四本好书：麦琪·弗格森（Maggie Fergusson）重新挖掘出诺贝尔文学奖得主帕特里克·怀特（Patrick White）的一本早期小说，并挑出2012年的最佳书籍……
Happy Valley by Patrick White (Cape, hardback, out now). When this first novel appeared in 1939, reviewers including Graham Greene came together in a chorus of praise. Then Patrick White suppressed it. Reissued now to mark his centenary, it turns out to be a masterpiece. Happy Valley is a small Australian town, a microcosm through which White explores the passions simmering below the surface of apparently unexceptional lives. The only Australian writer to win a Nobel prize, he is brilliant on the gulf between thought and speech, and the sleights of mind we develop to cope with anguish. The spinster piano teacher withdraws from the "formless and volatile" present into an idealised past; the bullied child inhabits an imaginary future; the asthmatic schoolmaster harbours anger, finally released in the murder of his wife. White’s prose slides between dialogue and interior monologue, subtle but never obscure. "Will they read me when I’m dead?" he used to ask. They should.
《快乐谷》，帕特里克·怀特著（开普出版社，精装版，已上市）。这部处女作于1939年出版，当时包括格兰汉姆·格林（Graham Greene）在内的各方评论家都对它大加赞赏。但帕特里克·怀特之后却禁止此书再版。直到去年为了纪念他诞辰100周年，这本小说才终于再次付印。快乐谷是澳大利亚的一个小镇，它也是大千世界的一个缩影，怀特通过这个小镇探索了表面上平淡无奇的生活背后酝酿着的激情。身为惟一一位获得过诺贝尔文学奖的澳大利亚作家，怀特尤为擅长处理思想和语言之间的鸿沟，对于人们的大脑为了承受痛苦而使用的一些心理技巧也非常熟悉。身为钢琴老师的一位老姑娘从“无形不定”的现在退缩入一段理想化的过去之中，受欺负的孩子居住在想象中的未来里；患有哮喘的男老师内心受到愤怒的煎熬，最终他杀死自己的妻子，释放了这种愤怒。怀特的行文在对话和内心独白之间巧妙地来回更替，微妙却从不隐晦。怀特曾问过：“我死后人们还会读我写的书吗？”人们应该读的。
SHORT STORIES
短篇小说集
Dear Life by Alice Munro (Chatto, hardback, out now). Hiding her craftsmanship under an easy, conversational style, Alice Munro uses the first ten stories in this collection to revisit small-town Ontario, and to reveal just how surreal real life can be. Every word pulls its weight (a wallflower at a party feels that everyone else is "equipped" with friends) as Munro homes in on the things that throw lives off kilter: the nuance of character that, slowly but surely, derails a marriage; the despair that drives a nine-year-old to suicide. She saves the best till last, closing with a quartet of stories that are, she says, the closest she will ever come to memoir. "The Eye", in which Munro’s capricious mother makes her visit the corpse of a nanny to whom she has become traitorously attached, is a gem.
《亲爱的生活》，爱丽丝·门罗（Alice Munro）著（查托出版社，精装版，已上市）。爱丽丝·门罗将她的写作技巧蕴藏在一种如同对话般的简单风格之中。她用这部小说集内的前十个故事回顾了安大略省的小镇风情，并透露了在这些小镇上的真实生活有多么地超现实。门罗在书中描写将人们的生活打乱的事物时所用的每一个词都有其分量（在一次聚会上一位害羞孤僻的客人觉得其他所有人都“装备”着朋友）。这些事物包括性格上的细微差异缓慢却实实在在地将一段婚姻导向破灭，或是绝望驱使一个九岁孩子自杀。门罗将最好的故事留在了最后，用四个故事将本书结尾。据她所说，这四则故事是她过去及未来写出的所有作品中最接近她自身传记的故事。在写得极为出色的《眼睛》这则故事中，和叛逆的门罗很亲的保姆去世之后，她那善变的母亲让她去瞻仰了这位保姆的遗容。
PSYCHOLOGY
心理学
Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks (Picador, hardback, out now). Hallucination need not imply insanity: this is what Oliver Sacks sets out to demonstrate in an "anthology" of his patients’ experiences. Some are gently amusing—an elderly lady who regularly "sees" figures in Eastern dress is delighted when diagnosed with "Charles Bonnet Syndrome"; most are alarming and poignant. One patient with "sundowning syndrome" is daily besieged by grotesque intruders as the light fails. But this is more than arm’s-length reportage. Writing with compassion, and weaving his tales together with literary reference and scientific research, Sacks places at the heart of the book a riveting confessional chapter about the drug-induced hallucinations he himself experienced as a young neurologist – his conversations with a spider, and the summer’s day he spent watching the battle of Agincourt played out on his dressing gown.
《幻觉》，奥利弗·萨克斯（Oliver Sacks）著（皮卡德出版社，精装版，已上市）。这本书可说是奥利弗·萨克斯记录其病人体验的一本“编年史”。在书中，作者致力于说明一点：幻觉并不一定表示精神不正常。某些幻觉症状会带有轻微的喜感，一位老太太总是“看到”身穿东方服饰的人影，她得知自己患的其实是邦纳综合症时松了一口气，非常高兴。不过大多数幻觉症状还是令人担忧且让人印象深刻的。一位患有日落综合症的病人每天在黄昏时都会感觉到大量形状怪异的不速之客出现在眼前。但这本书可不仅仅是一部置身事外的报告。萨克斯的书蕴涵着深厚的同情感，故事中穿插着大量文学典故以及科学研究。占据全书中心地位的一章非常有趣，在其间年轻的神经学家萨克斯用毒品让自己产生幻觉，他记录了自己和蜘蛛的对话，以及在那个夏日他花了一天的时间观看在自己的睡衣上上演的阿金库尔战役。
MEMOIR
回忆录
Trafficked by Sophie Hayes (Harper-Collins, paperback, out now). Misery memoir, or "mis mem", strikes me as a genre that too often panders to prurience. But by chance I met Sophie Hayes, was impressed, and felt compelled to read her story in full. British, well-educated and middle-class, she was not an obvious target for sex traffickers. But when her “boyfriend” took her to Italy, locked her up, stole her passport, and brainwashed her into believing that she’d be dead if she didn’t obey him, she was forced into prostitution, serving around 30 clients a night, seeing humanity at its most depraved—and, occasionally, at its kindest. Working with the United Nations and the Metropolitan Police, she now devotes herself to preventing other women from meeting a similar fate. Her cautionary tale ends in a triumph of tenacity over terror.
《被贩卖的我》，苏菲·海耶斯（Sophie Hayes）著，（哈普·柯林斯出版社，简装版，已上市）。苦难传记，或血泪史，在我看来是一个很容易沉迷于淫秽描述的文学体裁。但是一次偶然的机会让我认识了苏菲·海耶斯。她给我留下了非常深刻的印象，并让我决定仔细阅读她的故事。英国人，受过良好教育，出身中产阶级，这样背景的苏菲不太像是性贩子的目标人物。但是她的“男朋友”将她带到意大利，把她监禁起来，拿走了她的护照，并对其洗脑使她相信如果不听话就会被杀死。在那之后，她被迫卖淫，一晚要接约30个客人，目睹了人性最黑暗的一面，偶尔却也见证了人性最高尚的一面。现在苏菲为联合国和伦敦警察厅工作，将一生贡献在防止其他女性遭受类似命运上。她的警示故事最终以坚韧战胜邪恶结尾。
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