良心书单 | 最适合冬季阅读的年度中外好书推荐

001 Cleanness

by Garth Greenwell

The casual grandeur of Garth Greenwell’s prose, unfurling in page-long paragraphs and elegantly garrulous sentences, tempts the vulnerable reader into danger zones: traumatic memories, extreme sexual scenarios, states of paralyzing heartbreak and loss. In the case of “Cleanness,” Greenwell’s third work of fiction, I initially curled up with the book, savoring the sensuous richness of the writing, and then I found myself sweating a little, uncomfortably invested in the rawness of the scene. The cause was a story titled “Gospodar,” in which the narrator, an American teacher living in Bulgaria, hooks up with a man who begins by play-acting violence and then veers toward the real thing. The transition from fantasy to horror is accomplished with the deftness of a literary magician, and Greenwell repeats the feat even more unnervingly in a later story, “The Little Saint,” in which his likable narrator takes the role of the aggressor rather than the victim. These stories are masterpieces of radical eroticism, but they wouldn’t have the same impact if they didn’t appear in a gorgeously varied narrative fabric, amid scenes of more wholesome love, finely sketched vistas of political unrest, haunting evocations of a damaged childhood, and moments of mundane rapture. Tenderness, violence, animosity, and compassion are the outer edges of what feels like a total map of the human condition. —Alex Ross

加思·格林威尔散文的随意宏大，以一页长的段落和优雅的饶舌句子展开，诱惑脆弱的读者进入危险地带：创伤记忆、极端的性场景、瘫痪的心碎和失落的状态。以格林威尔的第三部小说《清洁》为例，一开始我蜷缩在书中，细细品味着作品的感官丰富，后来我发现自己有点出汗，不安地投入到了场景的粗犷之中。起因是一个名为“戈斯波达尔”的故事，故事的叙述者是一位住在保加利亚的美国教师，他勾搭上了一个男人，这个男人一开始玩暴力，后来转向了真实的东西。从幻想到恐怖的转变是通过文学魔术师的娴熟技巧完成的，格林威尔在后来的故事《小圣人》中更令人不安地重复了这一壮举，在故事中，他可爱的叙述者扮演了侵略者而不是受害者的角色。这些故事都是激进情色主义的杰作，但如果它们不以华丽多样的叙事结构出现，在更健康的爱情场景中，在政治动荡的精细勾勒远景中，在受损童年的萦绕回忆中，在平凡的狂喜时刻，它们就不会有同样的影响。柔情、暴力、敌意和同情是感觉像是人类状况总地图的边缘。-亚历克斯·罗斯

002 Stranger Faces

 by Namwali Serpell