品牌：Anne Enright
基本信息·出版社：Grove Press
·页码：272 页
·出版日期：2002年
·ISBN：0802138896
·条形码：9780802138897
·装帧：平装
·英语：英语
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内容简介Anne Enright is one of the most exciting writers of Ireland's younger generation, a beguiling storyteller The Seattle Times has praised for "the ... way she writes about women ...their adventures to know who they are through sex, despair, wit and single-minded courage." In What Are You Like?, Maria Delahunty, raised by her grieving father after her mother died during childbirth, finds herself in her twenties awash in nameless longing and in love with the wrong man. Going through his things, she finds a photograph that will end up unraveling a secret more devastating than her father's long mourning, but more pregnant with possibility. Moving between Dublin, New York, and London, What Are You Like? is a breathtaking novel of twins and irretrievable losses, of a woman haunted by her missing self, and of our helplessness against our fierce connection to our origins. What Are You Like? has been selected as a finalist for the Whitbread Award. It is a novel, Newsday wrote, that "announces [Enright's] excellence as though it were stamped on the cover in boldface." "Richly descriptive ... Slightly surreal, revelatory images are hallmarks of Enright's writing, which beguiles throughout." -- Melanie Rehak, US Weekly "Cool, wicked, and quintessentially Irish ... Anne Enright tells a sharp, stylish tale in an accent all her own." -- Annabel Lyon, The National Post (Toronto)
编辑推荐Amazon.com Review
Some novels you nibble away at, half unthinking. Anne Enright's prose bites back. The Irish author ofThe Portable VirginandThe Wig My Father Worehas produced a third book as unexpected and lively as a miracle child--or is it twins? She tells the story of a Dubliner whose mother died in childbirth. Maria is now 20, living in New York, cleaning houses, taking drugs, sleeping with strangers, and generally being in a funk. In a lover's bag, she finds an old photo of a girl who looks just exactly like herself, dressed in clothes she's never owned, posing with people she's never met. But this isn't some gooey, alternate-reality identity fantasy. Maria has, in fact, a twin sister. Though each is unknown to the other, we learn both their lives inside out as they head toward a giddily inevitable meeting.This twinning tale suits Enright's style right down to the ground: Her mandate is to bump us into awareness, and if it takes double heroines, so be it. Her language does the rest of the work. On the very first page, for instance, she freshens the simple act of holding a baby into a joke: "And they handed her on from arm to arm, with the dip that people make when they give away a baby--letting her body go and guiding her head, as though it might not be attached. Nothing worse than being left holding the baby, they seemed to say, except being left with the baby's head." In fact, Enright is transfixed by the weirdness of the body, as when Maria visits a dairy farm: "She is too old to dip her fingers in the milk and let the calves suck. Though when she does, a feeling she has never had before goes straight up her arm and into her right nipple. Hello, farming." Enright writes fiction meant to surprise. But her message is surprisingly traditional: biology matters.--Claire Dederer--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.
From Publishers Weekly
After a flawlessly rendered first chapter, Enright, an Irish broadcast journalist, short story writer and novelist (The Wig My Father Wore), struggles to keep the assorted pieces of her novel together; it is fractured like the family it illuminates. Maria Delahunty is born in Dublin in 1965, delivered from her dying mother, who is comatose from a brain tumor. Maria's father, Berts, brings the baby home, and along with his new wife, Evelyn, they decide "to love each other if they could." But Maria grows up conflicted about herself, unable to decide whether she should live in her middle-class home in Dublin or in New York City, "the country of the lost." There, she imagines she can reinvent herself, but she ends up cleaning apartments. At 20, she falls in love with a man who carries in his wallet a picture of someone who looks strangely like her as a 12-year-old. Meanwhile, in England, a young woman named Rose, adopted by a wealthy family and also feeling curiously ill at ease about herself, decides she is not talented enough to pursue a career as a violinist, and begins to shoplift. At the same point, the two young women begin to search for each other, leading them back to that impulsive decision the bumbling though well-meaning Berts first made in the maternity ward. Enright's story is compelling, and she writes effectively and generously in the points of view of her various characters, especially in the flat, resigned voices of Evelyn and Berts. The facets of her plot keep multiplying, however, and the cut-and-paste sentences are more perplexing than evocative, e.g., "His head was full of saxophones that turned into fish, and ordinary matchboxes filled with dread." The narratives of unhappy Maria and unhappy Rose take on a whining redundancy that mars an otherwise boldly written work. Agent, Heather Schroeder. (Sept.) Cahners Business Information.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.
From Library Journal
Winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature (having published both a novel and a collection of short stories), Enright here explores the impact of a shattering decision on a seemingly ordinary family. Bert Delaney's wife is diagnosed with a brain tumor during her first pregnancy, and Bert must decide whose life takes precedence. When twins are delivered, he makes a second decision that will irrevocably alter the lives of both his daughters, sending them on divergent routes marked equally by dislocation and despair. Set in Dublin, New York, and London, the book is written in episodic chapters that hop among voices and across time and space, and it takes some effort to see how the different patchwork pieces come together to form a pattern and story. Although Enright writes simply and economically, her characters fail to engage the reader. An acquired taste for larger fiction collections only.
-DCaroline M. Hallsworth, Sudbury P.L., Ont.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.
FromBooklist
Enright writes in the fine Irish tradition of comic portrayals of tragic situations. A mother dies in childbirth; the reader learns much later that twins were born. Maria lives a life that feels incomplete and unsatisfying. In a lover's possessions, she finds a picture of herself as a child but in a place she has never been, wearing clothes she has never had. Her twin, Rose, who was adopted, lives the same incomplete sort of life. Will they, can they, come together? Using brittle, surreal, and highly original language, Enright brings us inside her story and characters. All the inhabitants of this novel, not just the twins, are strugglingwith loneliness, milling about in livesbased on incomplete truths, looking for a center. There is no smoothness to the events because of the quirky points of view and skewed world picture. Any truth to be found is in the humor, which comes across in spite of everything.The book is not easy to read but well worth the effort.Danise Hoover
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.
From Kirkus Reviews
This Irish writer's American debut offers stunning images, though not enough story to make the evocative language truly resonant.In 1965 Dublin a baby is born and a mother dies. What follows is over 20 years of fractured narrative as the girl grows up, the widower remarries, and a shocking secret is revealed. Taking time off from pursuing her engineering degree to live in New York, 20-year-old Maria falls in love with a man with a past-perhaps her own past. Innocently rummaging through his things one day, Maria finds among his possessions a picture of herself as a young girl, wearing clothes she's never owned and standing among people she's never met. Soon the mystery is resolved: The baby who was born was actually twins whom their distraught father Berts carelessly separated, choosing Maria, while Marie, renamed Rose, is adopted by an English couple living in London. As Enright flip-flops between Maria and Rose, the two women, so emotionally similar, grow up, choosing different though often parallel paths. The novel's haunting, albeit distant prose shines when describing the sensations of their mother Anna, pregnant and dying of a brain tumor, as she puts ketchup in the sugar bowl, and to her ailing mind the "sound of a tap dripping smel[ls] of roses." But far too often the narrative keeps Maria and Rose at arm's length, and the digressive revelations about middle-aged adulterer Berts, his new wife Evelyn, and Anna speaking from beyond the grave only widen the distance between the reader and the twins' unnamed heartache. Slowly the two sisters inch towards each other, but the final reconciliation of twin strangers isn't enough to save the meandering plot.The story's structure is too loose to be compelling, but newcomer Enright's lyrical language bespeaks her talent --Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.
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