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Books and Arts; My family and other animals
文藝；我的家庭和一些動物
Various Pets Alive and Dead. By Marina Lewycka.
《活著以及死去的各種寵物》，瑪麗娜·柳薇卡著。
Not many authors could successfully mix lentils, bra-burning and free love with city traders, quantitative analysts and the mathematical calculations that supposedly make naked short selling, CDOs and subprime mortgages infallible. But Marina Lewycka is an exception. The bestselling author of a 2005 hit, “A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian”, has set her fourth book in London and Doncaster and uses farce, irony and biting wit to explore serious issues.
扁豆，激烈到燒掉胸罩的婦女維權運動，自由戀愛，城市貿(mào)易商，為裸賣空進行的數(shù)量分析和數(shù)學計算，債務抵押債券，次級房貸……能把這些成功地混合在一起而不犯錯誤，這樣的作家不多，瑪麗娜·柳薇卡就是其中之一。作為一名暢銷書作家，她2005年的《烏克蘭拖拉機短史》曾經(jīng)熱賣一時。《活著以及死去的各種寵物》是她的第四本書，書中地點設在倫敦和唐卡斯特，用鬧劇、諷刺以及辛辣的智慧來探索嚴肅的議題。
“Various Pets Alive and Dead” features a group of sharply drawn and sharp-tongued characters. Marcus and Doro, elderly ex-hippies from Solidarity Hall, a left-wing commune, still wear their slogan T-shirts and crave the “non-bourgeois non-private non-nuclear non-monogamous community” of their past. To make the present bearable, Marcus is writing a never-ending history of the left-wing movement, while Doro looks after the Down's syndrome child they are raising. She fulfils her longing for militant action by campaigning to save local allotments.
書中這些人物性格特別的鮮明，其言語表達也十分尖酸辛辣。馬庫斯和多蘿，一對年老的前嬉皮士人物，來自左翼社區(qū)團結(jié)工會，他們?nèi)匀淮┲鴮懹袠苏Z的T恤衫，仍然渴望舊日里“沒有資產(chǎn)階級、沒有私有制、沒有核能、沒有一夫一妻制度的社區(qū)”。可當下的現(xiàn)實如此難熬，馬庫斯只得寄情寫作，書寫左翼運動沒有休止的歷史，而多蘿的寄托則在照顧他們領養(yǎng)的患唐氏綜合癥的小孩，另外，她還參加保護當?shù)赝恋氐倪\動，也算圓了自己參與斗爭運動的夢想。
Their daughter Clara (named after Clara Zetkin, a German proto-feminist), and son Serge (Victor Serge, a Belgian-Russian revolutionary) are somewhat different. Clara, a Doncaster schoolteacher, battles to educate children who smell of cigarette smoke, chip fat and urine, while craving order, clean bathrooms and a man—preferably Mr Gorst, the headmaster, whose hunky presence makes her giddy with girlish desire.
一雙兒女卻與父母不同，女兒名叫克拉拉，取自女權運動先驅(qū)人物德國的克拉拉·蔡特金，兒子謝爾蓋，取自俄國革命家維克多·謝爾蓋。克拉拉在唐卡斯特一所學校教書，她一邊要教好這群油膩膩的渾身煙味和騷味的小孩，一邊又要在生活中爭取一些秩序，爭取能有干凈的衛(wèi)生間，一邊還在戀著一個男人——近乎完美的古斯特校長，英俊瀟灑令她怦然心動。
Her brother Serge, whose parents think he is studying for a Cambridge PhD in maths (a worthy validation of their ideals), has ditched academic life to become a City fat cat at Financial and Trading Consolidated Alliance (FATCA), in London. When he is not fixated by the figures on his computer screen he fantasises about the figure of Maroushka Malko, a haughty eastern European quant in slinky skirts and slingback shoes “you could stab kittens with”.
謝爾蓋呢，父母引以為豪，以為他在劍橋攻讀數(shù)學博士學位，實際上他已放棄學術生涯，就業(yè)于倫敦金融與貿(mào)易統(tǒng)一聯(lián)盟，成了金融城一名富佬。不用盯著電腦顯示器看數(shù)據(jù)的時候，他就會幻想著Maroushka Malko的身體，Malko是一個驕傲的數(shù)據(jù)分析師，來自東歐，穿著緊身裙子、露跟女鞋，那鞋跟絕對可以把小貓給砸死。
This quartet takes the story from present to past and back again in a series of sparklingly humorous vignettes. The clever bit is that while whooshing the reader along on a tide of wit, the author also neatly explores the morals and values of different generations and the impact that these have on family dynamics. Never has reading about something serious been quite so much fun.
這樣一個四重奏，用一系列幽默的小插曲，把過去與現(xiàn)在穿插起來。比較巧妙的是，作者不僅妙語連珠，讓讀者感受噼里啪啦的智慧，而且還同時巧妙地探討兩代人的道德觀與價值觀，以及不同的觀點對于整個家庭的影響。如此嚴肅的問題，也能探討得饒有趣味，以前還未讀過這樣的好書。
