J. M. Coetzee文學評論集《內心活動》《異鄉人的國度》/ Here and Now 此刻(Paul Auster ~2024 / J. M. Coetzee) hc chung

【漢清講堂】2017年新春心得分享與討論會
日期：2017年1月21日(周末)，10：00~ 15：00
鍾漢清先生：「簡介Walter Benjamin 的 The Arcades Project (1927-40？)」
主要根據兩篇書評：
The Marvels of Walter Benjamin By J. M. Coetzee, the New York Review of Books

The evolution of Walter Benjamin's masterpiece | Books | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com › Arts › Books › History

我們說話時，讓年輕人翻白眼吧

MARTIN RIKER 2013年04月07日

Lotte Hansen (Paul Auster); Bert Nienhuis (J. M. Coetzee  2024)

左為保羅·奧斯特，右為J· M·庫切。

對於文學書信這種體裁而言，現在是一個奇怪的時刻。從多個方面來看，過去幾年裡出現的書 信集出版數量激增現象（貝克特[Beckett]、貝婁[Bellow]、伍德豪斯[Wodehouse]、加迪斯[Gaddis]的書信集已經出版，卡 爾維諾[Calvino] 和華萊士[Wallace]書信集即將出版）都可以被視為是一種“驗屍”：把一種事實上已經死去的體裁，連同它的作者們，一起擺放在了台上。儘管電子革命 意味着我們閱讀各類書籍的方式發生了變化，從書信到電子書信的變遷，無論是好還是壞，都從根本上重新定義了這種體裁本身。而且，雖然可能有很多當代作家會 把自己最出色的電子郵件保存在移動硬盤上，便於將來出版，但是你很難想像它們看上去或者讀起來會像是一本書信集。由於你會在電子設備上閱讀這些電子郵件 集，它們看上去很可能就跟你的收件箱差不多。
保羅·奧斯特(Paul Auster)和J· M·庫切(J. M. Coetzee)的通信集《此時此地》(Here and Now) 在打印信件這個傳統走到尾聲時抵達，它主旨卻是新的開始。這兩位作者於2008年2月第一次碰面，此後不久，庫切寫信給奧斯特，建議他們互相通信，以“激 發彼此的火花”。《此時此地》中的第一封信由庫切在2008年7月所寫，沒有任何開場白，直接談論友誼，庫切說他一直在思考和閱讀這個話題。奧斯特在回信 中談到了自己對友誼的想法，從而開啟了為期三年的通信歷程，奧斯特住在布魯克林，庫切身在遠隔重洋的澳大利亞，他們的書信短則隻言片語，長則有好幾頁，有 時候快速連續地通信，有時候也間隔數月。大多數情況下都採用郵寄方式，偶爾也會使用傳真，甚至偶爾還用電子郵件發送（發給奧斯特的妻子希莉·哈斯特維特 [Siri Hustvedt]，因為奧斯特不用電子郵件）。這些年裡兩個人也見過面，信中深情款款地提到了他們在葡萄牙、意大利、法國的短暫停留。兩人在信中順便也 寫到各自的家庭、旅行，各種書籍和電影，以及他們自己的小說，但是他們主要是提出各種話題進行討論，比如友誼、體育、德里達(Derrida)、手提籃、 國際政治以及其他種種，然後看看它們會走向何方。

乍看上去，這兩位知名作家不太可能成為筆友。奧斯特比庫切年輕7歲，是一個狂熱的人，或者說我顯然一直把他看成是狂熱的人：他沉迷於巧合和奇特的情 況，知道大量的趣聞軼事；他推崇的冷門書籍和電影最後總是相當成功。而庫切是來自南非的諾貝爾文學獎得主，他更接近於懷疑論者，挑剔的思想家，不妥協的道 德主義者，會剝去社交和政治的慣例，尋求一種本質體驗的倫理學。然而，無論兩人之間存在什麼差異，無論這些差異是真實存在，還是一種給人的感覺，在《此時 此地》中很快浮現出來的，卻是他們之間存在着更多的共同點。
例如，奧斯特和庫切都熱愛運動，他們喜歡的運動不全一樣，或者喜歡這些運動的原因不同，所以他們在這個話題上有很多話要告訴對方。在討論運動魅力的 本質時，奧斯特說它們是“一種表演藝術”。庫切回應說，他對運動的興趣“是道德上而非審美上的”，涉及到“運動所滿足的對英雄的需要”。《此時此地》中有 很多趣聞軼事，奧斯特從這種“對英雄的需要”出發，講述了自己兒時的趣事：母親給他買了一套足球服裝，但他從來沒有真正穿上它踢過足球，只是穿着它裝模作 樣。他寫道，他對足球的興趣“完全是在裝飾物上”。兩位作者繼續進行運動方面的探討，最終從5個或6個不同的角度挖掘這一主題，得出了令人興奮的結果。
他們還發現了彼此在其他方面的共同興趣和觀點，並展開了不同程度的有益探討，這些方面包括：卡夫卡(Kafka)和貝克特(Beckett)；自由 政治；美國詩歌自20世紀60年代以來令人失望的表現；懷疑自己的作品是否能持久流傳；相信人類“將生活在我們所創造的痛苦現實中……而不是創造一個新 的、協商後的現實”，語言符號能指在本質上是任意的（雖然不是沒有意義的，奧斯特補充說）；每個人跟他所吃的食物的關係，比我們普遍承認的更加複雜；德國 作家海因里希·馮·克萊斯特 (Heinrich von Kleist) 是“‘A級足球聯賽’作家中的一個例子（庫切語）；‘A級聯賽’不僅成員很少，而且玩法跟‘B級聯賽’大不相同，人們習慣了‘B級聯賽’的玩法，它讓大家 感覺更自在”；小說家不應該公開回應對他們的批評；接受採訪遠遠不如真正的對話那麼有吸引力；作家為了保持活力，必須不斷嘗試一些新的東西。在上述所有方 面中，最後的這個共同信念似乎是最初促使他們開始書信往來的主要因素。
事實上，《此時此地》中兩人意見一致的時候太多，最終反而成為了該書一個問題，因為他們的對話讀起來更像是獨白。到了全書的三分之二處，書信集的整 體情緒從“激發火花”變得更加接近於體恤同情。有段時間，他們的討論失去了動力。這樣繼續下去倒是也沒有什麼關係——但是當庫切開始把奧斯特的“文人的掙 扎”浪漫化時，以及奧斯特說“發牢騷也可以很有趣”，然後提出，“當我們說話時，讓年輕人去翻白眼吧。讓不那麼年輕的人無視我們說的話”時，作為一名讀 者，我不由得想接受他的提議。但是我也很好奇：如果這兩名作者各自與不那麼贊同他們的人通信，《此時此地》將會是什麼樣呢？當然，那它就會成為一本不同的 書，也許對於作者們來說，它會是一部更加重要的作品，而他們之間的友誼也會是另一種類型。
因為友誼才是《此時此地》的真正意義。他們通信的目的不是要寫作一本書，而是要發展一段友誼，這一事實解釋了《此時此地》的諸多弱點和長處。從最初 的幾封信——或者更早，從決定通信這件事本身——開始，友誼就是這本書的最高主題。不同的話題來來去去，其首要任務是發掘雙方的共同點，以使這段友誼可以 蓬勃發展。在通信開始不久，奧斯特寫道，友誼提供了“絕對平等的地位。彼此給予的都比接受的更多，接受的比給予的更多，友誼在這種交流的互惠中盛放。”書 信往來3年之後，兩位作者似乎感覺他們已經抵達了這一理想的某個版本。他們開始佔據對方的心思，奧斯特稱庫切為“缺席的另一位”，而庫切回應道，他感到 “對你，以及你堅韌頑強、未被珍視的勇敢，有一種兄弟般的關切”。“未被珍視”一詞似乎跟事實不太吻合，但從整體來看，《此時此地》作為友誼發展過程中一 系列互動的探尋和一種延伸的沉思，它提供的東西可謂真材實料。

Martin Rike是聖路易斯華盛頓大學的英語老師。
本文最初發表於2013年3月17日。
翻譯：土土

Pen Pals

By MARTIN RIKER April 07, 2013

It’s an odd moment for literary letters as a genre. The proliferation of letter volumes published over the past few years (Beckett, Bellow, Wodehouse, Gaddis, with Calvino and Wallace on the way) might be considered post-mortem in more ways than one, putting to bed a form that is already effectively dead, along with its authors. For while the ­e-­revolution means changes in how we read any sort of book, the move from epistles to ­e-­pistles is, for better or worse, a fundamental redefinition of the genre itself. And while there are probably plenty of contemporary writers saving up their best e-mails on external hard drives for later publication, it’s difficult to imagine those looking or acting like a volume of letters. Since you will read these collected e-mails on your electronic device, there’s a fairly good chance they will look like, well, your in-box.
Arriving at the end of the print-letter tradition, Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee’s collected correspondence, “Here and Now,” is all about new beginnings. The two writers met for the first time in February 2008, and shortly thereafter Coetzee wrote to Auster proposing an exchange of letters as a way to “strike sparks off each other.” The book’s inaugural letter, from Coetzee in July 2008, skips any preamble and goes straight to talking about friendship, a topic Coetzee says he’s been thinking and reading about. Auster responds with his own thoughts on friendship, and thus begins a three-year correspondence between Auster’s home in Brooklyn and Coetzee’s across the world in Australia. The letters range in length from a couple of sentences to several pages, sometimes sent in quick succession, other times with months between. They’re mostly mailed but occasionally faxed, even less occasionally e-mailed (to Auster’s wife, Siri Hustvedt, since Auster doesn’t use e-mail). The authors also see each other in person during these years, referring fondly in their letters to visits in Portugal, Italy, France. They write in passing about their families, their travels, various books and films, their own novels. But mostly what they do is pose topics for discussion and then see where those topics lead, from friendship to sports to ­Derrida to handbaskets to international politics and various points between.


For potential pen pals, these two famous writers might seem at first an unlikely pairing. Auster, the younger by seven years, is an enthusiast, or certainly I’ve always thought of him that way: his fascination with coincidences and odd circumstances; his bottomless bag of anecdotes; his championing of out-of-the-way books and films that always end up being very good. Meanwhile Coetzee, the Nobel Prize-winning South African, seems more of a skeptic, a fastidious thinker and uncompromising moralist, who strips away social and political conventions in search of an ethics of essential experience. Yet whatever their differences, real or perceived, what quickly becomes clear in the pages of “Here and Now” is that they have far more in common than not.
They both love sports, for example, and the fact that they don’t love precisely the same sports, or love them for precisely the same reasons, is largely why they have so much to say to each other about them. Discussing the nature of sports’ appeal, Auster proposes they are “a kind of performance art.” Coetzee responds that his interest in sports is “ethical rather than aesthetic,” having to do with “the need for heroes that sports satisfy.” Auster takes off from this “need for heroes” to relate one of the book’s many anecdotes, about how as a child his mother bought him a complete football outfit that he never actually played in, but simply wore to pretend. His interest in football, he writes, “was all about the outer trappings.” The sports conversation continues on from here, the authors ultimately approaching this topic from five or six different angles and with stimulating results.
Other interests and opinions they find they have in common, and discuss with varying degrees of success, include: Kafka and Beckett; liberal politics; disappointment in American poetry since the 1960s; doubts that their own books will endure; the belief that humanity “would rather live through the misery of the reality we have created . . . than put together a new, negotiated reality”; that linguistic signifiers are essentially arbitrary (although not meaningless, Auster adds); that everyone’s relationship to the food we eat is more complicated than we generally acknowledge; that the German writer Heinrich von Kleist is an example (Coetzee writes) of “an A league of writers, which has very few members and in which the game being played is very different from the game in the more comfortable B league to which one is accustomed”; that novelists should not respond publicly to their critics; that being interviewed is far less engaging than having a real conversation; and that writers, in order to remain vibrant, must always attempt something new, which of all of the above seems the one shared belief most responsible for their embarking on this correspondence in the first place.
In fact, the sheer amount of agreement in the pages of “Here and Now” eventually becomes a problem for the book, as their dialogical back-and-forth starts to read more like a monologue. Perhaps two-thirds in, the general mood of the letters shifts from “striking sparks” to something more like commiseration, and for a while the discussion loses steam. It’s fine as far as it goes — yet when ­Coetzee starts romanticizing Aus­ter’s writerly struggles, and when ­Auster writes that “griping can be fun,” then offers, “Let the young roll their eyes when we speak. Let the not so young ignore what we say,” as a reader, I was tempted to take him up on it. Instead, I found myself wondering what “Here and Now” would have been like if each author had corresponded with someone he agreed with less often. That would’ve been a different book, of course, and perhaps more important for its authors, a different sort of friendship.
Because friendship is really the point of “Here and Now.” They did not set out to make a book, but to make a friendship, and this fact accounts for many of the book’s weaknesses as well as its strengths. Starting with their first letters — or ­earlier, with the decision to correspond at all — friendship is the book’s overarching subject, and the various topics that come and go are before all else attempts at finding that common ground upon which friendship can flourish. In the early pages, Auster writes that friendship offers “a position of absolute equality. You are both giving more than you receive, both receiving more than you give, and in the reciprocity of this exchange, friendship blooms,” and three years of correspondence later, the two authors do seem to feel they have realized some version of this ideal. They’ve come to occupy each other’s thoughts, Auster referring to ­Coetzee as an “absent other,” and ­Coetzee responding that he feels “a certain fraternal tenderness for you and your dogged, unappreciated bravery.” That “unappreciated” may be an adjective in need of a reality check; but taken as a whole, as a series of collaborative inquiries and an extended meditation on the processes of friendship, the book has something substantive to offer.

Martin Riker teaches English at Washington University in St. Louis.

*****
異鄉人的國度 可以擴展讀者的眼界 只要你不是西洋文學的.....異鄉人

《異鄉人的國度:文學評論集》是2003年諾貝爾文學獎得主庫切的文學評論集，收入發在《紐約時報》或《紐約客》上的文論26篇，這些文論寫於 1986-1999年間。庫切不光是被公認的經典作家，還是一位著名的學者，他兼通文理，學識駁雜，不亞於博爾赫斯。他的文學評論有相當的分量，那隨筆式 的文論很具親和力和可讀性。他不但論及了18至19世紀的作家如笛福、屠格涅夫、陀思妥耶夫斯基、卡夫卡等，還剖析了博爾赫斯、奧茲、萊辛等20世紀的文 學巨匠。優美的文筆和較高學術價值使之成為不可多得的文學評論集。

---

圖書目錄：
01 何為經典？ ——一場演講
02 丹尼爾•笛福的《魯濱遜漂流記》
03 塞繆爾•理查森的《克拉麗莎》
04 馬塞盧斯•艾芒茲的《死後的懺悔》
05 哈里•穆里施的《發現天堂》
06 齊斯•努特布姆：小說家、旅行家
07 威廉•加斯所譯的里爾克
08 翻譯卡夫卡
09羅伯特•穆齊爾的《日記》
10 約瑟夫•斯科弗雷齊
11 陀思妥耶夫斯基：奇蹟般的年代
12 約瑟夫•布羅茨基的隨筆
13 豪•路•博爾赫斯的《小說集》
14 A•S•拜厄特
15 卡瑞爾•菲利普斯
16 薩爾曼•拉什迪的《摩爾人的最後嘆息》
17 阿哈龍•阿佩菲爾德的《鐵軌》
18 阿摩司•奧茲
19 納吉布•馬哈福茲的《平民史詩》
20 托馬斯•普林格爾的詩歌作品
21 達芙妮•羅克
22 戈迪默和屠格涅夫
23 多麗絲•萊辛的自傳
24 布萊頓•布萊頓巴赫的回憶錄
25 南非自由人士：阿蘭•佩頓和海倫•蘇茲曼
26 諾埃爾•莫斯特德和東開普邊陲
文學的政治和道德（代譯後記）

异乡人的国度

副标题: 文学评论集
作者: [南非] J.M.库切
译者: 汪洪章
出版社: 浙江文艺出版社
出版年: 2010-04
页数: 392

---

Title:	Stranger Shores
Author:	J.M.Coetzee
Genre:	Literary criticism
Written:	(2001)
Length:	281 pages
Availability:	Stranger Shores - US
	Stranger Shores - UK
	Stranger Shores - Canada

• Literary Essays
• 1986-1999
• These piece were previously published elsewhere, most of them in The New York Review of Books

- Return to top of the page -

---

Our Assessment:

B : solid collection, good introductions to authors and works

See our review for fuller assessment.

---

Review Summaries

Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
The Economist	B-	15/9/2001	.
New Statesman	.	17/12/2001	D.J.Taylor
The NY Times Book Rev.	A	16/9/2001	James Shapiro
Rev. of Contemp. Fiction	.	Spring/2002	E. Kim Stone
The Spectator	.	22/9/2001	Alberto Manguel
TLS	.	5/10/2001	Michael Gorra
World Literature Today	A	Spring/2002	J. Roger Kurtz

Review Consensus:

No consensus, but the majority are very impressed

From the Reviews:

• "Stranger Shores contains several outstanding essays. Taken as a whole, however, it is a disappointment. Little has been done to make the book reader-friendly. There is no foreword, no index, and no organisation of the contents. Several of the pieces are redundant. Reviews of novels by Salman Rushdie and A.S. Byatt, for example, offer little more than plot summaries. Others have aged badly. (...) The collection also suffers from Mr Coetzee's preferred critical tone, which is dry tending to arid." - The Economist
  
  
• "JM Coetzee (...) approaches works of literature in rather the same spirit that a government nutritional scientist might approach a plate of roast beef and root vegetables. What exactly is the calorific value of these items ? And the fat content ? How much flour was added to the gravy ?" - D.J.Taylor, New Statesman
  
  
• "Coetzee is that rare breed, an academic who is also a world-class writer, and this latest collection is informed as much by the novelist's keen eye as it is by the theorist's obsessions. These are not puff pieces. (...) Coetzee wields a sharp scalpel, carefully exposing the stylistic flaws, theoretical shortcuts and, on occasion, bad faith of writers he otherwise admires. It's a dazzling if at times coldly clinical performance." - James Shapiro, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• " Stranger Shores, by South African writer J. M. Coetzee, the only two-time winner of the Booker Prize, is an immensely pleasurable read because Coetzee submits a global array of authors to the responsible scrutiny of his skeptical gaze." - E. Kim Stone, Review of Contemporary Fiction
  
  
• "(H)owever strict their critical intelligence, these essays have been written without malice. They are instead dispassionate, learned and often technical, especially in discussing a translator's choices in moving from Dutch or German to English. They are descriptive before they turn evaluative, precise and lucid in their presentation of often unfamiliar material. (...) And taken together, these essays project a strong if characteristically indirect light on his own fictional practice." - Michael Gorra, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "Like his fiction, these pieces are smart, intense, and stylistically sophisticated. (...) One of the great values of Coetzee's essays is that they demonstrate the methods and raise the questions that students of comparative literature need to pursue and ask. There is the attempt to balance historicity with esthetics, and there is also a strong emphasis on issues of translation." - J. Roger Kurtz, World Literature Today

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

- Return to top of the page -

---

The complete review's Review:

After an opening lecture on "What is a classic ?" Stranger Shores consists mainly of book introductions and reviews (most of the latter originally published in The New York Review of Books).
It is a very international selection: the only American author discussed is William Gass, and that piece -- a review of Reading Rilke -- focusses more Rilke and translation than Gass. There are the obvious areas Coetzee gravitates to -- Dutch literature (Emants, Mulisch, and Nooteboom) and South African literature -- but he also reaches considerably beyond these. Other contemporary authors he discusses range from Josef Skvorecky and Salman Rushdie to Aharon Appelfeld, Amoz Oz, and Naguib Mahfouz. Classic authors he introduces and discusses include Turgenev, Defoe, and Samuel Richardson.
Translation is a major issue in many of these pieces, and it is noteworthy that several of the reviews consider newly re-translated works. "Translating Kafka" takes the publication of a new translation of The Castle to re-examine the original Kafka translators, the Muirs, and the influence their work had on Kafka-reception. Coetzee also reviews Jorge Luis Borges' Collected Fictions, the first complete version of his fiction by a single translator (Andrew Hurley). And, of course, Gass' Reading Rilke is itself a book comparing translations. In each Coetzee compares previous versions with the new, and makes some observations; some of it might seem like nit-picking, but it gives a general sense of what Coetzee believes to be the translations' strengths and weaknesses (and presumably helps in at least reminding readers of the compromises made when literature is read in translation).
Elsewhere, too, Coetzee does not ignore questions of translation. Comfortable reading both Dutch and German, his reviews of authors who wrote in these languages also touch upon the quality of the translations, while even with authors such as Mahfouz he at least reminds readers that there are translation issues to consider.
The reviews tend to be very expansive, including detailed summaries. In some cases Coetzee's retelling of the story takes up too much of the allotted space (in his discussion of The Discovery of Heaven, for example), but generally he manages to helpfully expound while summarising. Still, Coetzee's reviews are very much what one might expect from a professor of literature: more lecture-like than review-like. It is often difficult to even get a sense of whether Coetzee actually enjoyed a book.
Coetzee's forte here is his ability to introduce an author in the span of a few pages. He focusses on the authors as much as the works, introducing them as one might in a class where the students will not read the book in question but are expected to have some familiarity with the author and the work. From Robert Musil to Doris Lessing, he offers good (though often not neutral) snapshots of their lives, and given how few of these authors are widely read this is fairly useful
Many of the authors discussed either suffered or witnessed oppression, and clashes of cultures (and nationalities or similar groups) also define them. A.S.Byatt is the practically the most insular of the lot -- but tellingly the book Coetzee reviews, Babel Tower, is the one in which she is most concerned with the clash of culture (admittedly in a slightly different way than most of these other authors).
Stranger Shores is an interesting collection of pieces, devoted almost entirely to significant authors and worthy works. Several discussions -- the ones on translation, in particular -- are excellent, and for the most part Coetzee does really open a door to these authors and works, tempting the reader to consider them more closely. But it is also only a collection of hardly connected pieces, and while the cover maintains these are Literary Essays they are only, in part quite uncomfortably, something between essays and book reviews.

- Return to top of the page -

---

Links:

Stranger Shores:

• Excerpt at USA Today

Reviews:

• Cercles
• The Hindu (1)
• The Hindu (2)
• The New York Times Book Review
• Review of Contemporary Fiction
• The Sunday Tribune
• Yale Review of Books

J.M.Coetzee:

• J.M.Coetzee at books and writers
• J.M.Coetzee at GuardianUnlimited
• J.M.Coetzee at Contemporary Writers
• Nobel Prize, 2003
• Nobel lecture
• As a Woman Grows Older by J.M.Coetzee

Other books by J.M.Coetzee under review:

• Diary of a Bad Year
• Disgrace
• Elizabeth Costello
• Life & Times of Michael K
• Slow Man
• Summertime

Books reviewed and discussed by J.M.Coetzee in Stranger Shores under review:

• Harry Mulisch's The Discovery of Heaven
• Cees Nooteboom's In the Dutch Mountains and Roads to Santiago
• William H. Gass' Reading Rilke
• Jorge Luis Borges' Collected Fictions
• A.S.Byatt's Babel Tower
• Naguib Mahfouz's The Cairo Trilogy

Other books
《內心活動——文學評論集》 Inner Workings by J. M. Coetzee 作者：（南非）庫切



出版社：浙江文藝出版社出版日期：2010年09月01日 語言：簡體中文


在 《内心活动》中，不管是写到塞缪尔·贝克特、 罗伯特·穆齐尔或索尔·贝娄，库切都给自己一个任务，就是审视哲学家胡塞尔所称的“欧洲人文危机”的文学余震……他最好的随笔，论贝克特和策兰，称赞那些 挺身迎接挑战的作家。在颂扬他们艺术上一丝不苟的精神和他们对语言的力量的英雄式的、尽管“非总是毫不动摇的信念”时，他拐弯抹角地向读者解释作家“复 杂、二争执和痛苦的”努力，这努力也正是他自己的小说的特点。J.M. 库切著有：《幽暗之地》、《内 陆深处》、《等待野蛮人》、《迈克尔·K的生活与时代》、《福》、《彼得堡的大师》、《男孩》、《青春》、《凶年纪事》(英文版均列入企鹅丛书，中译本由 浙江文艺出版社出版)。作者曾为芝加哥大学社会思想学系教授，现定居澳大利亚。曾荣获许多文学奖项，其中包括：南非最著名的“中央新闻社文学奖”(三 次)、布克奖(两次)、法国费米娜外国小说奖、耶路撒冷奖、拉南文学奖、爱尔兰时报国际小说奖、英联邦文学奖和诺贝尔文学奖(2003)。导言
一　伊塔洛·斯维沃
二　罗伯特·瓦尔泽
三　罗伯特·穆齐尔及其《青年特尔莱斯的自白》
四　瓦尔特·本雅明及其“拱廊计划”
五　布鲁诺·舒尔茨
六　约瑟夫·罗特：小说集
七　山多尔·马劳伊
八　保罗·策兰和他的译者
九　君特·格拉斯与“威廉·古斯特洛夫”号
十　W.G.塞巴尔德及其《效仿自然》
十一　胡戈·克劳斯：诗人
十二　格雷厄姆·格林及其《布赖顿棒糖》
十三　塞缪尔·贝克特：短篇小说集
十四　沃尔特·惠特曼

THE INNER WORKINGS OF J.M. COETZEE | More Intelligent Life

Coetzee’s Canon

By WALTER KIRN

Published: August 5, 2007

A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, but dangerous things are very often exciting, and only the truly saintly would deny that there is a pleasure in forming opinions of writers whom one has never read a word of. Without experience to cloud one’s judgment or information to slow one’s thinking, the passage from ignorance of a writer’s work to a vague acquaintance with its main elements — courtesy, say, of an essay or a review executed by someone better versed — can be a stimulating imaginative exercise. On the basis of brief descriptions and short quotations the reader is free to conjure up a figure who may not much resemble the artist in question but is rich in associations anyway and who will do — will have to do — for now (which sometimes, sadly, is all the time one has).

Skip to next paragraph

Enlarge This Image

Paul Rogers

INNER WORKINGS

Literary Essays 2000-2005.

By J. M. Coetzee.

304 pp. Viking. $25.95.

I’m thinking here of W. G. Sebald, the late German writer whom I’ve never read but am told I should by people who impress me — most recently by J. M. Coetzee, the Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist whose new collection of literary essays, “Inner Workings,” includes compressed studies of several authors who fall, at least for me, in Sebald’s category of highly ranked European worthies (Robert Musil and Bruno Schulz are others) whose pages are easy to postpone turning, but hard, in some circles, to avoid discussing. What little I know about Sebald’s novels comes from Coetzee’s commentaries on them, but this knowledge feels strong and suggestive nonetheless.
“There is a lead-up full of compulsive activity, often consisting of nocturnal walking, dominated by feelings of apprehension. The world feels full of messages in some secret code. Dreams come thick and fast. Then there is the experience itself: one is on a cliff or in an aircraft, looking down in space but also back in time; man and his activities seem tiny to the point of insignificance; all sense of purpose dissolves.”
This brisk little stroke of literary summary (itself an underappreciated form) gratifies that base side of our nature that wants to grasp before it has to reach and to caption before it has to scrutinize while also inviting us to examine firsthand what, for the moment, we must take Coetzee’s word about: Sebald’s distinctively fertile melancholia. It’s a valuable service, ably performed, with just the mix of concreteness and generality that letters of introduction ought to have. Thanks to Coetzee, Sebald stands at our door now, still a stranger but no longer a mystery, and our sense of how he’s likely to behave inclines us to usher him inside.
In the essays on modernist European writers that make up the first part of his book, Coetzee supplements his criticism with biography and occasional bits of illuminating gossip. Because most of the pieces first appeared in The New York Review of Books, he doesn’t have endless space for this material, but he also doesn’t seem to need it. He has a Cordon Bleu instinct for measuring portions and knows how to fill yet not overcrowd a plate. The German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin, the magisterially obscure left-wing literary something-or-other whose masterwork was an unfinished prose montage on the subject of Parisian shopping centers (“The Arcades Project”), is shown to have taken the Marxist path partly as the accidental result of a love affair with a Communist theater director. To Coetzee, this suggests that Benjamin was not a pure ideologue whose politics were fashioned by his intellect but a man who happened into a pose he found emotionally congenial and gradually bent to suit his eccentricities.
Coetzee compares “The Arcades Project” to “another great ruin of 20th-century literature, Ezra Pound’s ‘Cantos.’ ” With the tongue-and-groove precision of someone who machines his thoughts to the finest hair’s-breadth tolerances, Coetzee shapes this comparison into a model for a type of literary lunacy that held a peculiar intellectual allure once, back in the heyday of the great isms. Both Benjamin and Pound, Coetzee observes, are obsessed with economics, both “have investments in antiquarian bodies of knowledge whose relevance to their own times they overestimate,” and “neither knows when to stop.”
That Coetzee can make such exotic eminences as Sebald and Benjamin less forbidding is a testament to his prowess as an interpreter but also to his charm as a companion. His erudition and analytic acumen — both considerable, to say the least, and best displayed in his remarks on the nuances of literary translation — are so well dissolved into his elegant bearing that walking beside him rarely feels intimidating. And when, about halfway through the book, he leads us to the smoother ground of writers who compose in English and whom we’ve already presumably met (Faulkner, Beckett, Bellow, Roth and others), the stroll speeds up some and grows more invigorating.
In his essay on Faulkner, Coetzee sets aside the novels (after aptly defining perhaps the most ambitious three, the Snopes trilogy, as the story of a “poor white class in a revolution as quiet, implacable and amoral as a termite invasion”) and concentrates on how Faulkner’s leading biographers handled him — maladroitly, Coetzee feels — as a character. In the process of attacking one biographer, Frederick R. Karl, for “reductive psychologizing” (Karl views Faulkner’s tidy penmanship as a sign of an “anal personality,” for example), Coetzee questions whether Faulkner the man even existed in the conventional sense or was “a being of negative capability, one who disappeared into, lost himself in, his profoundest creations.” Coetzee holds out Faulkner’s alcoholism as a biographical “acid test” but finds the explanations for it wanting, even fatuous. He concludes — with surprising modesty, for a novelist — that words must fail when the subject is addiction.
Coetzee’s discussion of Philip Roth’s “Plot Against America” is pretty much a straight review, but a review of special consequence because it’s written by a peer with an appreciation of the challenges Roth must have faced in fashioning his tale (of a fictional fascist Charles Lindbergh presidency in the early 1940s). He judges the book a noble failure marred by Roth’s inadequate understanding of the troubling swerve in history that is his main conceit. On the way to this slightly too strict conclusion — that reaching out of time to alter a past event should have obliged Roth to track the falling dominos and also change the present situation that his narrator looks back from — Coetzee gives us a primer in the dystopian novel that’s thorough and practical enough to be of aid to working fiction writers. Any slights discernible in the review are between esteemed colleagues, one is given to think, and Coetzee is, in fact, paying Roth an honor by putting him on the syllabus.
“Inner Workings” is Coetzee’s master class, and he honors us, too, by letting us sit in on it, despite our spotty preparation and the hasty ways we may use it. Knowing something about W. G. Sebald feels a lot better than knowing nothing — particularly when the little knowledge one does have comes from a source as reliable as Coetzee and inspires one to make time to learn much more.

Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review. His new novel is “The Unbinding.”

of interest under review:

• See Index of Literary Essays
• See Index of books from and about Africa
• See Index of Contemporary British fiction
• See Index of Books by Nobel laureates

Alain de Botton (2) : The School of Life； Art Is Therapy review； 陳玉慧觀點：我們需要好新聞

The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humor, sexual understanding, and selective resignation. 

The emotionally intelligent person awards themselves the time to determine what gives their working life meaning and has the confidence and tenacity to try to find an accommodation between their inner priorities and the demands of the world.

 The emotionally intelligent person knows how to hope and be grateful, while remaining steadfast before the essentially tragic structure of existence. 

The emotionally intelligent person knows that they will only ever be mentally healthy in a few areas and at certain moments, but is committed to fathoming their inadequacies and warning others of them in good time, with apology and charm.

 There are few catastrophes, in our own lives or in those of nations, that do not ultimately have their origins in emotional ignorance. ~Alain de Botton

(Book: The School of Life https://amzn.to/4dPggOz)

(Art: Photograph of Paul Newman and wife Joanne Woodward)

The School of Life 人才招募

The School of Life 總部位於英國倫敦，由英國作家艾倫．狄波頓 (Alain de Botton) 於2009年創立，透過文化和人文學科，探討關於工作、愛情、自我的生活課題。2017年The School of Life於台北開幕。 目前台北辦公室正熱烈招募以下職缺。有興趣加入The School of Life Taipei 師資或團隊成員，請聯繫 taipei@theschooloflife.com 師資 Faculty www.theschooloflife.com/taipei/company/faculty-recruitment/ 事業發展暨行銷經理 Business Development & Marketing Manager www.theschooloflife.com/taipei/company/recruiting/

Alain de Botton : The News: A User’s Manual ； 幸福建築...

陳玉慧觀點：我們需要好新聞

陳玉慧 2014年05月08日 10:47 

在無冕王已死的年代，人人都是記者，正因此我們更需要好新聞。（取自網路）

狄波頓（Alain de Botton）又寫了一本我想寫的書，他每次都這樣。因為，他是大才子，我不是。但狄波頓從來沒做過特派員，他好整以暇可以仔細以他哲學家般的巧思來評論 現今的新聞環境，而我的的確確擔任過特派員，真槍實彈，幾乎每天都在與新聞為伍。我一直身處新聞現場。可以乘機說說我的讀後感嗎？狄波頓先生？

曾經擔任廿年歐洲特派員，我經歷太多這樣的日子，每天起床，早餐後，喝起咖啡或茶，一邊讀報紙或溜覽新聞網頁，然後思索：什麼新聞值得我寫？

或者，什麼新聞值得台灣讀者閱讀？

狄波頓要說的是，新聞已經是宗教。每天的晨間新聞是晨禱，午間新聞是午禱，而晚間新聞又是晚禱，在歐洲，收視率最高的是晚上十一點的電視新聞，因為很多人看過後便可以去睡覺。

對一個特派員而言，什麼新聞值得讀者閱讀，這個決定權不一定完全在我手上，因為報社每天都在同樣的時間裡，開著大小不同的編採會議，有時會議中已經 決定什麼歐洲新聞必登不可，又或者是，什麼台灣新聞過於重要，歐洲新聞根本不會有版面，揙採會議決定了歐洲新聞的篇幅，會後同事會同步告知我。

如果不告知我的話，而那天又剛好有點版面的話，是的，那麼我大可書寫一些我認為值得閱讀的新聞。但問題就在這裡，什麼是那樣的新聞？我得發廿年的時間才知道，不是什麼新聞值得台灣讀者知悉，而是什麼角度和什麼寫法的新聞，才值得台灣讀者閱讀。

狄波頓這一本「新聞的騷動」（The News：A User's Manuel）便是在闡揚及描繪他的「新聞文藝復興」理論，他的書大大安慰了多年擔任駐外特派員的我。現在我才知道，那些年，我無能發揮我那歐陸的黑色幽 默，可能並不是我的問題。因為，台灣正如大部份的西方媒體，新聞寫法沿襲了那一板一眼的制式新聞規定：五個W（who where when what why），而且，許多記者連五個W都做不到。另外，台灣讀者(包括媒體編輯)對歐洲的欠缺了解，往往是很多新聞的盲點。而台灣媒體勢單力薄，如何與大通訊 社競敵？說穿了，我們無法競爭，只能延續和伸論，或者，在好一點的情況，過濾和篩選，但前題是，寫稿的人也得對歐陸政治社會文化有足夠的熟悉和理解。

讓我舉個例子吧，這譬如說，身為歐洲特派員，我報導了無數次的德國女總理梅克爾，她參加選戰，她在國會發言，她接受訪問，這種種的新聞，甚至包括她 宣佈那違背她所屬右派的決定，也是一個順從民意的好決定：2022年德國全面廢核；但這些新聞都不如我注意到的一件事：無論她在哪裡，聆聽別人時，她的雙 手手指總是會做出一個心型圖案，梅克爾，妳怎麼了？妳的雙手手指被瞬間膠黏住了嗎？其實，這件事說明了梅克爾為了營造自己有多麼努力.....畢竟，在德 國那樣的父權社會，她已經是全球最有權勢的女人。



我曾經和梅克爾面對面，我詢問她問題時，她便有這樣的手勢，我也曾看過幾十張別人拍攝她的心型手勢相片，我便曾經想寫一篇這樣的報導，卻一直沒寫。 是造型和心理專家聯合建議她做出這樣的手勢，女性、委婉但堅定，我被那選舉選舉選舉記者會記者會記者會分心了，因為我也會擔心我漏新聞。而在台灣媒體，漏 發新聞便是記者的大罪。

好吧，我說遠了。我本來只是想禮讚狄波頓這本「新聞的騷動」。在此無冕王已死的時代，人人都是新聞記者，可以隨時在任何網路社群發佈訊息，垃圾新聞 因此滿天飛，讀者其實更無知了，人心其實更惶惶了，消息其實更泛濫了，但我們需要這麼悲觀嗎？狄波頓無非要告訴我們，我們不必這麼悲觀，我們需要新聞，但我們需要更好的新聞，不是人人都可以寫新聞，是極少數有文化有知識又有使命感甚至幽默感的人才能寫好新聞，而這本書告訴我們怎麼寫好新聞，也充份說明了書寫及閱讀好新聞的必要性。

編者按：

艾倫．狄波頓被喻為英倫才子作家，在台出版作品有《哲學的慰藉》。《新聞的騷動》（先覺出版社，5月19日上市）是他最新力作，深刻觀察六大新聞類 型：政治、國際、經濟、名人、災難、消費，並將哲學與新聞連結，以絕妙觀點顛覆一般人對新聞的認知。本文係作者為新書所做的序言。　

＊作者為知名作家，曾任聯合報駐歐特派員

全文網址: 陳玉慧觀點：我們需要好新聞 -風傳媒 http://www.stormmediagroup.com/opencms

Art Is Therapy review – de Botton as doorstepping self-help evangelist

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Alain de Botton has filled the Rijksmuseum with giant yellow Post-it notes that spell out his smarmy and banal ideas of self-improvement – but leaves us no room to look at the art

• Alain de Botton's exclusive video guide to Art is Therapy

• Adrian Searle
• 
  
• The Guardian, Friday 25 April 2014 14.39 BST

No eye, and no ear for language … the writer Alain de Botton at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Photograph: Vincent Mentzel

A flashing neon sign hangs over the grand entrance to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Art Is Therapy, it reads, mirroring the cover of Alain de Botton's recent book Art as Therapy, written with the philosopher and art historian John Armstrong.

1. Alain de Botton and John Armstrong
2. Art Is Therapy
3. Rijksmuseum,
4. Amsterdam

1. Until 7 September
2. Details:
   +31 20 6747 000
3. Venue website

The Rijksmuseum reopened last year after major reorganisation and restoration, to almost universal acclaim. It had more than 3 million visitors in 2013. They thought they had a museum; what they have is a crammed-to-the-gills tourist attraction. It's the Tate Modern effect.
Perhaps troubled that 3 million visitors was not quite enough, Rijksmuseum director Wim Pijbes invited De Botton and Armstrong to make an "intervention". The authors have filled the place with loud, intrusive labels – giant Post-it notes that often dwarf the exhibits – along with a number of thematic displays.
No escape … one of the philosophers' labels at the Rijksmuseum. Photograph: Olivier Middendorp You can't avoid the crowds, and there is no escape from the labels: in the entrance hall, on the stairs, in the grand salons that connect the galleries, as well as beside and beneath the exhibits. People are spending longer reading the damn things than looking at the art.
"You suffer from fragility, guilt, a split personality, self disgust," reads a note next to Jan Steen's 1660s genre painting The Feast of Saint Nicholas. "You are probably a bit like this picture," the label goes on. "There are sides of you that are a little debauched." The labels tell us what's wrong with us, and how the artworks and artefacts they accompany can cure our ills.
In front of Rembrandt's Night Watch, the crowning glory of the collection, another big yellow label tells us what it believes we are thinking: "I can't bear busy places – I wish this room were emptier." De Botton sees the Night Watch as an image of communality, which I suppose it is. There's not much fellow-feeling in the audience around it, and I guess that's the point, too.
One of the exhibition's yellow labels … Photograph: Olivier Middendorp Next to Vermeer's Woman Reading a Letter and his quiet Delft street scene, beside teapots and Chinese gods, alongside an Yves Saint Laurent dress and a Rietveld chair, the labels proliferate. De Botton is trying to mend what he sees as a disconnection between art and life, between past and present. This is an unexceptional ambition. Artists and designers do it all the time. Why do we need De Botton? In a display of 19thcentury daguerrotypes, under the curatorial theme of memory, we are told we are in "one of the saddest rooms in the museum. You might want to cry." Why? All the people in the pictures are dead. They generally are in photographs this old.
Banality and bathos are the stock-in-trade here. De Botton's curatorial rubrics – as well as memory, there's fortune, money, politics and sex – are anodyne, his insights and descriptions shallow and obvious. De Botton insists that art can tell us how to live: "It should heal us: it isn't an intellectual exercise, an abstract aesthetic arena or a distraction for a Sunday afternoon." His petulant tone is wearing. I also dislike the self-improvement shtick. In front of an athletic bit of statuary, a label inquires why, if we can accept going to the gym to improve our bodies, we don't visit the museum "to work on our character".
Banality and bathos are the stock-in-trade … Photograph: Olivier Middendorp De Botton is like one of those "Jesus is your best mate" Christians, giving us not one but 150 thoughts for the day, on the ubiquitous labels, audioguide and downloadable app. He wants museums to become temples of virtue, places of instruction that go far beyond their usual remit of caring for and displaying centuries of culture. He'd probably also like to replace burgeoning museum education departments with outposts of his School of Life, a sort of drop-in self-help centre which, just this week, opened a branch in Amsterdam.
De Botton thinks we've got art all wrong. He doesn't like the way museums are organised and finds the usual little wall labels, with their dates and movements and snippets of art history, unhelpful. Ideally, he envisages museums reorganised according to therapeutic functions – with a basement of suffering, leading upwards to a gallery of self-knowledge on the top floor. It's like Dante's circles of hell.
De Botton's evangelising and his huckster's sincerity make him the least congenial gallery guide imaginable. He has no eye, and no ear for language. With their smarmy sermons and symptomology of human failings, their aphorisms about art leading us to better parts of ourselves, De Botton's texts feel like being doorstepped. But art contains concentrated doses of the virtues! You could coerce any art at all into his cause of mental hygiene and spiritual wellbeing. De Botton reduces art to its discernible content. He doesn't make us want to look at all.
Until 7 September. Details: +31 20 674 7000. Venue: Rijksmuseum.

Jane Austen《信》

2010年，台灣出版 珍 奧斯汀的世界 Jane Austen' World.原文 1995 Maggie Lane

Jane Austen《信》北京：新星 2007U.S. pipeline operator Kinder Morgan Inc has acquired oil and gas producing assets in West Texas and is planning to tap U.S. carbon capture incentives to increase output from the properties, according to people familiar with the matter.

本书精选了简?奥斯丁的60封家书，她的每一部作品都机智幽默，充满生气，在全世界的读者心中都占有一席之地。本书通过她的家书，展现了这位伟大的女作家所生活的世界，它还将读者带到那时的英格兰，那个极富戏剧性的变革的年代。
[内容介绍]
　　该选集收录简·奥斯丁现存书信约三分之一，作家当时的生活状况及人际交往从中可窥见一斑。本书信集的注释已减少至最低限度，主要限于身份不清或易混淆的人名。简·奥斯丁的书信没有分段。她尽可能写在一张信纸上，因为多用一张信纸将耗费她双倍邮资。
　 　根据《简明不列颠百科全书》的说法，简·奥斯丁是“第一个现实地描绘日常平凡生活中平凡人物的小说家。（她的作品）反映了当时英国中产阶级生活的喜剧， 显示了‘家庭’文学的可能性。她多次探索青年女主角从恋爱到结婚中自我发现的过程。这种着力分析人物性格以及女主角和社会之间紧张关系的做法，使她的小说 摆脱十八世纪的传统而接近于现代的生活。正是这种现代性，加上她的机智和风趣，她的现实主义和同情心，她的优雅的散文和巧妙的故事结构，使她的小说能长期 吸引读者。”并且说：“当时（指十九世纪初）流行夸张戏剧性的浪漫小说，已使人们所厌倦

编辑推荐

该选集收录简·奥斯丁现存书信约三分之一，作家当时的生活状况及人际交往从中可窥见一斑。本书信集的注释已减少至最低限度，主要限于身份不清或易混淆的人名。简·奥斯丁的书信没有分段。她尽可能写在一张信纸上，因为多用一张信纸将耗费她双倍邮资。
　 　根据《简明不列颠百科全书》的说法，简·奥斯丁是“第一个现实地描绘日常平凡生活中平凡人物的小说家。（她的作品）反映了当时英国中产阶级生活的喜剧， 显示了‘家庭’文学的可能性。她多次探索青年女主角从恋爱到结婚中自我发现的过程。这种着力分析人物性格以及女主角和社会之间紧张关系的做法，使她的小说 摆脱十八世纪的传统而接近于现代的生活。正是这种现代性，加上她的机智和风趣，她的现实主义和同情心，她的优雅的散文和巧妙的故事结构，使她的小说能长期 吸引读者。”并且说：“当时（指十九世纪初）流行夸张戏剧性的浪漫小说，已使人们所厌倦，奥斯丁的朴素的现实主义启清新之风，受到读者的欢迎……到二十世 纪，人们才认识到她是英国摄政王时期（1810～1820）最敏锐的观察者，她严肃地分析了当时社会的性质和文化的质量，记录了旧社会向现代社会的转变。 现代评论家也赞佩奥斯丁小说的高超的组织结构，以及她能于平凡而狭窄有限的情节中揭示生活的悲喜剧的精湛技巧。”

作者简介

姓名：(英)简﹒奥斯丁(Jane Austen)著
作者简介：
作品：《信》 《理智与情感》 《爱玛》 《诺桑觉寺劝导》

目录

前言
序言
斯蒂文顿　一七九六年至一八○一年
巴思　一八○一年至一八○五年
南安普敦　一八○七年至一八○九年
乔顿　一八○九年至一八一七年
温彻斯特　一八一七年
附录一
附录二

Tracy Kidder,(born November 12, 1945) 起碼前三本書都有翻譯本。 “The Soul of a New Machine”此書有譯本 讀者文摘有書摘，(1985). House。(1990) [1989]. Among Schoolchildren.

Tracy Kidder(born November 12, 1945),  起碼前三本書都有翻譯本。 “The Soul of a New Machine”此書有譯本 讀者文摘有書摘，(1985). House。(1990) [1989]. Among Schoolchildren. 

Selected awards[edit]

• Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, 1982, for The Soul of a New Machine^[9]
• National Book Award for Nonfiction, 1982, for The Soul of a New Machine^[10][a]
• Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, 1989–1990, for Among Schoolchildren^[11]
• L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award, 1990, for Among Schoolchildren
• Ambassador Book Award in American Studies, 1990, for Among Schoolchildren^[12]
• Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement, 2001^[13][14]
• Lettre Ulysses Award (2nd prize), 2004, for Mountains Beyond Mountains^[15]

Books[edit]

• Kidder, Tracy (1974). The Road to Yuba City: A Journey into the Juan Corona Murders. Garden City: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-02865-3.
• Kidder, Tracy (1981). The Soul of a New Machine. Boston: Little, Brown. ISBN 978-0-316-49170-9.
• Kidder, Tracy (1985). House. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-618-00191-3.
• Kidder, Tracy (1990) [1989]. Among Schoolchildren. New York: Avon Books. ISBN 0-380-71089-7.
• Kidder, Tracy (1993). Old Friends. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-395-71088-3.
• Kidder, Tracy (2000) [1999]. Home Town. New York: Washington Square Press. ISBN 0-671-78521-4.
• Kidder, Tracy (2003). Mountains Beyond Mountains. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-375-50616-0.
• Kidder, Tracy (2005). My Detachment: A Memoir. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-375-50615-2.
• Kidder, Tracy (2009). Strength in What Remains. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1-4000-6621-6.
• Kidder, Tracy; Todd, Richard (2013). Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1-4000-6975-0.
• Kidder, Tracy (2016). A Truck Full of Money: One Man's Quest to Recover from Great Success. Random House. ISBN 978-0-8129-9524-4.
• Kidder, Tracy (2023). Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O'Connell's Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People. Random House. ISBN 978-1-9848-0143-2.^[16]

“The Soul of a New Machine” --此書有譯本 讀者文摘有書摘

THE HARDY BOYS AND THE MICROKIDS MAKE A COMPUTER

Date: August 23, 1981, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Correction Appended Section 7; Page 1, Column 1; Book Review Desk
Byline: By SAMUEL C. FLORMAN; Samuel C. Florman, an engineer and builder, is a contributing editor of Harper's and the author of ''The Existential Pleasure of Engineering.'' His latest book, ''Blaming Technology,'' will be published in September.
Lead:

THE SOUL OF A NEW MACHINE By Tracy Kidder. 293 pp. Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown. $13.95.

FROM mid-1978 to early 1980, a group of engineers at Data General Corporation developed a new super-mini computer. In ''The Soul of a New Machine,'' Tracy Kidder provides a factual accounting of this achievement, and anyone interested in the annals of American industry will find the story absorbing. But Mr. Kidder, a freelance journalist and the author of ''The Road to Yuba City,'' has endowed the tale with such pace, texture and poetic implication that he has elevated it to a high level of narrative art.

In ''Literature and Science,'' a slim book published almost 20 years ago, Aldous Huxley tried to discern ways in which literary artists might come to grips with the accelerating scientific and technological revolution. Contemporary writers, he observed, have shown little enthusiasm for science, and less for engineering. Although they have been concerned with ''the social and psychological consequences of advancing technology,'' they have been very little interested in technology itself. The making of machinery has not aroused - in either writers or readers - the ''passionate interest'' that lies at the heart of creative literature.
Text:

Looking to the future, however, Huxley was more intrigued than discouraged. He viewed the difficulties inherent in wedding science to literature as a challenge to intellectual combat. ''The conceptual and linguistic weapons,'' he said, ''with which this particular combat must be waged have not yet been invented. ... But sooner or later the necessary means will be discovered.''

As the years have passed, there has been little indication that Huxley's optimism was well-founded. Science, perhaps, has inspired a few works of poetic insight; but technology, increasingly complex and impersonal, appears to be drifting ever farther away from the domain of serious literature. There is science fiction, of course, but it is usually written as superficial entertainment and set in the distant future, as if to concede that the world of complex machines cannot be congruent with the world of contemporary sentient beings.

A few successful efforts have been made. John McPhee has explored the subjects of aeronautics and nuclear technology. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in ''The First Circle,'' has shown that engineers at work can be the subject, however tangential, of powerful fiction. Robert Pirsig's ''Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'' blazed across the literary sky, albeit eccentrically, like a comet that might not return for a hundred years. There are other instances one might adduce - for example, Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, bemused by the mechanical marvels that underlie America's exploits in space. But aside from a few such tantalizing glimpses, technology is absent from contemporary literature - except where it serves as a backdrop for scenes of gloom and alienation.

But now, suddenly, in a hot, listless summer, we are given without warning (except for excerpts that appeared in The Atlantic) Mr. Kidder's splendid book, which goes far toward reviving the promise of Huxley's prophecy.

''The Soul of a New Machine'' is first of all a good story, but beyond the narrative, or rather woven into it, is the computer itself, described physically, mechanically and conceptually. The descriptive passages will not ''explain'' computers to the average reader (at least they did not significantly increase my own very superficial knowledge), but they give a feeling, a flavor, that adds to one's understanding - as broadly, or even poetically, defined. The uninitiated will find these brief passages abstruse but not bewildering, unfathomable but not boring. Those who know something about computers - and there are literally millions more such people each year - will doubtless react with a delight enhanced by understanding.

Mr. Kidder proceeds by taking the reader ''down into'' the machine, and indeed the book consists of repeated descents -not only into an environment of wires and silicon chips, but also into dark corporate basements where secret work proceeds feverishly behind locked doors, and into home cellar workshops where engineers pursue their compulsive tinkering. One of the senior engineers introduces Mr. Kidder to the game ''Adventure,'' in which the computer appears to create an underground world called Colossal Cave, through which the player must travel by typing out directions on a terminal keyboard. This world consists of mazes, twisting passages, dark chambers and rusty doors; it is populated by dragons, snakes and trolls, all creations, of course, of the computer engineers who invented the game. Reading this book is, in part, a voyage through such a subterranean world. Mr. Kidder is our Dante - not, to be sure, a mature genius artistically reconstructing Western civilization at the end of an era, but a young explorer standing on the threshold of a new age, looking for the outlines of uncharted regions of human experience.

His companions in this journey are a cadre of engineers, about two dozen in number, who, working day and night under incredible pressure for almost two years, produced the new machine, code-named Eagle. These characters, introduced in succession as their roles in the unfolding drama become significant, are surely drawn larger than life, but this is totally appropriate in a journalistic report that is also a work of imagination.

Most engineers, like most people, are anything but heroic; they are often stolid sorts who, as Mr. Kidder admits, hang calculators from their belts and wear plastic ''nerd packs'' in their breast pockets to keep their pens from soiling their clothes. The leading lights of the Eagle team, however, chosen for their brilliance, energy and ambition, are portrayed as eccentric knights errant, clad in blue jeans and open collars, seeking with awesome intensity the grail of technological accomplishment.

Practically all of them, we learn, were obsessed from their earliest years with the need to see how things work, taking gadgets apart and putting them back together. In technical creativity they have found a fulfillment that occasionally verges on ecstacy - ''The golden moment. ... When it worked I'd get a little high. ... Almost a chemical change. ... It was the most incredible, soaring experience of my life. ...'' By plunging into the world of numbers, theories and things they appear to find a path to their own emotions. By looking outward they reach inward. In doing they encounter being. The contrast with the narcissism of most contemporary fiction is striking. Wives and children drift occasionally across the background, mellow and serene, as if intense interest in one's work were the key to domestic felicity. Again the contrast with contemporary literary cliches is remarkable.

The leader of the group is an engineer named Tom West, who is introduced in the prologue at the helm of a small white sloop sailing in rough seas. Quiet, aloof and intrepid, Mr. West is described by one of his sailing companions as ''a good man in a storm.'' (I could not help thinking of John Hersey's novel ''Under the Eye of the Storm,'' in which the computer scientist, flawed by an ''electrical intellectuality,'' disintegrates during a crisis at sea, while the hero, ''a humanist, a vitalist'' performs valiantly.) In his youth, Mr. West had been required to leave Amherst College for a year as ''an underachiever,'' and almost became a guitar-playing dropout. But he responded to the chaos around him - it was the early 1960's - by deciding to become an engineer. His friends were astonished: ''The very word, engineer, dulled the spirit.'' Yet Mr. West felt that ''in a world full of confusion'' there is satisfaction to be found in learning how things get put together, how they work. By 1978 he was at Data General in charge of the Eagle team, an austere, demanding Ahab who leads his young crew in chase of a contemporary white whale.

The Eagle team is divided into two working groups, ''the Hardy Boys,'' who put together the machine's actual circuitry, and ''the Microkids,'' those who develop the microcode that fuses the physical machine with the software programs that eventually tell it what to do. These men - only one of the engineers is a woman, in spite of equal-opportunity recruiting efforts - are fanatics but not purists. They cannot afford to be; it is crucial that they not only produce a superior machine, but also work quickly enough and cheaply enough so that it will ''get out the door'' to market. The most elegant technical solution is worth nothing if the end product is not used. This need to stop striving for perfection - to say at some point ''O.K., it's right. Ship it.'' - is a bittersweet aspect of the engineering experience that also applies to other elements of our public and private lives.

Being totally absorbed in their work, the Eagle engineers are vulnerable to exploitation, and Mr. Kidder describes in detail the often devious means by which the members of the group are recruited and persuaded to ''sign up'' - not merely to enlist, but to throw their entire beings into the enterprise. The men put up with cramped quarters, inadequate supplies, unpaid-for overtime, moody and often uncommunicative bosses, and in the distance somewhere, corporate overlords known to be ruthless and aggressive; but morale remains surprisingly high. One young engineer, burned out and feeling the pressure in his stomach, leaves suddenly, announcing that he is going to a commune in Vermont. But the others persist, grumbling and weary, yet perversely playful and tenacious, arguing constantly yet working ''in sync.'' The project becomes a crusade.

At a time when American productivity is in decline, when the nation's innovative powers are said to be waning, and nobody seems to be able to motivate himself or anybody else, the experience of the people who created Eagle merits attention. Not that life can be lived in a state of perpetual commotion. But in microcosm the Eagle team exhibits the intensity and high spirits that pontifical social commentators keep saying Americans have lost. Of course, after the triumph and the glory comes the tragic recognition that for each individual the quest must start afresh, and that life may never again be as exciting.

Near the end of the book, with the successful conclusion of the project in view, Mr. Kidder joins the Eagle group on a day's excursion from their Westborough, Mass., headquarters to a computer trade show in New York. After looking through the exhibits, the young men scatter throughout the city to enjoy an afternoon's relaxation. Mr. Kidder sits in a cafe with one of the engineers and looks out at the crowds of people and the traffic. Life goes on, he muses, and computers, for all their magical qualities, are not about to change the essence of the human condition. There has been no ''revolution,'' as was being predicted just a few years ago, and ''artificial intelligence'' still seems comfortably far from becoming a reality. The human spirit still calls the tune. And as the computer engineers return to their bus, bubbling over with the effects of their holiday and a few beers, the reader cannot help concluding that the imminence of a sinister technocracy is one of the silliest myths of our time.

In the introduction to ''The John McPhee Reader,'' William L. Howarth insists that although most of Mr. McPhee's work is called ''non-fiction'' it should more properly be called ''Literature.'' That is exactly the way I feel about Mr. Kidder's ''The Soul of a New Machine,'' and I believe that Aldous Huxley - who looked forward to the coming of a worthy literature of science and technology - would agree. <123> October 4, 1981, Sunday, Late City Final Edition <127> Despite the headline on the review of Tracy Kidder

****

Tom West Dies at 71; Was the Computer Engineer Incarnate

By PAUL VITELLO

Published: May 27, 2011

Tom West, a shy computer engineer who became an unlikely symbol of high tech to multitudes of general-interest readers as leader of the engineering team portrayed in Tracy Kidder’s book “The Soul of a New Machine,” died on May 19 at his home in Westport, Mass. He was 71.

Enlarge This Image

Ravell Call

Tom West developed a 32-bit microcomputer in the '80s.

His family said Mr. West was found in his kitchen and might have suffered a heart attack or stroke.

Mr. West and his team of engineers at the Data General Corporation, in Westborough, Mass., developed a 32-bit microcomputer that briefly led the field of digital processing in the early 1980s, when the computer industry was poised between the eras of the mainframe and the PC.

Mr. Kidder’s book, which won a Pulitzer Prize, chronicled the team’s punishing, almost round-the-clock race to engineer a state-of-the-art microcomputer, the Eclipse MV/8000, to reach the market ahead of their company’s competitors.

In the book, Mr. West emerged as a driven, brilliant, aloof company man — equally adroit at solving the technical and bureaucratic problems facing the project — who at the same time harbored the free spirit of the self-taught computer wiz that he was.

His daughter Jessamyn West said he was driven “to understand everything.”

“He knew a million things — it didn’t matter: worms, plumbing, literature. He could give you a discourse. It seemed like he could never rest until he had a sense of control over the things around him.”

When Mr. Kidder’s book was published in 1981, the intensely private Mr. West became briefly famous. He was inundated with requests for interviews and speaking appearances, some of which he agreed to do at the request of his employers, who tried to leverage the book’s popularity to Data General’s advantage in its constant marketing wars.

But Mr. West never grew comfortable with fame. “It offends me when people think they know me because of the book,” he said in a 2000 interview with Wired magazine.

The complexity of his nature was a recurring theme in Mr. Kidder’s book, which paints Mr. West as alternately inscrutable, brutally frank, unexpectedly kind and seemingly capable of being two people at the same time.

“Some nights he would go away from Eagle,” Mr. Kidder wrote, referring to the in-house code name of the project, “and play music with friends and acquaintances, sometimes all night long, and then, fingers raw from his guitar strings, he would drive right into work and become once again the tough, grim-looking manager. One evening that winter I said to him that I didn’t think it was really possible to be a businessman and a dropout all at once. West said, ‘But I do it.’ ”

Joseph Thomas West III was born in Bronxville, N.Y., on Nov. 22, 1939, the son of an American Telephone and Telegraph executive who moved the family often. Mr. West attended four different high schools before enrolling at Amherst College, where both his father and grandfather had received their degrees. Because of low grades, however, the college asked him to take some time off. He spent a year playing folk music and working part time at the Smithsonian Observatory in Cambridge, where he first became interested in computers, before returning and finishing his studies with a major in physics.

Mr. West’s two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Jessamyn, of Randolph, Vt., he is survived by another daughter, Katherine West, of Stow, Mass., and a sister, Terry West, of Santa Fe, N.M.

Mr. West joined Data General in the mid-1970s, at a time when competition for new products in the computer industry was increasingly driven by the threat of obsolescence.

“My father and the men of his generation were really trying to get ahead of a rolling wave,” Mr. West’s daughter Katherine said. “They had to figure out where things were going, and my dad was really good at anticipating that, seeing where things were going to be.” While most of his colleagues scattered to other high-tech companies, Mr. West remained at Data General until his retirement in 1998 — playing against type to some degree from the Tom West portrayed in Mr. Kidder’s book, who complained about his bosses frequently and routinely threatened to quit.

In the 2000 Wired interview, he said he stayed because he liked being a big fish in a small pond.

His daughter Jessamyn offered another perspective: “My dad loved routine. He rolled his sleeves up exactly the same way every morning. He went to work at exactly the same time every day. It was what gave him the freedom to think.”