Past and present过去与现在
A musical novel, finely plotted 一本充满乐感、情节动人的小说
Jul 15th 2010
The Shape of Her. By Rowan Somerville. Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 288 pages; £18.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk
《她的身影》罗文•萨默维尔，魏登菲与尼寇森出版社；288页；18.99英镑。
ROWAN SOMERVILLE’S second novel, “The Shape of Her”, opens with a quote from William Faulkner: “The past is never dead, it’s not even past.” It’s a art choice, a phrase the American Nobel laureate used several times in different forms, notably in his 1951 novel “Requiem for a Nun”.
罗文•萨默维尔的第二本小说《她的身影》，开头援引威廉•福克纳的名句“过去从未逝去，而且仍在继续”。这是个巧妙的选择，诺贝尔文学奖得主福克纳曾以不同形式引用过这段话，出自他1951年的小说《修女安魂曲》。
Mr Somerville’s setting is Mediterranean Greece. It is high summer and his two young heroes, Max and Tine, are living a life of lotus rhythms, grilling octopus and rereading “Gormenghast”, which Tine and her family had devoured obsessively when she was young.
萨默维尔新书的背景是地中海畔的希腊。正值盛夏，两位年轻的主人公马克斯和蒂娜过着充满诗意的生活，烧烤章鱼、重温小说《歌门鬼城》，蒂娜小时候和家人对这本书非常着迷。
Like Mervyn Peake’s fantasy novel, the pair’s sunny idyll is threatened by shadows as dark as Peake’s “irregular tableland of greeny-black rock, broken and scarred and empty”. These aren’t a fantasy river or a mountain, but the shadow of the past looming. As children both were neglected: Max despatched far too young to a horrible boarding school and Tine by parents whose once caring natures were overwhelmed by matrimonial misery and distrust. Needing to survive as children, neither he nor she quite understands the price they have paid by the time they are grown up.
就像英国作家梅文派克的奇幻小说一样，两人阳光普照的田园生活被阴影笼罩，就像派克笔下那“墨绿色岩石丛生的错落高地，恐怖阴森、陡峭空荡”。这片阴影并不是虚幻的河流和山巅，而是过往岁月的阴霾。两人儿时都被人忽略：马克斯小小年纪被送到一所令人毛骨悚然的寄宿学校，蒂娜曾经备受关爱，却因父母的婚姻悲剧和互不信任遭受打击。两个孩子需要生存下去，却都不能理解成长所付出的代价。
As the weeks wear on, Max and Tine discover that sex is no synonym for intimacy. Few authors can write a good second novel. Mr Somerville (pictured), whose first book, “The End of Sleep”, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ prize just a year ago, has come up trumps. On the face of it a study of the borderlands between sex and love, “The Shape of Her” is far more. Deceptively simple in plot and singularly musical in its voice, it is a study of the place where our past becomes our present. A summer read to be kept—and revisited in the dark days of winter.
几周时间过去，马克斯和蒂娜发现并不是亲昵的同义词。很少有作者能写出第二本佳作。萨默维尔的处女作《开罗狂想曲》去年被列入英联邦作家奖的候选名单，最终赢得大奖。《她的身影》远远不止对的边缘地带进行研究。情节看似简单，却充满不同寻常的韵律，对我们的过去成为现在一探究竟。夏天的阅读一直延续，在黑暗的冬日里再次回味。
