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New fiction
新小说
Fatty issue
胖子是个大问题
A thoughtful new work by an American original.
具有独创精神的美国作家带来富有创见的新作
Big Brother
《老大哥》
LIONEL SHRIVER knows the drawbacks of using her own family in her fiction. Famous for the bestselling “We Need to Talk About Kevin”, which won the Orange prize for fiction in 2005, she once lamented that her parents had not yet forgiven her for an unflattering portrait in an earlier book. The rift was unfortunate, even sad, Ms Shriver noted, but that did not mean she would not do it again. “Real-life people are like carcasses thrown to a carnivorous pet,” she observed.
兰诺丝薇佛明白，拿自己家人作为小说人物原型问题多多。于2005年获英国柑橘文学奖小说奖的畅销书《凯文怎么了》使丝薇佛声名鹊起，她曾慨叹，因为自己在一部早期作品中对父母描述直白，双亲一直耿耿于怀。丝薇佛表示，与父母产生嫌隙是令人遗憾的，甚至是令人伤心的，但那并不意味着她不会故技重施。她说，“现实中的人物就像抛给食肉动物的畜体，有血有肉。”
“Big Brother”, Ms Shriver's 12th novel, may be her most plainly autobiographical. The author has written publicly before about her own big brother, an “obscenely smart” man who ultimately ate himself to death. The experience left her with not a few unresolved questions. What moves someone to eat to grotesque excess? Why is it so hard to deal with food in a healthy way in the overabundant 21st century? And what is the duty of kin when it comes to helping someone bent on self-destruction? These concerns drive her new novel, which considers the fate of a morbidly obese man and his sensible, successful 40-something younger sister. Ms Shriver, who has reviewed fiction for The Economist, has a knack for conveying subtle shifts in family dynamics, but this book feels uniquely personal, and is more poignant for it.
《老大哥》是丝薇佛的第12本小说，也可能是她自传痕迹最明显的一部小说。作者在以前公开发表的作品中就曾提到她的老大哥，说他“聪明到让人吃惊”，最后把自己给吃死了。如此经历给丝薇佛留下了不少困惑。是什么动力使一个人暴饮暴食到近乎荒唐的地步？在物产过剩的21世纪，为何健康饮食如此之难？如果要向一个执意自我毁灭的人施以援手，其亲属又肩负哪些责任？对这些问题的关注推动她完成了这部小说，对一个肥胖病患者和他理智、成功、四十来岁的妹妹的命运做出了思考。丝薇佛曾为《经济学人》撰写过小说评论，擅长巧妙传达家人互动时的微妙变化。但这本书似乎更关怀个人，而且更加切中要害。
Pandora Halfdanarson, the heroine, leads a staid life in Iowa, where ambitions are as modest as the plains are flat. She has a thriving toy business, a contented marriage and a good relationship with her teenage stepchildren. But these dulling comforts have her craving the “splash of anarchy” that a visit from her cool, jazz-playing brother, Edison, would bring.
小说女主人公潘多拉?哈夫达纳森在爱荷华州享受着安稳的生活，那里土地平坦，人们甘于平凡。她的玩具店生意兴隆，婚姻美满，和十几岁的继子女们相处融洽。但波澜不惊的安逸生活让她对“混乱的波澜”心生向往，这份波澜，将由爱迪生—她玩爵士乐的哥哥—带给她。
After years of limited contact, however, the sight of him comes as a shock. Her once handsome and sylphlike brother has become a mountain of flesh in a double-wide wheelchair, his jazz-pianist fingers bulging like bratwurst just before the skin splits. “It was rude to stare, and even ruder to cry.” Struggling, Edison hopes to stay with Pandora and her family for a little while. But his presence is outsized and disruptive, his appetites epic, his boastful stories tinged with resentment (“Hey I've played with some heavy cats, dig?”). Edison's bombast strains Pandora's marriage and disturbs the balance of her life, especially after she hatches a dramatic plan to slim him down in order to save him.
兄妹间多年少有联络，再见面时，妹妹被哥哥吓了一跳。她原本相貌英俊、身形窈窕的哥哥如今成了一座瘫在加宽轮椅上的肉山，曾经弹奏爵士钢琴的手指如今鼓胀得像肠衣即将爆裂的德式香肠。“瞪眼直视俨然成了无礼冒犯，泪流满面则更甚。”爱迪生努力想同潘多拉一家人待一段时间。但他身形庞大，到处添乱，胃口惊人，自吹自擂的故事里还捎带着忿恨爱迪生的胡吹乱侃让潘多拉的婚姻关系变得紧张，扰乱了她平静的生活。为了挽救哥哥，潘多拉想出了一个戏剧性的方案来帮他减肥，之后一切更是乱了套。
With “Big Brother”, Ms Shriver offers some sage observations on the pleasures of eating, the link between fat and shame and the struggle to lose weight—a “distinctly bourgeois form of suffering”. She suggests that the fundamental problem of food may be that it is “more concept than substance”, an idea of satisfaction if never quite satisfaction itself. The highlight of ingestion is the moment between one bite and the next; actual eating never quite delivers on the tantalising contentment promised between bites.
丝薇佛在《老大哥》中提出了一些富有哲理的看法，涉及饮食的乐趣、肥胖和羞耻的关系以及减肥的努力—她称减肥为“典型的中产阶级痛苦”。她认为食物最根本的问题也许在于它“更多的是一个概念，而非物质”，强调的是满足感而非满足本身。摄取食物最令人满足的时刻在咬一口和下一口之间，而两口之间那诱人的满足感并不能通过实际的吃来获得。
But this book is not just about bingeing and purging. Ms Shriver writes tenderly about marriage, and also about the potency of blood ties, which are wonderful and horrible for the same reason: there is “no natural limit to what these people can reasonably expect of you”. Her interior monologues are pitch-perfect; her dialogue less so. Yet her main gift as a novelist is a talent for coolly nailing down uncomfortable realities—like the feelings of regret that haunt a sister who asks if she did right by her big brother.
但这不只是一本探讨暴饮暴食和心灵净化的书。丝薇佛充满温情地描绘了婚姻，也将血缘亲情的力量娓娓道来，这份力量既美好又可怕，因为“家人以为对你的期待合情合理，而这份期待其实无边无际”。丝薇佛笔下的内心独白精彩异常，对话稍逊一筹。不过，作为小说家，丝薇佛的天赋在于能够从容地把握令人不安的现实——比如潘多拉不确定自己对哥哥所做的一切是否正确时，那份困扰她的懊悔之情。
