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Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman |
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Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman |
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基本信息·出版社：Vintage
·页码：362 页
·出版日期：2007年07月
·ISBN：0307386325
·条形码：9780307386328
·版本：2007-07-01
·装帧：平装
·开本：32开 Pages Per Sheet
·外文书名：盲柳与睡觉的女人
内容简介 Book DescriptionFollowing the best-selling triumph of Kafka on the Shore—“daringly original,” wrote Steven Moore in The Washington Post Book World, “and compulsively readable”—comes a collection that generously expresses Murakami’s mastery. From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit his ability to transform the full range of human experience in ways that are instructive, surprising, and relentlessly entertaining. As Richard Eder has written in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, “He addresses the fantastic and the natural, each with the same mix of gravity and lightness.”
Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, and an iceman, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things we might wish for. Whether during a chance reunion in Italy, a romantic exile in Greece, a holiday in Hawaii, or in the grip of everyday life, Murakami’s characters confront grievous loss, or sexuality, or the glow of a firefly, or the impossible distances between those who ought to be the closest of all.
“While anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream,” Laura Miller wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “it’s the rare artist, like this one, who can make us feel that we are dreaming it ourselves”—a feat performed anew twenty-four times in this career-spanning book.
From Publishers Weekly[Signature]Reviewed by Lily Tuck One of my favorite Haruki Murakami stories is "The Elephant Vanishes"—part of an earlier collection published in 1991—in which the narrator watches as an elephant in a zoo grows smaller and smaller until finally the elephant disappears. No explanation is given, there is no resolution, the vanished elephant remains a mystery at the same time that the narrator's life is changed forever.Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Murakami's new collection of 25 stories, many of which have appeared in the New Yorker and other publications, also describes these epiphanic instances. In the title story, a character who is half deaf, alludes to a John Ford movie, Fort Apache, in which John Wayne tells the newly arrived colonel that if he actually saw some Indians on his way to the fort that means there weren't any. Everything is a bit off—including of course the blind willow trees whose pollen carry flies that burrow inside a sleeping woman's ears—as in a dream, where explanations are always lacking but where interpretations are plentiful. In "Mirror," the narrator sees someone who appears to be both himself and not himself in a mirror and then finds out the mirror does not exist; the disaffected woman—a lot of Murakami's characters are handicapped or incapacitated in some physical way—in "The Shinagawa Monkey," loses her own name; in "Man-Eating Cats," the narrator's girlfriend disappears and as he searches for her finds that "with each step I took, I felt myself sinking deeper into a quicksand where my identity vanished." Murakami's stories are difficult to describe and one should, I think, resist attempts to overanalyze them. Their beauty lies in their ephemeral and incantatory qualities and in his uncanny ability to tap into a sort of collective unconscious. In addition, a part of Murakami's genius is that he uses images as plot points, going from image to image, like in the marvelous story "Airplane," where, while making love, the narrator imagines strings hanging from the ceiling and how each one might open up a different possibility—good and bad. It is clear that Murakami is well acquainted with the teachings of Buddhism, western philosophies, Jungian theory; he has a deep knowledge of music and, also, I have been told, is a dedicated, strong swimmer. In his stories, he roams freely and convincingly through all these elements (and no doubt many more) without differentiating to create a world where cats talk and elephants disappear. In the introduction to this collection, Murakami writes how, for him, writing a novel is a challenge and how writing short stories is a joy—these stories are a joy for his readers as well.Lily Tuck's most recent novel, The News from Paraguay, won the 2004 National Book Award.
From Bookmarks Magazine"Everything I write is a strange tale," Haruki Murakami says in his preface to this collection. Admittedly, his fusion of Eastern and Western elements of story and reality to create a uniquely surreal landscape of human and otherworldly experiences may be a little too strange for some readers. In addition, he asks more questions than he answers about his protagonists and their unusual situations. Yet those accustomed to his weird ways will find a lot to enjoy here, including many of his most popular New Yorker pieces. While it's clear that many of the stories are sketches made in preparation for the grand artistry of his novels, most, if not all, stand very well on their own.
From BooklistThis well-honored and avidly read Japanese writer, who is the author, most recently, of the novel Kafka on the Shore (2005), extols the virtues of, as well as admits to a fondness for, the short story form ("a joy") in his introduction to this selection of 25 of his short works. Readers who fear the short story, particularly by writers with a high literary reputation, need to set hesitations aside here. Murakami is an open-armed, hospitable short story writer who avoids the obscurantism often caused by the concision that the form requires. His stories have an oral tone, a greatly appealing and embracing personal narrative voice. "Yep, that's life all right," says the narrator of "A Perfect Day for Kangaroos," on the subject of finding a suitable day--what with inclement weather and health issues--to visit the zoo. The sheer perfection of that story is counterpoised by "Tony Takitani," a longer and more elaborate but no less jolting story about a man's life, which begins and ends in loneliness. The title story is a low-key but poignant memoir-type narrative about a young man's caring for his hearing-impaired cousin, and the pleasure of "The Mirror" arises from the feel it gives of an Edith Wharton ghost story. The beauty of the author's prose style seals every story's sharp delivery.
Brad Hooper
Book Dimension length: (cm)19.7 width:(cm)12.8
作者简介 Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into thirty-eight languages, and the most recent of his many honors is the Yomiuri Literary Prize, whose previous recipients include Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe, and Kobo Abe.
媒体推荐 Reviews “A true miscellany [or] more like one of those overstuffed, career-spanning CD box sets…[But] the tales seem to speak with one, very seductive, voice. That voice, in each of these wildly varied excursions into the strange, dim territory of the self, says that someone named Haruki Murakami is still looking, quixotically, for something less fragile, less provisional than the usual accommodations we make do with on the road.”
--Terrence Rafferty, New York Times Book Review
"A virtuosic demonstration of Murakami's incredible range . . . thrilling, funny, sad, moving, scary--all at once. Since 1980, the year Haruki Murakami wrote his first short story, the Japanese author has been a walking definition of genius . . . He is a master of tone, and can manipulate a reader's curiosity at will, [and he] approaches the large subjects indirectly, through mood and bizarre occurrences, and always trusts his reader to be moved."
--John Freeman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"In this extraordinary new story collection by the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, reality is ever in danger of breaking loose of its moorings . . . The inconsequential registers as significant in these wonderful stories as people struggle to figure out how to be, and what 'normal' means, if anything."
--Joan Mellen, Baltimore Sun
"Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a satisfying, entertaining collection [and] a solid introduction to the eclectic talents of this master storyteller."
--Robert Allen Papinchak, The Seattle Times
"Murakami effortlessly conjures modern fairy tales that dazzle . . . These stories are full of wisdom, wrenching us into understanding our innermost impulses by confronting us with the unexpected."
--Geoffrey Bateman, Rocky Mountain News
“Murakami’s writing perfectly captures the way surreal, even seemingly supernatural, encounters can subtly alter the terrain of everyday life.”
--Sara Cardace, Washington Post Book World
“Chance on this writer, and you’re lucky . . . Each of these tales is delightfully entertaining, a pleasure to read and to ponder at one’s leisure. And believe me, they do stick with you, creeping back into consciousness at the oddest moments, giving rise, quite out of the blue, to yet another surprising insight . . . Read through a selection or two, and you likely will be hooked [on] one of the most fascinating, playful literary minds around.”
--Lee Makela, Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Whimsical, magical, daring or sometimes played with the mute in the bell of the trumpet . . . the best of these linger far beyond the reading of them, creating an aura about the world that for many of us just wasn’t present before we read them. ”
--Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune
“As beautiful and metaphysical as anything Murakami, an artist who’s at the top of his form, has offered in the past . . . The tales in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman strike a gripping balance between the bizarre and wise [as] empirical reality is bluntly scrutinized, if not entirely undermined . . . He’s the rare sort of artist who not only creates uncanny landscapes but effortlessly ferries you through them.”
--Dan Lopez, Time Out New York
“Mysterious and evanescent . . . [The] stories in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman juxtapose the deeply bizarre with the mundane [as] Murakami explores the loneliness of spaghetti, man-eating cats, romantic alienation, and eyeless, cake-obsessed crows . . . [A] dexterous story collection that illustrates the range and vitality of the genre.”
--Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly
“Murakami’s first collection of stories in more than a decade once again demonstrates his fabulous talent for transporting readers and making ‘the world fade away’ . . . What shines in all of [these stories] is Murakami’s love for the open-ended mystery at the core of existence and his willingness to give himself up ‘to the flow’ in order to capture some of the magic in the mundane.”
--Heller McAlpin, The Christian Science Monitor
"A warning to new readers of Haruki Murakami: You will become addicted . . . [His] newest collection is as enigmatic and sublime as ever."
--Jenna Krajeski, San Francisco Chronicle
"Murakami's made from the DNA of Kafka, Gogol, Borges and Vonnegut. Like all these masters of metaphor, this writer slips through the silver membrane between life and dream as effortlessly as Alice through her looking glass . . . The meanings in [his] fiction are koi in a black pool. When it is time to be seen, up they rise, gold and gorgeous for one patient reader, cream and black and mysterious for the next."
--Charles McNair, Paste
"Engrossing . . . Although Murakami's style and deadpan humor are wonderfully distinctive, his emotional territory is more familiar--remorse, unresolved confusion, sudden epiphanies--though heightened by the surreal . . . For all its peculiarity, Planet Murakami offers a recognisable landscape of our fears."
--David Jays, Observer
"A beguiling collection that shows off Murakami's bold inventiveness and deep compassion."
--Siobhan Murphy, Metro
"Sharp but humane [and] as unforgettable as it is untypical."
--Hugo Barnacle, New Statesman
"Marvelous . . . These stories are a joy for [Murakami's] readers . . . Their beauty lies in their ephemeral and incantatory qualities and in his uncanny ability to tap into a sort of collective unconscious."
--Lily Tuck, Publishers Weekly (signature review)
"An intimate pleasure."
--Ruth Scurr, The Times (London)
"Murakami's matchless gift for making the unconvential and even the surreal inviting and gratifying creates hard little narrative gems . . . A superlative display of a great writer's wares. Absolutely essential."
--Kirkus
"Readers who fear the short story, particularly by writers with a high literary reputation, need to set hesitations aside here. Murakami is an open-armed, hospitable short story writer [with] a greatly appealing and embracing personal narrative voice . . . The beauty of the author's prose style seals every story's sharp delivery."
--Brad Hooper, Booklist
"[Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman] will undoubtedly confirm his reputation as literature's answer to David Lynch."
--Jonathan Ellis, Times Literary Supplement (London)
