介绍:
At the age of eleven she wrote her first story—a foolish affair, imitative of half a dozen
folktales and lacking, she realized later, that vital knowingness about the ways of the
world which compels a reader’s respect. But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the
imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be
told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone
know. Even writing out the she saids, the and thens, made her wince, and she felt foolish,
appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being. Self-exposure was inevitable the
moment she described a character’s weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was
describing herself. What other authority could she have? Only when a story was finished, all
fates resolved and the whole matter sealed off at both ends so it resembled, at least in
this one respect, every other finished story in the world, could she feel immune, and ready
to punch holes in the margins, bind the chapters with pieces of string, paint or draw the
cover, and take the finished work to show to her mother, or her father, when he was home.
Her efforts received encouragement. In fact, they were welcomed as the Tallises began to
understand that the baby of the family possessed a strange mind and a facility with words.
The long afternoons she spent browsing through dictionary and thesaurus made for
constructions that were inept, but hauntingly so: the coins a villain concealed in his
pocket were “esoteric,” a hoodlum caught stealing a car wept in “shameless auto-
exculpation,” the heroine on her thoroughbred stallion made a “cursory” journey through
the night, the king’s furrowed brow was the “hieroglyph” of his displeasure. Briony was
encouraged to read her stories aloud in the library and it surprised her parents and older
sister to hear their quiet girl perform so boldly, making big gestures with her free arm,
arching her eyebrows as she did the voices, and looking up from the page for seconds at a
time as she read in order to gaze into one face after the other, unapologetically demanding
her family’s total attention as she cast her narrative spell.
Even without their attention and praise and obvious pleasure, Briony could not have been
held back from her writing. In any case, she was discovering, as had many writers before
her, that not all recognition is helpful. Cecilia’s enthusiasm, for example, seemed a
little overstated, tainted with condescension perhaps, and intrusive too; her big sister
wanted each bound story catalogued and placed on the library shelves, between Rabindranath
Tagore and Quintus Tertullian. If this was supposed to be a joke, Briony ignored it. She was
on course now, and had found satisfaction on other levels; writing stories not only involved
secrecy, it also gave her all the pleasures of miniaturization. A world could be made in
five pages, and one that was more pleasing than a model farm. The childhood of a spoiled
prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one
rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a
glance. The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the
life they contained. Her passion for tidiness was also satisfied, for an unruly world could
be made just so. A crisis in a heroine’s life could be made to coincide with hailstones,
gales and thunder, whereas nuptials were generally blessed with good light and soft breezes.
A love of order also shaped the principles of justice, with death and marriage the main
engines of housekeeping, the former being set aside exclusively for the morally dubious, the
latter a reward withheld until the final page.
大家还在听
