美国国家公共电台 NPR What 'The Heavens'? This Extraordinary New Book Feels Like 5 Novels In One

 

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Novelists have to have active imaginations. For her last novel, "The Country Of Ice Cream Star," Sandra Newman made up a whole new language. How would you say BJ Leiderman writes our theme music in that language? In her new novel, "The Heavens," a recurring¹ dream changes the world in big and small ways each time the dreamer wakes up. NPR's Lynn Neary has this story of a writer who likes to do things her own way.

LYNN NEARY, BYLINE²: When Sandra Newman was working on "The Country Of Ice Cream Star," an agent told her she would reach a wider audience if she wrote in plain English instead of her invented dialect. But Newman wouldn't back down - a decision she now recalls with some irony³.

SANDRA NEWMAN: He was absolutely right that that book would have sold a lot more copies if I had not had the language. But it wouldn't have been a particularly special book.

NEARY: And Newman freely admits that her latest novel, "The Heavens," is almost impossible to describe.

NEWMAN: It is really hard. I found that you can give about five different descriptions of it, which are equally true and give you the idea of five completely different books.

NEARY: The book starts out simply enough. A young woman named Kate meets a young man named Ben at a party in New York. And they are soon a couple. Before long, Ben learns that Kate has a recurring dream. In it, she's a woman named Emilia who lives in Elizabethan England.

NEWMAN: (Reading) Kate had started having that dream when she was a child. At first, it only came a few times a year. But now she had it most nights. On mornings after she'd had the dream, she felt a particular sublime⁴ importance, as if the dream were a secret mission on which depended the fate of millions, as if it held the key to the salvation⁵ of the world.

NEARY: Kate dreams she is the mistress of a wealthy man. She becomes involved with another man named Will, as in Will Shakespeare. Increasingly, the dream becomes more real to Kate than her own life. And, says Newman, Kate feels safer when dreaming.

NEWMAN: She knows what's going on. She knows who the queen is because it's Queen Elizabeth. And she knows who the people are going to be. But when she wakes up, there will be a different president. Her room will look different. And she will have done things that she has no memory of but other people want to hold her responsible for. So it becomes an increasingly chaotic⁶ and frightening world that she wakes up in as herself.

NEARY: Kate becomes convinced that her dream is causing the world to change. Her personal life keeps shifting. A constant stream of family and friends surrounds her. But each time she emerges from the dream, her relation to them changes - so does the political reality. When the book begins, it is the year 2000, and President Chen, an environmentalist, is the leader at the United States. Later, the president is Bush, and 9/11 is happening when she wakes up. Newman sees these disorienting shifts as a metaphor⁷ for the Trump⁸ era.

NEWMAN: We see that the world is changing beyond recognition, and things happen that seemed inconceivable just a few years ago. And we don't understand how we got to this place. We're looking at history and trying to find all of the strands⁹ - all of the causes of this strange effect that we see all around us.

NEARY: But then the story takes another turn, as Ben starts to believe that the woman he loves is quite literally¹⁰ insane. Suddenly, the evidence mounts, and it seems clear Kate really is mentally ill. This part of the story, says Newman, comes from Ben's point of view.

NEWMAN: For me, it became a lot about what it is like to love somebody and be very close to somebody who has a serious mental illness and how it kind of eclipses your own life and your own concerns. And there's this terrible kind of tug¹¹ of war between your loyalty¹² to your own life and your own dreams and your loyalty to them and their safety.

NEARY: So in case you're counting, we're up to four novels now - historical fiction, a time-travelling fantasy, political allegory and social realism. But if you remember, Newman said you could come up with five ways to describe her novel which would all be accurate. So what's left? Well, let's go back to the beginning. A young man meets a young woman. It's a love story.

NEWMAN: There's something about love stories - and I suppose this is true for 90 percent of writers - that I can't write a book without some kind of love story in it.

NEARY: So it's a rom-com?

(LAUGHTER)

NEWMAN: It is. It's the marriage plot, basically. That's what it is.

NEARY: "The Heavens" is all of that. And if you decide to delve¹³ into it, Sandra Newman will take you on quite a ride through her very vivid imagination. Lynn Neary, NPR News, Washington.

1 recurring   

adj.往复的，再次发生的

参考例句：

• This kind of problem is recurring often. 这类问题经常发生。
• For our own country, it has been a time for recurring trial. 就我们国家而言，它经过了一个反复考验的时期。

2 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

3 irony   

n.反语，冷嘲；具有讽刺意味的事，嘲弄

参考例句：

• She said to him with slight irony.她略带嘲讽地对他说。
• In her voice we could sense a certain tinge of irony.从她的声音里我们可以感到某种讥讽的意味。

4 sublime   

adj.崇高的，伟大的；极度的，不顾后果的

参考例句：

• We should take some time to enjoy the sublime beauty of nature.我们应该花些时间去欣赏大自然的壮丽景象。
• Olympic games play as an important arena to exhibit the sublime idea.奥运会，就是展示此崇高理念的重要舞台。

5 salvation   

n.（尤指基督）救世，超度，拯救，解困

参考例句：

• Salvation lay in political reform.解救办法在于政治改革。
• Christians hope and pray for salvation.基督教徒希望并祈祷灵魂得救。

6 chaotic   

adj.混沌的，一片混乱的，一团糟的

参考例句：

• Things have been getting chaotic in the office recently.最近办公室的情况越来越乱了。
• The traffic in the city was chaotic.这城市的交通糟透了。

7 metaphor   

n.隐喻，暗喻

参考例句：

• Using metaphor,we say that computers have senses and a memory.打个比方，我们可以说计算机有感觉和记忆力。
• In poetry the rose is often a metaphor for love.玫瑰在诗中通常作为爱的象征。

8 trump   

n.王牌，法宝；v.打出王牌，吹喇叭

参考例句：

• He was never able to trump up the courage to have a showdown.他始终鼓不起勇气摊牌。
• The coach saved his star player for a trump card.教练保留他的明星选手，作为他的王牌。

9 strands   

n.（线、绳、金属线、毛发等的）股( strand的名词复数 )；缕；海洋、湖或河的)岸；（观点、计划、故事等的）部份v.使滞留，使搁浅( strand的第三人称单数 )

参考例句：

• Twist a length of rope from strands of hemp. 用几股麻搓成了一段绳子。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• She laced strands into a braid. 她把几股线编织成一根穗带。 来自《简明英汉词典》

10 literally   

adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实

参考例句：

• He translated the passage literally.他逐字逐句地翻译这段文字。
• Sometimes she would not sit down till she was literally faint.有时候，她不走到真正要昏厥了，决不肯坐下来。

11 tug   

v.用力拖(或拉)；苦干；n.拖；苦干；拖船

参考例句：

• We need to tug the car round to the front.我们需要把那辆车拉到前面。
• The tug is towing three barges.那只拖船正拖着三只驳船。

12 loyalty   

n.忠诚，忠心

参考例句：

• She told him the truth from a sense of loyalty.她告诉他真相是出于忠诚。
• His loyalty to his friends was never in doubt.他对朋友的一片忠心从来没受到怀疑。

13 delve   

v.深入探究，钻研

参考例句：

• We should not delve too deeply into this painful matter.我们不应该过分深究这件痛苦的事。
• We need to delve more deeply into these questions.这些是我们想进一步了解的。