上次小麦说起南方的作家,发现我也读过不少南方的文学,非常喜欢。想不如系统的把南方作家都读一读。在网上查了一下,有哪些比较著名的南部小说。看到这个书单(I'm a list person):
http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2009/aug/27/best-southern-novels-all-time/
The Best Southern Novels of All Time
# 1 已读
ABSALOM, ABSALOM! by WILLIAM FAULKNER (1936) (120 votes)
A profound exploration of race and all its attendant complexities. Faulkner’s rendering of the Southern “class” struggle through the life of one figure, Thomas Sutpen, makes Absalom, Absalom! the only serious rival to Melville’s Moby-Dick as the great American novel.
—Richard King
# 2 已读
ALL THE KING’S MEN by ROBERT PENN WARREN (1946) (80 votes)
Robert Penn Warren’s book is an unqualified masterpiece. It is all-encompassing and eclipses everything else on the list. One could make a reasonable case for its being the greatest American novel ever written. Seemingly nothing escapes its scope or ambition. —Ben George
All the King’s Men is a terribly ambitious and sometimes maddening novel, five or six novels crammed into one. It is cumbersome, perhaps, but it is a generative novel, a novel that is so innovative it changed the novels that followed, or made them possible. Descendents of All the King’s Men are various—from popular political novels to, oddly, road novels like Kerouac’s (there is a whole Beat sequence in Warren’s book—a trip to California). And, in the weary voice of Jack Burden, we hear the slow, cosmic disappointment of Binx Bolling, who came after. —Moira Crone
# 3 读过一半
THE SOUND AND THE FURY by WILLIAM FAULKNER (1929) (64 votes)
This stylized and ultra-literary concoction still manages to engage us. We work our way through four hundred pages of convoluted, sometimes impenetrable prose—and the members of the Compson family appear before us in all their appalling egoism, fear, greed, innocence, and hubris. Reading, you almost forget that this is fiction—the characters are so fully realized. As the final dissolution of the family comes to pass, you want to avert your eyes but you keep turning the pages—in fear and trembling. An unbearable tragedy, yet simultaneously a joy—as we recognize that the thirty-year-old, small-town author has gone the limit, investing his mind, soul, passion, psyche, everything, in the novel’s creation.
—William Caverlee
# 4 已读
THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN by MARK TWAIN (1885) (58 votes)
If you can discern anything about the greatness of a book by how often someone has either banned it or tried to have it banned, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn surely must be the greatest Southern novel of all time. Critics can say what they want about the book’s ending, but I challenge anyone to come up with an American writer who was braver, funnier, and more eerily perceptive than Mark Twain. —Bronwen Dickey
Huck, the battered child, and Jim, the runaway slave, are capable of feeling painful sympathy, for each other and for others. Others aren’t so burdened. Huck wishes he weren’t. Others, including the King, the Duke of Bilgewater, Tom Sawyer, a justly popular undertaker, and the River itself, can put on a show. It’s the funniest great book there is. —Roy Blount, Jr.
# 5 已读
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by HARPER LEE (1960) (57 votes)
Okay, this is kind of like voting for Albert Pujols as best hitter—really predictable. But who doesn’t love this novel for its descriptions, its drama and humor, its characters that are now ingrained in the American psyche, and its explorations not only of race in the South but also of femininity and class? Even the questions that hover around the book (why did Harper Lee not write another? just what was Truman Capote’s role?) have become part of its lure.
—Hope Coulter
Even though it simplifies race relations in the South, and even though Atticus really could have done more to save an innocent man’s life, almost every American remembers reading this book as a watershed moment. —Michael Kreyling
# 6 已读
THE MOVIEGOER by WALKER PERCY (1961) (55 votes)
In Percy’s classic tale of love and longing in New Orleans, Binx Bolling woos his secretary, falls for his cousin, and muses lyrically on the nature of the search. This book has kept me company in China, Slovenia, Argentina. When I’m going to be away from home for any extended period of time, The Moviegoer is as essential a part of my travel kit as my toothbrush. I can open it to any page and instantly feel calmed. “To become aware of the possibility of a search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”
—Michelle Richmond
If a better book than The Moviegoer has been written, I’ll cut off my little toe. —Ada Liana Bidiuc
# 7
AS I LAY DYING by WILLIAM FAULKNER (1930) (52 votes)
I once heard a poet say she never reads novels. When asked why, she said, “Because I always get about twenty pages in and then I realize, hmm, THIS isn’t As I Lay Dying.” In comparison, everything else is a bit of a disappointment. —Keith Lee Morris
# 8 已读
INVISIBLE MAN by RALPH ELLISON (1952) (47 votes)
Write a novel this good and this significant that doesn’t die in the pursuit of significance but, instead, comes alive. Go on. We’ll wait.
—Wyatt Mason
# 9
WISE BLOOD by FLANNERY O’CONNOR (1952) (44 votes)
Flannery O’Connor’s seriously dark comedy Wise Blood is among the finest American novels squarely about religion—awash with street preachers, yearning rustics, fake and genuine self-inflicted blindness, roaming pigs, a stolen mummy pressed into service as a faux Holy Child, descriptions of an allegorical sky no one ever seems to see, a soul-consuming gorilla costume, and a battered black Essex automobile as pregnant with meaning as the Pequod in Moby-Dick. It is also a brilliant critique of what O’Connor called the “American tendency to address a problem by changing its appearance.”
—Mark Winegardner
Didn’t she turn over a rock with this one? And she didn’t flinch one bit. Renders the surreal believable. —Melissa Delbridge
# 10 已读
THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD by ZORA NEALE HURSTON (1937) (41 votes)
Janie springs to life from the pages of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and her half-understood yearning, her wordless understanding, grabs our hearts. Zora Neale Hurston, through her Janie—who, pondering under a pear tree, begins to understand what it means to try to live a fulfilled life—speaks for some of us in words, desires, and thoughts that we did not know could be articulated. She not only lives our experience, she makes it sing. —Jesmyn Ward
前10本已经读过7.5,剩下的 #7 Faulkner 我架子上有,打算读,O'Connor 读完短篇,要继续读长篇的。
11. THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers 已读
12. A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES by John Kennedy Toole 已读
13. LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner 已读
14. A DEATH IN THE FAMILY by James Agee
15. LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL by Thomas Wolfe
16. BELOVED by Toni Morrison 已读
17. THE AWAKENING by Kate Chopin 已读
18. THE COLOR PURPLE by Alice Walker 已读
前18本,我读过13本。一方面挺欣慰得,觉得自己这么多年努力读书,还是有些收获的;另一方面又感到有些失落,南方的文学的精华,难道我已经读得七七八八?
后面还有:
19. NATIVE SON by Richard Wright
20. THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER by Eudora Welty
(tie). SUTTREE by Cormac McCarthy
22. GO DOWN, MOSES by William Faulkner
(tie). GONE WITH THE WIND by Margaret Mitchell 已读
24. THE GOLDEN APPLES by Eudora Welty
25. CANE by Jean Toomer
(tie). THE KNOWN WORLD by Edward P. Jones
27. BLOOD MERIDIAN: OR THE EVENING REDNESS IN THE WEST by Cormac McCarthy
(tie). DELIVERANCE by James Dickey 已读
(tie). THE LAST GENTLEMAN by Walker Percy
(tie). A LESSON BEFORE DYING by Ernest J. Gaines
31. BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA by Dorothy Allison
(tie). THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER by William Styron
....
这个星期,每天早上八点多,收音机里都有一段 Faulkner 的讲话录音。昨天他讲关于 peace 的:
Q. Sir, do you have any solution for a man to find peace if he cannot write, as you?
A. Well, I don't think the writer finds peace. If he did, he would quit writing. Maybe man is incapable of peace. Maybe that is what differentiates man from a vegetable. Though maybe the vegetable don't even find peace. Maybe there's no such thing as peace, that it is a negative quality.
Q. I am speaking of peace in his own heart.
A. Yes, well, I'm inclined to think that the only peace man knows is--he says, Why good gracious, yesterday I was happy. That at the moment he's too busy. That maybe peace is only a condition in retrospect, when the subconscious has got rid of the gnats and the tacks and the broken glass in experience and has left only the peaceful pleasant things--that was peace. Maybe peace is not is, but was.
听到他的声音,真感到亲切。我总是想着他在小说 Absalom, Absalom! 中刻画的那个南部,grotesque, mysterious, beautiful, sad, depressed, full of longing, but forever lost.
- posted on 07/30/2010
阿姗 wrote:
这个星期,每天早上八点多,收音机里都有一段 Faulkner 的讲话录音。昨天他讲关于 peace 的:
Q. Sir, do you have any solution for a man to find peace if he cannot write, as you?
A. Well, I don't think the writer finds peace. If he did, he would quit writing. Maybe man is incapable of peace. Maybe that is what differentiates man from a vegetable. Though maybe the vegetable don't even find peace. Maybe there's no such thing as peace, that it is a negative quality.
Q. I am speaking of peace in his own heart.
A. Yes, well, I'm inclined to think that the only peace man knows is--he says, Why good gracious, yesterday I was happy. That at the moment he's too busy. That maybe peace is only a condition in retrospect, when the subconscious has got rid of the gnats and the tacks and the broken glass in experience and has left only the peaceful pleasant things--that was peace. Maybe peace is not is, but was.
福克纳跟桃谷六仙似的。当然,大作家讲话都是桃谷六仙级别的。
说起福克纳,想起来Godard当年在电影Breathless中让美国女主角Jean Seberg问在逃犯法国男主角(贝尔蒙多),你读过福克纳没有?男人说没有,反问,这人是谁?跟你睡过?
接着女人读了一段福克纳书里的话,“在悲伤和虚无之间,我选悲伤”,让男人选。男人说,悲伤(grief)是种妥协,我选虚无(nothing).
你看,再没什么比这部电影(出于无心)更好的总结了南方的气质和一个反社会者(男主角)的气质。南方是悲伤的,妥协的,拒绝虚无的(信仰)。
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