Heat and Dust: 1800 Headwords
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Heat and Dust: 1800 Headwords |
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基本信息·出版社：Oxford University Press
·页码：112 页
·出版日期：2000年04月
·ISBN：0194230686
·条形码：9780194230681
·装帧：平装
·正文语种：英语
·丛书名：Oxford Bookworms Library
内容简介 Heat and dust - these simple, terrible words describe the Indian summer. Year after year, endlessly, it is the same. And everyone who experiences this heat and dust is changed for ever. We often say, in these modern times, that sexual relationships have changed, for better or for worse. But in this book we see that things have not changed. Whether we look back sixty years, or a hundred and sixty, we see that it is not things that change, but people. And, in the heat and dust of an Indian summer, even people are not very different after all.
作者简介 Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927-) was born in Poland and came to England at the age of twelve. She is a well-known author and has written several film-scripts.
编辑推荐 Review Jhabvala's eighth novel intertwines two stories of two Indias over half a century, and what the book is really about is the social sea change that separates the lifestyle of the narrator, as recorded in her journal, from that of her grandfather's first wife, Olivia, whose story the modern heroine is pursuing through the old letters she carries with her. Olivia comes to India as a young administrator's bride in 1923. Isolated and bored in her European-style bower, she drifts into an affair with a charming but bankrupt prince and after aborting his child, remains in a mountain exile alone there for the rest of her life. Olivia's story is swoony and fatalistic, overpowering as the heat and the dust, but although her inheritor's account has certain parallels, the comedown into contemporary mores and morals makes plain the trade-off that progress has entailed. Instead of a dashing husband, she has an encounter with one of those exploitative nirvana-seekers - this one with a flat Midlands accent that makes his prayer ludicrous. No prince for her either: she becomes pregnant by a meek clerk. Unlike Olivia, she lives amid the lepers, cripples and beggars that populate the streets. The splendor that was has all decayed, and one can't help feeling nostalgic for the Olivias - weak, rotten Olivia destroyed by the exotic East - in comparison to the efficient young woman of today, with her sleeping bag, her rented spaces and rented lovers. An impressive juxtaposition. (Kirkus Reviews)
