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The Third Translation |  |
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The Third Translation | |
Walter Rothschild has nothing but his work. Estranged from his wife and adult daughter, he spends his days and nights lost in translation -- constantly working and reworking the riddles inscribed on ancient funereal stones. A gifted American Egyptologist, he was hired by the British Museum in London to try to crack the code of one of the greatest remaining hieroglyphic mysteries -- the Stela of Paser. Stuck, with no new inspiration, he meets a seductive young woman who seems interested in him and his work. When Walter invites her back to the museum to get a closer look at his work, she secretly steals an antiquity and disappears. Thus begins Walter?s frantic search to repair the damage he?s caused. Threatened by villains real and imagined, Walter races against time to win back the antiquity and his reputation, without losing his life in the process. Utterly original and told in electric prose, this is a novel that beautifully weaves together exceptional insight into the inner yearnings of men with a fast-paced plot about ancient mystery and modern conspiracy. Ingenious, witty, and compelling, it is a novel to be savored and urged on all of your friends.
作者简介 Matt Bondurant received his Ph.D. from Florida State University where he was a Kingsbury Fellow. He has been a two-time Bread Loaf fellow, and his short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, The New England Review, Prairie Schooner, The Hawaii Review, and others. He has worked for the Associated Press National Broadcast office, an NPR station, and the British Museum. He currently teaches at George Mason University in Virginia.
媒体推荐 "A compelling amalgam of history, mysticism, and suspense." -- BookPage
"A thrilling reading experience." -- Robert Olen Butler
"An impressive first novel about life and death and how we interpret each." -- Washington Post Book World
编辑推荐 Amazon.com
This is the latest novel trying to capitalize on the amazing success of The Da Vinci Code by positing an ancient mystery, contemporary scholars, rare documents, greedy collectors, and a quasi-academic protagonist. In this case he's an American Egyptologist living in London who's got less than a week to unlock the secrets of the Stela of Paser, a funerary stone whose references to a "third way" of deciphering the hieroglyphics inscribed on the stone have teased, tempted and eluded would-be translators for centuries.
Walter Rothschild has sacrificed a wife, a child, and many of the other things that make life worth living to pursue a passion cultivated in childhood and encouraged by his own father. Less than a week before his grant runs out and the Stela of Paser returns to its dusty basement in the British Museum, Walter is seduced and drugged by a mysterious young woman who steals a precious document from the Museum; in search of her and the papyrus scroll, Rothschild encounters a cult of would-be mystics who will stop at nothing to get him to decipher the Stela and reveal its secrets--especially those that promise a "third way" between life and death, "the endless quest of the ancient kings." While Walter's efforts are admirable, he is basically a boring, fretful, and regretful man who fails to engage the reader. That's too bad, for otherwise this is a beautifully written, thoroughly researched, and finely detailed novel based somewhat on the author's own obsession with the Stela. But if you share his passion for Egyptology, and want a more learned discourse on its arcana than the Amelia Peabody mysteries provide, The Third Translation is well worth reading. --Jane Adams --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
专业书评 From Publishers Weekly
Walter Rothschild, a middle-aged Egyptologist at the British Museum, has abandoned his wife and child to spend his time obsessively poring over the dusty inscriptions of a dead civilization. He is forced to reconnect with life when he is seduced by a mysterious woman who then steals an ancient papyrus containing the key to the enigmatic hieroglyphics of the Stela of Paser. The conspiracy trail leads Walter to a modern-day cult of the Egyptian sun god, Aten, protected by a menacing team of pro wrestlers. In Bondurant's ambitious debut, a sprawling picaresque is infused with mythic resonance by linking it to ancient Egyptian literature and mythology and to concepts in avant-garde physics, including black holes, general relativity and string theory. The author has an inventive imagination and an ardent feel for place; much of the book is a prose poem to London's squalid demimonde. Though some may feel that Bondurant's erudition and philosophical engagement ("the only way... to make sense of the magnitude of the time and the space and the span of humanity on earth is to grasp onto the one thing that gives you a clear look") slow the pace of his mystery, the success of previous literary novels of suspense bodes very well for this one.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Since The Da Vinci Code arrived in stores two years ago, publishers have eagerly proclaimed a number of titles "the next Da Vinci." Is this marketing strategy actually successful in luring readers? If so, readers of The Third Translation, by Max Bondurant (Hyperion), the newest contender for the crown, may be sorely disappointed. This book is a page-turner all right, but you will not find a religious cover-up here, and no great conundrum will unfold only to be rolled up neatly, like a sleeping bag, at the end of your journey.
Walter Rothschild, the protagonist, is a middle-aged Egyptologist at the British Museum in London. His task: to unlock the "cryptographic riddle" of the Stela of Paser, an ancient funerary monument on which is written mysterious text. Though he masters the arcana of the past, Rothschild seems hopelessly incapable of negotiating the present. After a night on the town, he sneaks a young woman, Erin, into the museum. But Erin, we learn, has her own interest in Egyptology; she dupes the dazed Rothschild and makes off with a rare artifact. Instead of deciphering the Stela of Paser, Rothschild must now track down the missing treasure. The central dramatic thread of this novel is therefore a theft. What elevates The Third Translation above this Indiana Jones plot is how it tunnels deep into our individual and collective ancient past in search of meaning.
Rothschild, like this novel, is obsessed with translating that past. His obsession is existential; it is as if in unraveling the mystery of the Stela he will come to uncover the mystery deep in himself. Simultaneously pulled toward two worlds, the past and the present, he is hardly able to work in either. It is this predicament that makes Rothschild so compelling a narrator and not just your run-of-the-mill action hero.
But the story, at times, bogs down. Whole chunks of Rothschild's history -- as well as his father's and his failed family's -- are laid like the foundations of the great pyramids: slowly, each stone carefully and exactly fitted into place. The revelation of Rothschild's identity, a good deal of which takes place backward in time, arrests the progression of the novel as if in mid-thought. Similarly, the author illustrates Rothschild's talent for deciphering hieroglyphs by periodically interrupting the story's flow. Some readers may shy away from this kind of exposition and wish that Bondurant had found some way of grafting this pre-history into present action.
Still, this is an impressive first novel about life and death and how we interpret each. It's not the next great thriller, but if you roll with it, you may just get more than what you'd expected.
Stela! Stela!
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
