The Bonesetter's Daughter [ 2006-04-10 09:36 ]
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中文譯名: 《接骨師的女兒》
Publisher: Ivy Books
ISBN: 0804114986
List Price: 68 RMB
Discounted Price(優(yōu)惠價(jià)): 61 RMB
You save: 7 RMB
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At the beginning of Amy Tan's fourth novel, two
packets of papers written in Chinese calligraphy fall into the hands of
Ruth Young. One bundle is titled Things I Know Are True and the other,
Things I Must Not Forget. The author? That would be the protagonist's
mother, LuLing, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. In these
documents the elderly matriarch, born in China in 1916, has set down a
record of her birth and family history, determined to keep the facts from
vanishing as her mind deteriorates.
A San Francisco career woman
who makes her living by ghostwriting self-help books, Ruth has little idea
of her mother's past or true identity. What's more, their relationship has tended to be an angry one.
Still, Ruth recognizes the onset of LuLing's decline--along with her own
remorse over past rancor--and hires a translator to decipher the packets. She also resolves
to "ask her mother to tell her about her life. For once, she would
ask. She would listen. She would sit down and not be in a
hurry or have anything else to do."
Framed at either end by Ruth's chapters, the central portion of The
Bonesetter's Daughter takes place in China in the remote, mountainous
region where anthropologists discovered Peking Man in the 1920s. Here
superstition and tradition rule over a succession of tiny villages. And
here LuLing grows up under the watchful eye of her hideously scarred
nursemaid, Precious Auntie. As she makes clear, it's not an enviable
setting:
I noticed the ripe stench of a pig pasture, the pockmarked land dug up
by dragon-bone dream-seekers, the holes in the walls, the mud by the
wells, the dustiness of the unpaved roads. I saw how all the women we
passed, young and old, had the same bland face, sleepy eyes that were
mirrors of their sleepy minds. Nor is rural isolation the worst of it.
LuLing's family, a clan of ink makers, believes itself cursed by its
connection to a local doctor, who cooks up his potions and remedies from
human bones. And indeed, a great deal of bad luck befalls the narrator and
her sister GaoLing before they can finally engineer their escape from
China. Along the way, familial squabbles erupt around every corner,
particularly among mothers, daughters, and sisters. And as she did in her
earlier The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan uses these conflicts to explore the
intricate dynamic that exists between first-generation Americans and their
immigrant elders. |
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