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A Miracle of Catfish |
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A Miracle of Catfish |
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基本信息·出版社：A Shannon Ravenel Book
·页码：455 页
·出版日期：2007年03月
·ISBN：1565125363
·International Standard Book Number：1565125363
·条形码：9781565125360
·EAN：9781565125360
·装帧：精装
·正文语种：英语
内容简介 在线阅读本书
Larry Brown has been a force in American literature since taking critics by storm with his debut collection,
Facing the Music, in 1988. His subsequent work—five novels, another story collection, and two books of nonfiction—continued to bring extraordinary praise and national attention to the writer
New York Newsday called a "master."
In November 2004, Brown sent the nearly completed manuscript of his sixth novel to his literary agent. A week later, he died of a massive heart attack. He was fifty-three years old.
A Miracle of Catfish is that novel. Brown's trademarks—his raw detail, pared-down prose, and characters under siege—are all here.
This beautiful, heartbreaking anthem to the writer's own North Mississippi land and the hard-working, hard-loving, hard-losing men it spawns is the story of one year in the lives of five characters—an old farmer with a new pond he wants stocked with baby catfish; a bankrupt fish pond stocker who secretly releases his forty-pound brood catfish into the farmer's pond; a little boy from the trailer home across the road who inadvertently hooks the behemoth catfish; the boy's inept father; and a former convict down the road who kills a second time to save his daughter.
That Larry Brown died so young, and before he could see
A Miracle of Catfish published, is a tragedy. That he had time to enrich the legacy of his work with this remarkable book is a blessing.
作者简介 Larry Brown was born in Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he lived all his life. At the age of thirty, a captain in the Oxford Fire Department, he decided to become a writer and worked toward that goal for seven years before publishing his first book,
Facing the Music, a collection of stories, in 1988. With the publication of his first novel,
Dirty Work, he quit the fire station in order to write fulltime. Between then and his untimely death in 2004, he published seven more books. His three grown children and his widow, Mary Annie Brown, live near Oxford.
媒体推荐 “
A Miracle of Catfish is vintage Brown. It's driven by terse sentences, haunting images and a sense of place you can almost smell and taste . . . [and] filled with memorable characters. . . . Brown was a writer who was never writerly. He was never self-consciously literary, yet created a literature that will last.”
—
USA Today (
USA Today )
“A Southern noir stylist publishes his best work. . . . When the novelist Larry Brown died in November 2004, the nation lost an irreplaceable literary voice. Spare, bluesy, and grimly beautiful, his books mapped the rough contours of life in his native north Mississippi. . . . His best work may have been
A Miracle of Catfish. . . .
Miracle is classic Larry, gritty and unflinching, with a wide-as-an-interstate streak of mischief running through its center. . . . [Brown is] a fierce and natural writer, a once-in-a-lifetime comet of big, bad, raw talent.”
—
Men's Journal (
Men's Journal )
“Brimming with humor and sympathy for the hardscrabble lives of ordinary people. The only flaw is that it's the last Larry Brown novel we'll be lucky enough to read.”
—
People (
People Magazine )
“The most compassionate of writers, Brown loves every living no-good heart he commits to paper. . . .
A Miracle of Catfish yields so many pleasures, it hurts to say so.”
— New York Times Book Review (
New York Times Book Review )
"Despite its designation as an "incomplete work" . . . its dry wit and gorgeous intimacy with the natural world make it as satisfying as anything Brown wrote. At the end of its 464 pages, the only thing readers will miss is the craftsman himself."
—
Outside magazine (
Outside )
A Miracle of Catfish is vintage Brown. It's driven by terse sentences, haunting images and a sense of place you can almost smell and taste . . . [and] filled with memorable characters. . . . Brown was a writer who was never writerly. He was never self-consciously literary, yet created a literature that will last. USA Today
A Southern noir stylist publishes his best work. . . . When the novelist Larry Brown died in November 2004, the nation lost an irreplaceable literary voice. Spare, bluesy, and grimly beautiful, his books mapped the rough contours of life in his native north Mississippi. . . . His best work may have been A Miracle of Catfish. . . . Miracle is classic Larry, gritty and unflinching, with a wide-as-an-interstate streak of mischief running through its center. . . . [Brown is] a fierce and natural writer, a once-in-a-lifetime comet of big, bad, raw talent. Men's Journal (
Men's Journal )
Brimming with humor and sympathy for the hardscrabble lives of ordinary people. The only flaw is that it's the last Larry Brown novel we'll be lucky enough to read. People (
People Magazine )
Despite its designation as an incomplete work . . . its dry wit and gorgeous intimacy with the natural world make it as satisfying as anything Brown wrote. At the end of its 464 pages, the only thing readers will miss is the craftsman himself. Outside magazine (
Outside )
The most compassionate of writers, Brown loves every living no-good heart he commits to paper. . . . A Miracle of Catfish yields so many pleasures, it hurts to say so. New York Times Book Review (
New York Times Book Review )
编辑推荐 When Larry Brown died suddenly in 2004 at 53, he left a nearly finished sixth novel,
A Miracle of Catfish, that revisits several of his favorite themes: fatherhood, alienation, and loneliness. Shannon Ravenel, Brown's Algonquin editor, had the daunting task of trimming the enormous manuscript to manageable size, almost impossible for a responsible editor to do without the help of the author. Brown's prolix, rambling style is at times mesmerizing and at times--just rambling. Brown's notes at the end show us where the story might have gone, but it does not suffer for being unfinished. Larry Brown definitely knew where he was taking his reader, and Ravenel helped him along.
Consideration of the fatherhood theme centers around a man known only as "Jimmy's Daddy," an unregenerate, wretched human being and an ignorant, violent drunkard. His preoccupations, view of women, and treatment of Jimmy might be seen as caricatures if we didn't know that such people actually exist. Another father, with a much more interesting story, is Cortez Sharp, a farmer in the low hills near Oxford, Mississippi, for nearly fifty years. He has a daughter, Lucinda, living "with a retard" in Atlanta. The man is a layabout artist who suffers from Tourette's Syndrome, which makes Cortez think that he is simply retarded. Cortez has a deep, dark, guilty secret which is eventually revealed, but the two things that we know about him from the beginning are that he is terribly lonely and is stocking a pond he just had dug with catfish--thousands of catfish. Two minor players are Cleve, a muderous black man who is an occasional employee of Cortez's and Tommy, who delivers fish to stock Cortez's pond and owns Ursula, the Mother of all Catfish. Jimmy is the hapless nine-year-old who suffers at the hands of his daddy, and comes to the attention of Cortez who tells him--initially--to get off his property. All of these lives intersect in unexpected ways and are changed by the encounters. Brown writes hell-bent-for-leather in a style uniquely his own which carries the reader along, into landscapes interior and exterior. --Valerie Ryan
专业书评 From Publishers Weekly
This sprawling novel was unfinished when Mississippi writer Brown (Dirty Work, etc.) died at 53 in 2004. (It remains so, according to a note from editor Shannon Ravenel, who includes Brown's own notes for how the novel would end.) Cortez Sharp, a widower in his later years, decides to build a catfish pond on his Mississippi acreage, mostly because the pond will serve (he imagines drily and obliquely) to bring others around and assuage his dark loneliness. Nearby live young Jimmy and his ne'er-do-well father ("Jimmy's daddy"). There's also Lucinda, who is Cortez's daughter and the mother of Albert, a young man with Tourette's syndrome who speaks in rhyming obscenities. Lucinda pops tranquilizers and has a talent for getting into odd squabbles (over the quality of pigs' feet in a supermarket, for one). Elsewhere, Cleve, an African-American ex-con, kills a soldier who is the object of his daughter's affections and hides the body in the woods. Despite the cuts that Ravenel says were made (marked in the text with ellipses), there's a lot of superfluously detailed family history, interior monologue and Dixie atmospherics. Would-be boffo sequences (Cortez driving a tractor into the pond; Jimmy becoming inconsolable when his father sells his beloved Go Kart), are not sharp enough to carry one through. (May)
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