[扫雷]curious case of benjamin button
Posted: 2009-01-01 23:39
难看死了。千万别看,还特长,三个多钟头。一堆没关系的内容堆在一起。
哎,笑嘻嘻,尤其是你,小布在里面扮演二十多,十七八的时候,化装惨不忍睹。
哎,笑嘻嘻,尤其是你,小布在里面扮演二十多,十七八的时候,化装惨不忍睹。
F. Scott Fitzgerald published a story, ¡°The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,¡± on the theme in 1922. Including it in his collection ¡°Tales of the Jazz Age,¡± he noted in a foreword:
This story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain¡¯s to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. By trying the experiment upon only one man in a perfectly normal world I have scarcely given his idea a fair trial. Several weeks after completing it, I discovered an almost identical plot in Samuel Butler¡¯s ¡°Note-books.¡±
It perhaps says something about Fitzgerald¡¯s psychology that the story¡¯s opening sections, with Button as an old man, come across as coarse and brittle farce, whereas the end, in which the hero regresses into infancy, feels seductively plausible:
Though not one of Fitzgerald¡¯s best, the story was reprised eighty years later by Gabriel Brownstein, in his story collection ¡°The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W¡± (2002). The title story, a fantastic riff upon a fantasy, almost duplicates Fitzgerald¡¯s for a few sentences but goes off weirdly in its own directions. Button, born ancient in 1912, masquerades in ¡°shtetl drag¡± as a jazz pianist ¡°known variously as the Hey-Hey Hebrew, the Jitterbug Jew, and the Kokomotion Kike¡± during the late twenties, and reappears in the seventies as a barefoot hippie living, with his aged mother, in the same West Side apartment building occupied by the adolescent narrator. Benjamin Button¡¯s parents are a Southern woman and a ¡°merchant banker¡± who is trying to suppress his Jewish, East Side origins, as the grandson of a rabbi. A great deal of new baggage is thus loaded upon the tenuous figure of Button, and he sinks beneath it, as Fitzgerald¡¯s ending returns in starker, more structuralist terms:Through the noons and nights he breathed and over him there were soft mumblings and murmurings that he scarcely heard, and faintly differentiated smells, and light and darkness.
Then it was all dark, and his white crib and the dim faces that moved above him, and the warm sweet aroma of the milk, faded out altogether from his mind.
Two years later in this progress, an entire novel, resplendently poetic and loftily sorrowing, ¡°The Confessions of Max Tivoli,¡± by Andrew Sean Greer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $23), has appeared. The name Benjamin Button is retired, but the thought-experiment remains. This time, the man at the end of his life is born in 1871, in San Francisco, of a Southern woman and a self-invented entrepreneur, not Jewish but Danish, who has changed his name from Asgar Van Daler to Tivoli, in honor of the Copenhagen park he remembers. Young-old Max¡¯s early memories are richly entwined with the animal wonders of San Francisco¡¯s Woodward¡¯s Gardens, one of the many lost local sights that Greer revives, with an eerie sensory omniscience, from the dry pages of research. He is one of numerous young-old contemporary fiction writers¡ªMark Helprin, Thomas Mallon, Caleb Carr, Alice Munro, Andrea Barrett, with E. L. Doctorow as godfather¡ªto whom time past is an open book, a theme park in which they wander with a child¡¯s delight in gaudiness and violence. What Henry James, himself now part of the past and available as a theme-park exhibit, breathlessly called the ¡°palpable present intimate that throbs responsive¡± is pointedly neglected in favor of what he called ¡°mere escamotage . . . the little facts that can be got from pictures and documents, relics and prints.¡± All fiction, insofar as it derives from the writer¡¯s memories, is historical in a sense; but a reader who has hearkened to Henry James enters guardedly ingeniously reconstructed worlds that ceased to exist before the author was born. A circumstantiality assembled of little documentary facts can feel flimsy, offering less resistance to enchantment than an unsifted environment clumsily pressing all around us.Soon, he could not tell day from night, pain from want, and finally presence from absence. Long after he ceased to feel the movement of time, he faded completely from its progress.
That said, ¡°The Confessions of Max Tivoli¡± is enchanting, in the perfumed, dandified style of disenchantment brought to grandeur by Proust and Nabokov. ¡°Love . . . ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come,¡± runs the novel¡¯s epigraph, from Proust, and Greer¡¯s opening sentence reads, ¡°We are each the love of someone¡¯s life.¡± The general fate of misdirected, unarrived love, then, merges with the singular case of Max Tivoli, who begins with the innocent mind of a child in an old man¡¯s body, and, after a brief and blissful intersection, in 1906, of his inner age with his physical age, ends with a man¡¯s mournful wisdom in a child¡¯s body. Max differs from Benjamin Button in that Button begins with a fully stocked old brain and ends with a newborn¡¯s tabula rasa; whereas Max learns as he goes, as do those of us not condemned to age in reverse. Sex, for example, comes upon him when he has the able body of a fifty-
three-year-old and the inexperience of an exceptionally chaste seventeen-year-old. His lover, the downstairs tenant Mrs. Levy, is ardent enough for two, crooning to him as they copulate in a bed of phlox, ¡°You¡¯re a good man, Max, don¡¯t worry, you haven¡¯t touched a woman in a while, have you? Max, you good, good man.¡± However, it is not the mother Max loves but the daughter, fourteen-year-old Alice, upon whom he spies with the ornate prurience of Humbert Humbert yearning for Lolita. Max (whose memoirs are written for Alice eventually to read) glimpses her one night looking for something in their shared back garden:
I could see through the neck of your loose cotton chemise a pink landscape of skin. You turned and writhed in your cloud and I turned and writhed in mine. I saw your legs stretching and tensing as you hunted and jerked your body in hope; women¡¯s pantaloons were devious things in those days, split down the crotch with overlapping fabric, and once you shifted just carelessly enough to allow the veil to part and I glimpsed the vulnerable blue veins of your thighs. . . . I hope you¡¯ll find it flattering, now that you are old as well, to think of me in bed, staring at my memory like a French postcard, watching the starlight trickle into the darkness of your clothes.
Just my personal opinion It was so bad I couldn't stop rolling my eyes.
谢谢笑嘻嘻的详细解释,这么说来是可看可不看的。我倒没有什么期待,想看的就是个反塔西,还要有俊男美女养眼最好。笑嘻嘻 wrote:我的总结是值得票价,既不推荐也不反对。