels increasingly estranged; the suicide of her adopted Korean sister, Ruby; her unhappy relationship with her erratic, out-of-it mother; her immersion in the novel “Mrs. Bridge,” by Evan Connell, whose casually ominous tone suits her mood. But what we have come to understand more than her motives for escaping her own existence is the pattern of her thoughts, the nuanced yet elliptical way she takes in the world around her, whether it’s “a small and brutally lit waiting area in the university police office,” a “wisp thin crack in the ceiling,” or “the unnerving precision” with which a woman slides a pile of diced onions into a hot skillet. We also come to understand that nothing in Elyria’s life—not the various people she meets on her trip, such as Jaye, a transsexual flight attendant who provides her with temporary lodging and sympathy, nor the distilled memories of her childhood and her marriage—means as much to her as keeping the demons inside her (she calls them “the wildebeest”) at bay. Although she is literally running away from herself by going on the road, she is also homing in on the root cause of her terror: her fear that she has done “everything wrong.”
Elyria表面上说自己要去的是Werner的农场。Werner是她从前在纽约遇到的一个著名诗人（“会被小说家和电影制作人称为曾经给他们以巨大影响的那种”），他们在一次读书会上认识，之后他随口邀请她去自己在新西兰的家里做客，在一小片纸上草草写下了一个地址。而等到Elyria真的到了Werner的家中，小说已经写了有一百多页，读者已经对主人公有了相当的了解：她嫁给了一个比她年长的男人，是为数学教授，他们的婚姻处于奇怪的境地，对于丈夫，她日益感觉疏离；她父母收养的女儿，韩国裔的Ruby自杀；她与行踪不定、昏沉度日的母亲的关系；她对Evan Connel所著小说《Mrs. Bridge》的沉迷，以为那种充满预兆却平淡如家常的语言很对她的口味。但读者理解更多的，不是她逃离的动机，而是她思维的方式，是她观察周围世界的那种精细却又圆滑的方式，无论是她眼中“照明刺眼的狭小大学警察局等候室”，“天花板上几条放射开来的细小裂纹”，还是一个女人把切成小块的洋葱丢进热锅里那“使人气馁的精准”，都体现了这一点。读者渐渐也了解了Elyria的生活中没有任何事情比困守住她的心魔（她称之为“那野兽”）更重要——无论是旅途上遇见的毒舌的人，比如那个给她提供暂时食宿与同情的变性飞行乘务员Jaye，还是她畸变的童年与婚姻，都不行。尽管旅行其实是她逃避自己的方式，但因着恐惧，她所踏上的其实也是归根之路：她怕自己之前所做的“一切都是错的”。
“Nobody is Ever Missing” has its longueurs, to be sure, and some of its lineaments seem a bit wobbly—I was never quite persuaded of the reality of Elyria’s New York life. But it is never less than strikingly original. By the novel’s end—which is blessedly free of even a whiff of so-called closure, and leaves us entangled in Elyria’s thoughts as she sits in a diner back in New York, “watching the rippled surface of my coffee quiver”—we have reached the idiosyncratic heart of the human mystery: we know this person profoundly well, but she might surprise us at any minute. Elyria has become interesting in the way that our dearest friends are, both familiar and profoundly not-us. I wanted to go on hearing her every passing observation, as though I might find salvation in the free-floating, embracing specificity of her details. For instance: “I walked into the library and the library smelled like every library I’d ever been in and Dewey decimals were on all the spines, same tiny font, tiny numbers, and I thought, for a moment, that there actually were things you could count on in this world until I realized that the most dependable things in the world are not of any significant use to any substantial problems.”
当然，《Nobody is Ever Missing》也有乏味的地方，有些故事线显得不清不楚——我个人就觉得Elyria在纽约的生活情况有点不太现实。但这不影响这本书的好，它仍然一样令人惊喜。令人庆幸的是，这本小说没有一点点近似于结局的东西，Elyria回到纽约坐在晚餐桌前“看着咖啡杯里咖啡表面泛起的涟漪”，读者继续与她的思绪纠缠。在书的结尾出我们碰触到了人类之迷的怪异内核：我们以为可以很深入地了解一个人，但她却可能在下一刻让我们惊讶到合不拢嘴。Elyria就好像我们最亲密的朋友一样散发着吸引力，熟悉，却不是我们中的一员。我想继续倾听她的每一点细小的观察体验，不放过她所独有的每个细节，仿佛在这样的自由漂浮中能得到救赎。比如“我走进图书馆，闻到了这图书馆里和每个我去过的图书馆一样的味道，杜威的十进制图书编号标签在每个书架上贴着，连字体都一样，小小的字母，小小的数字。有那么一刻我曾想，这世界上还是有能够数清楚的东西的，但后来我意识到，这世界上最可靠的东西，其实都不能解决任何实质性问题。”
Lacey has written a postmodern existential novel, featuring what Leslie Jamison, in her recent essay collection, “The Empathy Exams,” terms a “post-wounded woman”—one with a brain on overdrive and emotions that are slow to form, if not quite stalled. These are women, Jamison explains, who “are wary of melodrama so they stay numb or clever instead. Post-wounded women make jokes about being wounded or get impatient with women who hurt too much.” In this sense, the novel is very contemporary, I suppose, but it is also classical in its delineation of the youthful impulse to define oneself; among other things, I was thrilled to read a book in which the main character doesn’t own a cell phone and no one writes emails. Mostly, though, I was excited by its sustained attunement to the disjunctive universe its protagonist inhabits, and the way the writer nimbly hop-skips around, cutting squibs of arresting dialogue into the meditative sections and gimlet-eyed details (“The front desk sent flowers and a balloon and a stuffed bear—the string noosed around his neck”). Lacey is a very gifted writer and thinker, and if this is what post-wounded women sound like—diffident about the pain of being alive, funny and dead-on about the obstacles to being their best selves—I say bring ’em on.
Reviewed by Daphne Merkin
Translated by Lauren Dong
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Post comment Comment (4 replies)
- Reply xingyue
- “You must seem both totally harmless and able, if necessary, to push a knife through any tender gut.” The one must also be decisive and courageous. My first thought is the knife is to kill someone. Of course, the stingray is more astonishing. I agree that “we know this person profoundly well, but she might surprise us at any minute”. After all, man is a kind of extremely complicated creature. The term “ post-wounded woman” is much impressive. I check if I have the features. “ If this is what post-wounded women sound like—diffident about the pain of being alive, funny and dead-on about the obstacles to being their best selves—I say bring ’em on.” In a word, I admire your translation extremely.
- Reply laurendong
- Thank you for such kind compliments. This is a good article, and that's what originally makes a good translation.
xingyue: “You must seem both totally harmless and able, if necessary, to push a knife through any tender gut.” The one must also be decisive and courageous. ...
- Reply laurendong
- I would say the same of you. Thank you.
dousaiyan: You are so excellent.
