英国作家石黑一雄新作未获佳评
Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, “The Buried Giant,” is an eccentric, ham-handed fairy tale with a jumble of story lines lifted from “Beowulf,” Arthurian legend and assorted folk traditions. It is recounted in stilted, formalistic language that’s presumably meant to evoke a bygone era, and set in a mythical Britain equally reminiscent of “The Lord of the Rings” and “Game of Thrones.” King Arthur’s knight Sir Gawain is a major character, and so is a she-dragon named Querig.
石黑一雄最新的小说《被埋葬的巨人》是一部笨拙怪异的童话，纷乱的故事线来自《贝奥武普》(Beowulf)、亚瑟王传说和各种民间故事。它以生硬而充满形式感的语言重新叙事，可能是想唤起古老年代的感觉，故事发生在虚构中的英国，有点像《指环王》(The Lord of the Rings)和《权力的游戏》(Game of Thrones)中的世界。主角是亚瑟王的骑士，高文爵士(Sir Gawain)，还有一头名叫克里格的母龙。
This novel is concerned, at heart, with some of the author’s favorite themes: most notably, the role that memory and denial play in shaping people’s sense of themselves. But Mr. Ishiguro seems to have renounced the qualities — precision, elliptical understatement and indirection — that lent his two masterworks, “The Remains of the Day” and “Never Let Me Go,” a tensile strength, and he’s instead embraced a fablelike primitivism that hobbles his instinctive talents. Worse, he has failed here to create a persuasive or fully imagined fictional world.
小说的核心仍是这位作家最喜欢的主题：最主要的是记忆与抗拒现实在人们形成自我意识中所扮演的角色。但石黑一雄似乎放弃了精确、省略的描写和间接性等特质，正是这些特质令他此前的两部杰作《长日留痕》(The Remains of the Day)和《千万别丢下我》(Never Let Me Go)充满张力。这一次他转而采取寓言式的原始主义，这却妨碍了他发挥天赋。更糟糕的是，他没能创造出一个令人信服，或充满想像力的虚构世界。
“The Buried Giant” takes place during an interlude of relative peace between Britons and Saxons, though a “mist of forgetfulness,” which has something to do with Querig, has overtaken the land. Among those afflicted with amnesia are the novel’s two central characters — an elderly couple named Axl and Beatrice — who are so addled that they can’t remember much about their lives together, including any details about their missing son.
《被埋葬的巨人》发生在不列颠与撒克逊之间相对和平的年代，和克里格有关的“遗忘的迷雾”笼罩着这片土地。在许多身患健忘的人当中，也有本书的两个中心人物——名叫阿克塞尔(Axl)和比阿特丽斯(Beatrice)的老夫妻——他们头脑已经糊涂到记不起多少共同生活的岁月，也记不起关于他们失踪儿子的细节。
Axl asks why their son left, and Beatrice replies: “It could be he quarreled with the elders and had to leave. I’ve asked around, and there’s no one here remembers him. But he wouldn’t have done anything to bring shame on himself, I know for sure. Can you remember nothing of it yourself, Axl?”
阿克塞尔问，他们的儿子为什么离开了，比阿特丽斯答道：“可能是他和哥哥姐姐们吵架了，就走了。我到处打听，这儿没有人记得他。但是他没做什么见不得人的事，我知道。你怎么能什么都不记得呢，阿克塞尔?”
These sorts of conversations among people who can’t remember the most essential details of their lives quickly grow tiresome, and “The Buried Giant,” alas, is awash in them. The result is a fuzzy, dreamlike narrative not unlike the one in Mr. Ishiguro’s circuitous and opaque 1995 novel, “The Unconsoled,” which featured a hero who also appeared to suffer from memory loss, wandering about an unnamed European town, having a series of vaguely portentous encounters.
许多人都已经记不起生活中重要的细节，这一类的对话很快就变得令人厌烦，而《被埋葬的巨人》当中偏偏充满这样的对话。含糊梦幻的叙事有点像石黑一雄 1995年的小说《不得安慰》(The Unconsoled)中的含混晦涩，在那本小说中，主人公似乎也患有失忆症，总在想一个没有名字的欧洲小镇，并且遇到一系列略带不祥征兆的事情。
Beatrice is determined to visit their son’s village — conveniently, she seems to remember where it’s located — and she and Axl set off by foot on a journey that will take them across the perilous Great Plain around noon (when its “dark forces” were “most likely to be dormant”) and then over hill and dale, through forests and up a mountain. Their trip is, at once, a quest narrative and one of those allegorical journeys from innocence into knowledge — reminiscent of Dorothy’s travels in Oz, and Frodo Baggins’s in Middle-earth.
比阿特丽斯决心去拜访儿子的村子——她似乎记得那个村子所在的地点——她和阿克塞尔徒步出发，在中午时分穿过危险的“大平原”(那里的“黑暗势力” “很有可能处于潜伏状态”)，之后穿越小山和谷地，穿过森林，翻过一座高山。他们的旅行一下子变成关于探索和远征的叙事，成了关于天真者求知的寓言之旅 ——有点像多萝西在Oz国旅行的故事，也有点像弗罗多·巴金斯(Frodo Baggins)的中土之旅。
Along the way, Beatrice and Axl acquire two traveling companions: a Saxon warrior named Wistan, and Edwin, a 12-year-old boy whom Wistan has rescued from two ogres and plans to train as his apprentice. There are meetings with enigmatic strangers like Sir Gawain, and close calls with murderous monks and a giant, doglike beast, and the ever-present lurking danger of the she-dragon Querig.
一路上，比阿特丽斯和阿克塞尔达到了两个旅伴，一个名叫韦斯坦(Wistan)的撒克逊战士，还有韦斯坦从两个吃人巨妖手中救下的12岁男孩，他打算把男孩训练成自己的徒弟。他们遇到迷一般的陌生人，比如高文爵士，还同杀人修道士、巨人、像狗一样的野兽狭路相逢，母龙克里格的威胁也如影随形。
Instead of one unreliable narrator, as he’s often used in the past, Mr. Ishiguro moves from one character’s point of view to another’s, but his prose remains flat-footed throughout — vaguely inflected with a forced old-timeyness that’s more mannered than convincing.
石黑一雄没有像往常一样，让一个靠不住的叙事者讲故事，这一次，他的视角从一个角色移到另一个角色，但叙事仍然平铺直叙——有点受到旧时代风格的影响，显得做作，说服力不强。
The symbolism is also obvious and strained: The boatman Axl and Beatrice encounter is clearly a version of Charon, ferrying souls to the land of the dead, and the fog of amnesia plaguing the land turns out to be some sort of enchantment that has supposedly enabled old enemies, Saxons and Britons alike, to live alongside one another. In much the same way that Axl and Beatrice are unable to remember past quarrels and losses, so have tribal blood feuds been blurred or forgotten — which, Mr. Ishiguro halfheartedly suggests, might not be such a bad thing, at least when it comes to day-to-day survival among warring parties.
小说中的象征主义仍然鲜明而富于张力：阿克塞尔和比阿特丽斯遇到的船夫显然象征着将灵魂摆渡到阴间的船夫卡隆，这片土地上蔓延的健忘症迷雾是某种魔法，让撒克逊人和不列颠人等宿敌可以和平地生活在一起。正如阿克塞尔和比阿特丽斯在迷雾中无法记起过去的争吵与损失，那些部族之间的血仇也得以被埋葬和遗忘——石黑一雄半心半意地称，这可能不是什么坏事，至少可以让争斗的各方活下去。
