具體描述
內容簡介
A THRILLING REINVENTION OF THE VAMPIRE NOVEL BY THE MASTER OF MODERN FANTASY, GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
Abner Marsh, a struggling riverboat captain, suspects that something’s amiss when he is approached by a wealthy aristocrat with a lucrative offer. The hauntingly pale, steely-eyed Joshua York doesn’t care that the icy winter of 1857 has wiped out all but one of Marsh’s dilapidated fleet; nor does he care that he won’t earn back his investment in a decade. York’s reasons for traversing the powerful Mississippi are to be none of Marsh’s concern—no matter how bizarre, arbitrary, or capricious York’s actions may prove. Not until the maiden voyage of Fevre Dream does Marsh realize that he has joined a mission both more sinister, and perhaps more noble, than his most fantastic nightmare—and humankind’s most impossible dream. 作者簡介
George R. R. Martin's bestselling A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series has earned him the title of 'the American Tolkien'. The first book of the series has been made into a HBO TV adaptation, A Game of Thrones. He is the author of eight novels, several collections of short stories and numerous screenplays for television drama and feature films. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
喬治·雷濛德·理查德·馬丁(Geoger Raymond Richard Martin)歐美奇幻小說大師。1948年9月20日齣生於美國新澤西州的貝約恩,在伊利諾伊州伊凡斯頓的西北大學就讀,主修新聞寫作,1971年取得碩士學位。馬丁的作品主要以人物為關注點,描寫細膩豐富,突破瞭幻想文學界固有的創作模式,多次引領閱讀潮流。代錶作有十大浪漫太空歌劇之一的《光逝》、由雨果奬獲奬名篇擴展而成的《風港》、在雜誌讀者群中深受愛戴的《圖夫航行記》,以及當代正統奇幻的第一經典《冰與火之歌》等。由於馬丁的輝煌成就,他被譽為美國的托爾金和新世紀的海明威。從1989年開始,馬丁淡齣文學界,轉而投身演藝界發展,其中包括《美女與野獸》的編劇和The Twilight Zone的劇本編輯。1996年他纔重返文壇而開始奇幻文學的創作,處女作便是《權力的遊戲》(The Game Of Throne),即為《冰與火之歌》(The Song Of Fire And Ice)的首部麯。雖然封筆幾近10年,但大師風範猶在,《權力的遊戲》甫齣便拿下瞭British Fantasy Society、 世界奇幻奬和星雲奬年度最佳幻想作品提名,即使是由其中抽取章節編成的Blood of the Dragon也獲得多個最佳中篇奬,在科幻奇幻界引起極大的反響。在非官方的不記名奇幻作品投票中,《冰與火之歌》儼然已經可以和《魔戒》平起平坐,作者網站的訪問量也是和斯蒂芬·金、J.K.羅琳等不相上下,其受歡迎的程度可見一斑。他的讀者群早已是遠遠的超越奇幻科幻愛好者的範圍,而受到更為廣泛的關注。
權力的遊戲已在HBO播齣。喬治·馬丁被時代雜誌評選為2011年影響世界的一百人。 精彩書評
“A novel that will delight fans of both Stephen King and Mark Twain . . . darkly romantic, chilling and rousing by turns . . . a thundering success.”
—Roger Zelazny
“An adventure into the heart of darkness that transcends even the most inventive vampire novels . . . Fevre Dream runs red with original, high adventure.”
—Los Angeles Herald Examiner
“Stands alongside Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire as a revolutionary work.”
—Rocky Mountain News
“Engaging and meaningful.”
—The Washington Post Book World 精彩書摘
Chapter One
St. Louis, April 1857 Abner Marsh rapped the head of his hickory walking stick smartly on the hotel desk to get the clerk’s attention. “I’m here to see a man named York,” he said. “Josh York, I believe he calls hisself. You got such a man here?”
The clerk was an elderly man with spectacles. He jumped at the sound of the rap, then turned and spied Marsh and smiled. “Why, it’s Cap’n Marsh,” he said amiably. “Ain’t seen you for half a year, Cap’n. Heard about your misfortune, though. Terrible, just terrible. I been here since ’36 and I never seen no ice jam like that one.”
“Never you mind about that,” Abner Marsh said, annoyed. He had anticipated such comments. The Planters’ House was a popular hostelry among steamboatmen. Marsh himself had dined there regularly before that cruel winter. But since the ice jam he’d been staying away, and not only because of the prices. Much as he liked Planters’ House food, he was not eager for its brand of company: pilots and captains and mates, rivermen all, old friends and old rivals, and all of them knowing his misfortune. Abner Marsh wanted no man’s pity. “You just say where York’s room is,” he told the clerk peremptorily.
The clerk bobbed his head nervously. “Mister York won’t be in his room, Cap’n. You’ll find him in the dining room, taking his meal.”
“Now? At this hour?” Marsh glanced at the ornate hotel clock, then loosed the brass buttons of his coat and pulled out his own gold pocket watch. “Ten past midnight,” he said, incredulous. “You say he’s eatin’?”
“Yes sir, that he is. He chooses his own times, Mister York, and he’s not the sort you say no to, Cap’n.”
Abner Marsh made a rude noise deep in his throat, pocketed his watch, and turned away without a word, setting off across the richly appointed lobby with long, heavy strides. He was a big man, and not a patient one, and he was not accustomed to business meetings at midnight. He carried his walking stick with a flourish, as if he had never had a misfortune, and was still the man he had been.
The dining room was almost as grand and lavish as the main saloon on a big steamer, with cut-glass chandeliers and polished brass fixtures and tables covered with fine white linen and the best china and crystal. During normal hours, the tables would have been full of travelers and steamboatmen, but now the room was empty, most of the lights extinguished. Perhaps there was something to be said for midnight meetings after all, Marsh reflected; at least he would have to suffer no condolences. Near the kitchen door, two Negro waiters were talking softly. Marsh ignored them and walked to the far side of the room, where a well-dressed stranger was dining alone.
The man must have heard him approach, but he did not look up. He was busy spooning up mock turtle soup from a china bowl. The cut of his long black coat made it clear he was no riverman; an Easterner then, or maybe even a foreigner. He was big, Marsh saw, though not near so big as Marsh; seated, he gave the impression of height, but he had none of Marsh’s girth. At first Marsh thought him an old man, for his hair was white. Then, when he came closer, he saw that it was not white at all, but a very pale blond, and suddenly the stranger took on an almost boyish aspect. York was clean-shaven, not a mustache nor side whiskers on his long, cool face, and his skin was as fair as his hair. He had hands like a woman, Marsh thought as he stood over the table.
He tapped on the table with his stick. The cloth muffled the sound, made it a gentle summons. “You Josh York?” he said.
York looked up, and their eyes met.
Till the rest of his days were done, Abner Marsh remembered that moment, that first look into the eyes of Joshua York. Whatever thoughts he had had, whatever plans he had made, were sucked up in the maelstrom of York’s eyes. Boy and old man and dandy and foreigner, all those were gone in an instant, and there was only York, the man himself, the power of him, the dream, the intensity.
York’s eyes were gray, startlingly dark in such a pale face. His pupils were pinpoints, burning black, and they reached right into Marsh and weighed the soul inside him. The gray around them seemed alive, moving, like fog on the river on a dark night, when the banks vanish and the lights vanish and there is nothing in the world but your boat and the river and the fog. In those mists, Abner Marsh saw things; visions swift-glimpsed and then gone. There was a cool intelligence peering out of those mists. But there was a beast as well, dark and frightening, chained and angry, raging at the fog. Laughter and loneliness and cruel passion; York had all of that in his eyes.
But mostly there was force in those eyes, terrible force, a strength as relentless and merciless as the ice that had crushed Marsh’s dreams. Somewhere in that fog, Marsh could sense the ice moving, slow, so slow, and he could hear the awful splintering of his boats and all his hopes.
Abner Marsh had stared down many a man in his day, and he held his gaze for the longest time, his hand closed so hard around his stick that he feared he would snap it in two. But at last he looked away.
The man at the table pushed away his soup, gestured, and said, “Captain Marsh. I have been expecting you. Please join me.” His voice was mellow, educated, easy.
“Yes,” Marsh said, too softly. He pulled out the chair across from York and eased himself into it. Marsh was a massive man, six foot tall and three hundred pounds heavy. He had a red face and a full black beard that he wore to cover up a flat, pushed-in nose and a faceful of warts, but even the whiskers didn’t help much; they called him the ugliest man on the river, and he knew it. In his heavy blue captain’s coat with its double row of brass buttons, he was a fierce and imposing figure. But York’s eyes had drained him of his bluster. The man was a fanatic, Marsh decided. He had seen eyes like that before, in madmen and hell-raising preachers and once in the face of the man called John Brown, down in bleeding Kansas. Marsh wanted nothing to do with fanatics, with preachers, and abolitionists and temperance people.
But when York spoke, he did not sound like a fanatic. “My name is Joshua Anton York, Captain. J. A. York in business, Joshua to my friends. I hope that we shall be both business associates and friends, in time.” His tone was cordial and reasonable.
“We’ll see about that,” Marsh said, uncertain. The gray eyes across from him seemed aloof and vaguely amused now; whatever he had seen in them was gone. He felt confused.
“I trust you received my letter?”
“I got it right here,” Marsh said, pulling the folded envelope from the pocket of his coat. The offer had seemed an impossible stroke of fortune when it arrived, salvation for everything he feared lost. Now he was not so sure. “You want to go into the steamboat business, do you?” he said, leaning forward.
A waiter appeared. “Will you be dining with Mister York, Cap’n?”
“Please do,” York urged.
“I believe I will,” Marsh said. York might be able to outstare him, but there was no man on the river could outeat him. “I’ll have some of that soup, and a dozen oysters, and a couple of roast chickens with taters and stuff. Crisp ’em up good, mind you. And something to wash it all down with. What are you drinking, York?”
“Burgundy.”
“Fine, fetch me a bottle of the same.”
York looked amused. “You have a formidable appetite, Captain.”
“This is a for-mid-a-bul town,” Marsh said carefully, “and a formid-a-bul river, Mister York. Man’s got to keep his strength up. This ain’t New York, nor London neither.”
“I’m quite aware of that,” York said.
“Well, I hope so, if you’re going into steamboatin’. It’s the for-mid-a-bullest thing of all.”
“Shall we go directly to business, then? You own a packet line. I wish to buy a half-interest. Since you are here, I take it you are interested in my offer.”
“I’m considerable interested,” Marsh agreed, “and considerable puzzled, too. You look like a smart man. I reckon you checked me out before you wrote me this here letter.” He tapped it with his finger. “You ought to know that this last winter just about ruined me.
York said nothing, but something in his face bid Marsh continue.
“The Fevre River Packet Company, that’s me,” Marsh went on. “Called it that on account of where I was born, up on the Fevre near Galena, not ’cause I only worked that river, since I didn’t. I had six boats, working mostly the upper Mississippi trade, St. Louis to St. Paul, with some trips up the Fevre and the Illinois and the Missouri. I was doing just fine, adding a new boat or two most every year, thinking of moving into the Ohio trade, or maybe even New Orleans. But last July my Mary Clarke blew a boiler and burned, up near to Dubuque, burned right to the water line with a hundred dead. And this winter—this was a terrible winter. I had four of my boats wintering here at St. Louis. The Nicholas Perrot, the Dunleith, the Sweet Fevre, and my Elizabeth A., brand new, only four months in service and a sweet boat too, near 300 feet long with 12 big boilers, fast as any steamboat on the river. I was real proud of my lady Liz. She cost me $200,000, but she was worth every penny of it.” The soup arrived. Marsh tasted a spoonful and scowled. “Too hot,” he said. ...
《寂靜的海岸:一個關於失落與重生的故事》 作者:埃莉諾·凡斯 主題: 探索記憶的碎片、失落的藝術,以及在遺忘的邊緣尋求救贖的漫長旅程。 書籍簡介 在波濤永不休止地拍打著灰色卵石灘的奧剋利角,時間似乎被潮汐的力量凍結瞭。這裏矗立著一座名為“燈塔之心”的古老建築,它不僅是航海者的指引,也是伊芙琳·裏德爾——一位身份成謎、沉默寡言的畫傢——的最後避難所。 《寂靜的海岸》並非一個關於快速行動或戲劇性轉摺的故事,而是一部沉浸式的、充滿瞭感官細節和哲學深思的敘事作品。它關注的是那些潛藏在日常錶象之下,等待被緩慢挖掘的真相。 人物群像與核心衝突 故事的主人公,伊芙琳·裏德爾,她的過去是一張被撕碎的地圖。她來到奧剋利角已經七年,幾乎不與外界交流,唯一的慰藉是她那不斷堆積的、以海景為主題的畫作。她的畫筆下的海浪,時而狂暴,時而寜靜,但總有一種難以言喻的憂鬱籠罩其中,仿佛她正在試圖用顔料重塑一段她無法清晰迴憶的經曆。 與伊芙琳形成鮮明對比的是西拉斯·霍爾,一位從城市調職而來的氣象學傢。西拉斯受雇於一傢政府機構,任務是監測該地區日益不穩定的氣候模式。他性格嚴謹、邏輯清晰,最初將伊芙琳視為一個需要被理解的“異常數據點”。然而,隨著他對當地社區的深入接觸,特彆是那些世代居住在此、信仰著古老海洋傳說的人們,他開始懷疑,有些真相是無法通過科學模型來測量的。 故事的另一條綫索圍繞著奧剋利角當地的紡織工坊——“潮汐之綫”。工坊的繼承人瑪莎·布萊剋,一個堅韌而務實的女性,她承載著整個社區的經濟命脈和曆史記憶。她與伊芙琳之間建立瞭一種復雜的關係:既有對陌生人的警惕,也有對相似靈魂的無聲理解。 核心衝突在於:個體記憶的脆弱性與集體曆史的頑固性之間的張力。伊芙琳試圖拼湊她的過去,而奧剋利角的居民們,齣於保護或恐懼,似乎都在共同守護著某個不願被喚醒的秘密。 場景的塑造與氛圍營造 小說的大部分場景設定在奧剋利角的物理環境中,這些環境本身就是敘事的一部分。 燈塔之心: 這座搖搖欲墜的建築不僅是伊芙琳的住所,也是一個象徵——高聳、孤獨,緻力於發齣光芒,卻又時刻被黑暗包圍。伊芙琳將她的畫室設在頂層,那裏隻有海風、鹽霧和無盡的遠方。 霧鎖碼頭: 每天清晨,濃霧會如同實體般降臨,吞噬掉聲音和形狀。在霧中,西拉斯發現當地的聲呐記錄總是齣現無法解釋的低頻嗡鳴,這讓他對伊芙琳的“失憶”産生瞭新的猜想——也許她聽到的,就是這些聲音。 被遺忘的隧道: 廢棄的礦道和走私者的秘密通道散布在海岸綫之下,它們象徵著被壓抑的真相。伊芙琳在她的畫作中無意識地描繪瞭這些地下結構,引導著西拉斯去尋找那些被時間掩埋的綫索。 作者對感官體驗的捕捉極為細緻入微:海水的冰冷、風乾木材的乾燥氣味、油彩在畫布上堆疊的厚重質感,以及海鳥在岩石上撕裂空氣的尖銳叫聲。這種對細節的執著,使得讀者仿佛親身站在那片被遺棄的沙灘上。 主題的深度挖掘 1. 遺忘的代價: 小說探討瞭遺忘究竟是一種保護機製,還是一種緩慢的自我謀殺。伊芙琳的失憶是她痛苦的來源,但也讓她得以在沒有過去包袱的情況下,以一種近乎純粹的狀態去感知現在。然而,當真相開始浮現時,她必須麵對,重建一個破碎的自我是否比維持一個虛假的寜靜更加痛苦。 2. 藝術與記錄: 藝術在此書中扮演瞭“非語言的曆史記錄者”的角色。伊芙琳無法用言語訴說她的經曆,但她的每一筆觸都保存瞭情感的能量。西拉斯,一個依賴數據和邏輯的人,最終必須學會閱讀這些“情感數據”,纔能理解伊芙琳的內心世界。 3. 沉默的社區: 奧剋利角的居民們並非邪惡,他們是生存主義者。他們深知,有些創傷對一個小社區來說是緻命的。他們的沉默是一種集體防禦,保護瞭社群的結構,但也犧牲瞭個體的自由。瑪莎·布萊剋代錶瞭這種集體責任感與個人良知之間的永恒拉鋸。 敘事結構與節奏 《寂靜的海岸》采用瞭一種迴鏇鏢式的敘事結構。開篇,伊芙琳的世界是靜止的,被一層厚厚的迷霧包裹。隨著西拉斯的到來,敘事節奏開始加速,通過一係列閃迴片段(並非直接的記憶迴憶,而是伊芙琳畫作中隱晦的符號或西拉斯發現的舊檔案),真相被一點點“鑿”齣來。 小說的節奏是緩慢而深沉的,如同潮汐的漲落,每一次的推進都伴隨著情感上的強烈迴落。高潮並非一次爆炸性的揭示,而是一個緩慢的聚閤——當伊芙琳終於在她的最新一幅巨幅畫作中,用光綫和陰影精確地重現瞭導緻她失憶的那個決定性時刻時,故事達到瞭情感上的飽和點。 結尾的留白 小說的結局拒絕提供傳統意義上的“圓滿”。伊芙琳恢復瞭記憶,但痛苦並未消失,隻是轉化成瞭清晰的認知。她選擇留在奧剋利角,不是因為她被治愈瞭,而是因為她學會瞭與自己的傷疤共存。她開始用新的視角作畫,海浪依然存在,但其中多瞭一份接納。西拉斯最終完成瞭他的報告,但他的報告內容與他所學到的真相相去甚遠。他離開時,帶走瞭無用的數據,留下瞭對生活更深層次的睏惑。 《寂靜的海岸》是一部獻給那些在邊緣生活、在沉默中尋找意義的人的頌歌。它要求讀者慢下來,傾聽風聲,凝視深淵,最終理解,真正的錨點,往往不是你所尋找的地方,而是你決定停留的勇氣。