River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze
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作者: Peter Hessler
内容简介：
From Library Journal
Here is another departure from the author of such widely diverse books as Confederates, Schindler's List, The Playmaker, and Woman of the Inner Sea. Australian Keneally draws on his immigrant heritage in this turn-of-the-century story of Tim Shea, an Irish storekeeper struggling with his own and society's demons to make a life for his family in New South Wales. Deaths frame the novel: Tim is haunted by the image of a nameless young woman, dead from an abortion, whose severed head is trotted around in a jar by the local constable in an effort to identify her; and after attending to a farmer killed in a gory buggy accident, Tim feels obliged to support the farmer's elder child, Lucy. First regarded as a hero for his quick action after the cart accident, then excoriated publicly for his anti-Boer War sentiments, Tim fears losing his business. A final quarantine after exposure to the black plague ends Tim's tribulations. The Irish/Australian dialect is difficult at first, and the narrative sometimes seems flat despite the often melodramatic events. Nevertheless, this book, which teems with themes from race and class discrimination to the wages of sin, has the flavor of a 19th-century novel, and Keneally may catch the historical saga market with it. [For an in-depth look at River Town and the publishing process, see "The Birth of a Book," on p. 122-124; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/94.]-Francine Fialkoff, "Library Journal.
--Francine Fialkoff, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From
With 21 novels to his name, including Schindler's List (1982), internationally acclaimed Australian writer Keneally navigates the fictional universe with consummate ease. His own family history figures in this intricate tale of small-town life in New South Wales at the end of the nineteenth century. Keneally's exquisitely moral and individualistic narrator, Tim Shea, is eager to cast off the restrictive social mores of his native Ireland but is also leery of the rough-and-tumble ethos of his frontier home. A barely solvent shopkeeper, his philosophical and spiritual balancing act is put to the test in a series of tragic events. First, when no one can, or will, identify a young woman who died trying to terminate a pregnancy, the police--in a grisly act of expedience that horrifies Tim--decapitate her and cart her head from town to town. Then, another accidental death of a stranger brings Lucy, an eerily self-possessed young girl, into his life just when his marvelously imperturbable wife, Kitty, is quarantined during a plague scare. Amid all these distressing trials and tribulations, Tim is also subject to vicious gossip, blatant harassment, a soul-searing conflict over his friendship with a Muslim herbalist, and serious financial woes. His river town, a tiny huddle in a vast and mysterious land, is rife with petty tyrants and their worthless taboos, but Tim holds his own, able to simultaneously open and steel his heart. Rich in context and psychologically elegant, this is a beautifully rendered tale that gains potency in reflection. Donna Seaman
### Amazon.com Review
In 1996, 26-year-old Peter Hessler arrived in Fuling, a town on China's Yangtze River, to begin a two-year Peace Corps stint as a teacher at the local college. Along with fellow teacher Adam Meier, the two are the first foreigners to be in this part of the Sichuan province for 50 years. Expecting a calm couple of years, Hessler at first does not realize the social, cultural, and personal implications of being thrust into a such radically different society. In _River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze_, Hessler tells of his experience with the citizens of Fuling, the political and historical climate, and the feel of the city itself.
"Few passengers disembark at Fuling ... and so Fuling appears like a break in a dream--the quiet river, the cabins full of travelers drifting off to sleep, the lights of the city rising from the blackness of the Yangtze," says Hessler. A poor city by Chinese standards, the students at the college are mainly from small villages and are considered very lucky to be continuing their education. As an English teacher, Hessler is delighted with his students' fresh reactions to classic literature. One student says of Hamlet, "I don't admire him and I dislike him. I think he is too sensitive and conservative and selfish." Hessler marvels,
> You couldn't have said something like that at Oxford. You couldn't simply say: I don't like Hamlet because I think he's a lousy person. Everything had to be more clever than that ... you had to dismantle it ... not just the play itself but everything that had ever been written about it.
Over the course of two years, Hessler and Meier learn more they ever guessed about the lives, dreams, and expectations of the Fuling people.
Hessler's writing is lovely. His observations are evocative, insightful, and often poignant--and just as often, funny. It's a pleasure to read of his (mis)adventures. Hessler returned to the U.S. with a new perspective on modern China and its people. After reading _River Town_, you'll have one, too. _--Dana Van Nest_
### From Publishers Weekly
In China, the year 1997 was marked by two momentous events: the death of Deng Xiaoping, the country's leader for two decades, and the return of Hong Kong after a century and a half of British rule. A young American who spent two years teaching English literature in a small town on the Yangtze, Hessler observed these events through two sets of eyes: his own and those of his alter ego, Ho Wei. Hessler sees China's politics and ceremony with the detachment of a foreigner, noting how grand political events affect the lives of ordinary people. The passing of Deng, for example, provokes a handful of thoughtful and unexpected essays from Hessler's students. The departure of the British from Hong Kong sparks a conversational "Opium War" between him and his nationalist Chinese tutor. Meanwhile, Ho Wei, as Hessler is known to most of the townspeople, adopts a friendly and unsophisticated persona that allows him to learn the language and culture of his surroundings even as Hessler's Western self remains estranged. The author conceives this memoir of his time in China as the collaborative effort of his double identity. "Ho Wei," he writes, "left his notebooks on the desk of Peter Hessler, who typed everything into his computer. The notebooks were the only thing they truly shared." Yet it's clear that, for Hessler, Ho Wei is more than a literary device: to live in China, he felt compelled to subjugate his real identity to a character role. Hessler has already been assured the approval of a select audience thanks to the New Yorker's recent publication of an excerpt. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
目录预览：
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze
Maps
Author’s Note
Part I
One:
The City
Two:
Raise the Flag Mountain
Three:
The White Crane Ridge
Four:
The Wu River
Five:
White Flat Mountain
Six:
Part II
Seven:
The Priest
Eight:
The Restaurant Owner
........