Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad1 Egans Proustian meditation2 on time, fame and music won the National Book Critics Circle and Pulitzer awards. Whos the goon of the title Time is the stealth goon, the one you ignore because you are so busy worrying about the goons right in front of you, she says. Egan concocts3 her narrative4 around punk rocker-turned-music producer Bennie Salazar, his sticky-fingered assistant Sasha and a circle of wannabes, has-beens and hangers-on. Colette Bancroft, book editor of The Tampa Bay Times, named Egans novel her TOP pick not just because it is a splendidly written experiment in form that succeeds resoundingly, but because the 21st Century is its essential subject matter. Egan juxtaposes timeless literary themes, most notably5 the inexorable journey from youth to age, with an exploration of the ways in which a rapidly changing world reshapes the human experience. Its a novel that is prescient, surprising, wise and simply a blast to read. Ben Fountain, Billy Lynns Long Halftime Walk Eight rookies from the US armys Bravo squad, fresh from a firefight with Iraqi insurgents6, in which one of their fellow soldiers died and another was disabled, are dubbed7 war heroes by the Fox News cable channel. Their two-week stateside victory tour ends with a halftime salute8 at a Dallas Cowboys game. Fountain captures the excesses of Texas, American football, business and war, and gives us a memorable9 narrator in 19-year-old Billy Lynn, with his combination of lust10, bedazzlement and post-traumatic stress disorder11. It is sort of weird, he tells a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, being honoured for the worst day of your life. Ian McEwan, Atonement The novel opens on a summer day in 1935, when 13-year-old Briony shows her mother a play shes written to perform with her three cousins the next evening. Briony was hardly to know it then, but this was the projects highest point of fulfillment, McEwan writes. Nothing came near it for satisfaction, all else was dreams and frustration12.That evening, Briony witnesses her 15-year-old cousin Lola being assaulted in the darkened woods. Her testimony13 implicates14 Robbie, her sister Cecilias boyfriend from Cambridge and son of the family house maid, and he is jailed. In a second section, McEwan gives a panoramic15 account of the harrowing evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940, with Robbie among those saved. Realising she has ruined Cecilia and Robbies lives, Briony works as a nurse during the Blitz in a third section. As McEwan follows these characters through six decades, Brionys search for redemption evolves into a meditation on the power of art. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun In her audacious and vividly16 imagined second novel, Adichie drew upon her ancestral past to write about the Biafra conflict, which traumatised her country and her family for three years after the Igbo people of eastern Nigeria seceded17 in 1967. The novel is told from the perspectives of twin sisters Olanna and Kainene, a 13-year-old houseboy and Richard, a British expatriate who is in love with Kainene. Olannas academic boyfriend, who favours secession, is also a key character as Adichie shows the repercussions18 of postcolonial power struggles on individual lives. Adichies 2013 novel Americanah also ranked high in the poll, but missed out on a spot in the TOP 12 by one vote. Zadie Smith, White Teeth Smith, then a 23-year-old prodigy19, wowed the literary world with her first novel, which introduced a writer of inimitable wit and scope. White Teeth, which won Whitbread and Guardian20 first book awards, is set in London, where Archie Jones and Samal Iqbal, friends who met while serving in WWII, have settled to raise their families. Smith opens as Archie, divorced by his second wife, sits in his fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate face down on the steering21 wheel. Hes chosen suicide on New Years Day 1975, his car parked in front of a halal butchers shop, only to be saved by the owner. As White Teeth unfolds, it is chockablock with vivid scenes and characters, a portrait of postcolonial multicultural22 London: Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete23 within them mass exodus24, cramped25 boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks, Smith writes. Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably26 smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974, Eugenides writes in the opening lines of his novel. At 14, Calliope Stephanides discovers she has a rare recessive27 mutation28 that renders her a pseudo-hermaphrodite. Claiming her male brain, she shifts genders29 and becomes Cal. In often exuberant30 language, Eugenides layers questions of fate and free will onto Cals coming-of-age story and the tale of the entrepreneurial rise of his parents, Desdemona and Lefty. Ultimately Cals condition gives him a near mythic gift - the ability to communicate between the genders, to see not with the monovision of one sex but in the stereoscope of both. Middlesex bridged the gap between critical and commercial acclaim32, as well, winning a Pulitzer and selling millions of copies.
相关文章推荐
