Современная проза - Страница 240

В романе современной мексиканской писательницы Анхелес Мастретты рассказывается об истории семьи Саури на фоне событий конца XIX – начала XX века. Безудержная любовь и революционный мятеж, человеческие и политические страсти – все завязалось в один неразрывный узел. Эту глубокую увлекательную книгу отличает оригинальная манера повествования и яркие, экспрессивные характеры героев.

MARTIN AMIS hates nuclear weapons, and he doesn't care who knows it. In fact, he wants everyone to know it. At mid-career, he has virtually ceased to be a writer of fiction-from 1974 to 1984, he published five comic novels, including the hugely successful Money-and has metamorphosed instead into a kind of anti-nuclear polemicist. Einstein's Monsters, his most recent work, is a collection of stories based on the theme of nuclear holocaust. Lest anyone think this is a chance engagement, Amis has followed up Einstein's Monsters with an article in the October Esquire railing against the insanity of American nuclear planning. The article, a rehash of the Introduction to the present volume, is most notable not for its politics but for the warning it includes to those of us waiting for the return of a depoliticized Martin Amis: "When nuclear weapons become real to you,' he tells us, "hardly an hour passes without some throb or flash, some heavy pulse of imagined super-catastrophe.' The hydrogen bomb has claimed its first English target, and it is the career of Martin Amis.

In his new role, Amis runs around like the sheriff in Jaws, as if he's the only person who knows there's a shark in town and everyone else is trying to keep the beaches open. The Esquire article gives a good sense of the fundamental cheesiness of his political thinking. The members of the Washington nuclear establishment, he says, don't mind talking about "X-ray lasers and hard-kill capabilities,' but they "go green' when the author tries to light up a cigarette. When the author interviews an attache from the Soviet embassy, on the other hand, things go differently; the two "drink a lot of coffee and smoke up a storm.' "Sergi and I got along fine,' Amis tells us. "He didn't want to kill me. I didn't want to kill him.' Amis has invented the Marlboro Peace Plan.

Einstein's Monsters is only a touch more subtle. It consists of five stories, along with both an "Author's Note' and an Introduction. In his Note, Amis vacillates upon the question of whether the stories are polemical. "If they arouse political feelings,' he tells us, "that is all to to the good,' but really, they "were written with the usual purpose in mind: that is to say, with no purpose at all-except, I suppose, to give pleasure, various kinds of complicated pleasure.'

If there is any confusion in the reader's mind, however, it is cleared up by the first story, "Bujak and the Strong Force.' Reading it, one is reminded of the experience of sitting in a college fiction workshop, the excited author right there next to you, enthusiastically explaining the intricacies of his story's symbolic order.

Bujak, the title character, is a hugely powerful Eastern European living in a bad neighborhood in London. A survivor of the Nazi occupation of Poland, he spends a great deal of time arguing with the (American) narrator over the value of revenge. The narrator is anti, Bujak is pro. Bujak polices his block, rounds up petty criminals, makes the streets safe for young ladies at night. "He was our deterrent,' the narrator says. At the end of the story, when Bujak returns to his home to find his mother, daughter, and granddaughter brutally rape-murdered, the drunken perpetrators lying asleep on the floor, we expect him to exact some terrible revenge. But he doesn't. "Why?' the narrator asks. "No court on earth would have sent you down.' (Is this how Americans speak, by the way?) "When I had their heads in my hands,' Bujak replies, "I thought how incredibly easy to grind their faces together. But no… I had no wish to add to what I found.' It's… unilateral disarmament!

Throughout Einstein's Monsters Amis the author is at war with Amis the nuclear theoretician. "Insight at Flame Lake,' for example, would have been a fine schizophrenic-breakdown story, except that Amis the theoretician felt compelled to tack on an anti-nuclear subtext. "Thinkability,' the long introduction to Einstein's Monsters, has its flashes of brilliant writing (the generations of unborn babies who would be aborted by a nuclear war are described as "queueing up in spectral relays until the end of time'), but it is marred by the same sort of simplistic reasoning that plagues the Esquire piece. Amis wants to pin all our problems on the existence of nuclear weapons. In the face of these missiles, no merely personal atrocity matters: "What vulgar outrage or moronic barbarity can compare with the black dream of nuclear exchange?' It's like asking a meter maid, "How dare you give me a ticket when there are Russian tanks illegally parked on the streets of Kabul?' But Amis the satirist knows that it takes a lot more than nuclear weaponry to explain the spiritual malaise of our century, just as Amis the writer knows (or ought to know) that there is always more than one explanation for any human phenomenon. One suspects, in fact, that Amis's opposition to the Strategic Defense Initiative is derived not from the fear of a perilous escalation in the arms race, but from a (perhaps unconscious) perception that, with nuclear weapons gone, the novelist would have to face the fact of unexcused human weakness again.

Рассказы Сола Беллоу.

Они балансируют на грани между трагедией и язвительной сатирой.

Классический стиль соседствует в них с элементами постмодернизма.

В этих рассказах есть все — и подкупающая искренность, и тонкая ирония, и четко выстроенный сюжет.

Но прежде всего — в каждом отразился уникальный писательский дар Сола Беллоу!

Romans, kt?rego nigdy nie zapomnisz! Szukaj?c zemsty za ?mier? brata, Damien Falon zastawia pu?apk? na pi?kn? Alex? Garrick. Wygrywa od niej fortun? przy karcianym stole, nie ??da jednak pieni?dzy, lecz tego, by Alexa sp?dzi?a z nim noc. Wbrew jego oczekiwaniom Alexa okazuje si? delikatn? i mi?? dziewczyn? i Damien wkr?tce przy?apuje si? na tym, ?e pragnie nie tylko jej cia?a. Tymczasem niespodziewane komplikacje powoduj?, ?e musi broni? honoru Alexy, proponuje jej wi?c ma??e?stwo…

Известной журналистке — женщине с трагической судьбой, живущей на психотропах, — поручают взять интервью у страшного серийного маньяка, запертого в психушке. Маньяк сбегает, а журналистка, вовлечённая в поиски, оказывается на территории брошенных садоводств, где только два закона — заточка и ствол, где опасность поджидает за каждым перекрёстком. В историю вмешивается высокая политика и карательная психиатрия, становится непонятным, кто настоящий маньяк и где настоящий, один за другим гибнут друзья и враги. Мистика вползает в сюжет, как туман на берег реки. Героиня понимает, как хрупка она, НАША ЖЕСТЬ…

С творчеством выдающегося американского писателя Уильяма Стайрона наши читатели познакомились несколько лет назад, да и то опосредованно – на XIV Московском международном кинофестивале был показан фильм режиссера Алана Пакулы «Выбор Софи». До этого, правда, журнал «Иностранная литература» опубликовал главу из романа Стайрона, а уже после выхода на экраны фильма был издан и сам роман, мизерным тиражом и не в полном объеме. Слишком откровенные сексуальные сцены были изъяты, и, хотя сам автор и согласился на сокращения, это существенно обеднило роман. Читатели сегодня имеют возможность познакомиться с полным авторским текстом, без ханжеских изъятий, продиктованных, впрочем, не зловредностью издателей, а, скорее, инерцией редакторского мышления.

Уильям Стайрон обратился к теме Освенцима, в страшных печах которого остался прах сотен тысяч людей. Софи Завистовская из Освенцима вышла, выжила, но какой ценой? Своими руками она отдала на заклание дочь, когда гестаповцы приказали ей сделать страшный выбор между своими детьми. Софи выжила, но страшная память о прошлом осталась с ней. Как жить после всего случившегося? Возможно ли быть счастливой? Для таких, как Софи, война не закончилась с приходом победы. Для Софи пережитый ужас и трагическая вина могут уйти в забвение только со смертью. И она добровольно уходит из жизни…

Paul Theroux is a vocal proponent of rail travel over air travel, which he likens to traveling by submarine for all that goes unseen and not experienced by its adherents. The Great Railway Bazaar, his 1975 account of a four month railroad journey through Europe and Asia begins, "I sought trains, I found passengers." It is certainly the individuals that Theroux meets along the way, rather than the cities, buildings, or sites of touristic import, to which he devotes his most generous descriptions.

Beginning in Victoria Station with Duffill, an older man with a tweed cap, ill-fitting clothes, and mysterious business in Istanbul (Duffill's name later becomes synonymous with being left behind at a railway station), Theroux's journeys brim with a huge cast of colorful characters. From ashram-bound hippies to devout Kali-worshiping Tamils to Vassily Prokofyevich, the drunken Russian dining car manager on the Trans-Siberian Express, Theroux richly details his varied encounters, paying particular attention to the bizarre along the bazaar.

In Calcutta, "a city of mutilated people (where) only the truly monstrous looked odd," the author encounters "the hopping man," who with only one muscular leg, hops himself through the urban detritus; on the Saigon to Bien Hoa train, a Vietnamese woman thrusts an American baby upon him, expecting Theroux to keep and raise the child; and in Japan, where the cleanliness, efficiency, and quiet of the passenger trains provide striking contrast to what the author had up until that point become accustomed to, he finds the cultural undercurrent of sadistic pornography disturbingly unquestioned.

Paul Theroux had already established himself as a novelist at the time of his four month journey; The Great Railway Bazaar, today a travel writing classic, was preceded by ten books, six of which were novels. In fact, his four month long excursion seems to have been funded or at least justified, by the lecture engagements the author had arranged all along his route.

The first of many in this genre from Theroux, including Dark Star Safari (2002) and Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008), The Great Railway Bazaar is at once a timeless narrative of humans and travel and a distinctly historical slice of global affairs as viewed by one decidedly motion-bound writer.

The journey however is a long one and while masterfully wrought, it is often the incidental passage of time in a railway compartment that is thus rendered, and by the end of it even Theroux has tired of his travels. Snippets of brilliance exist throughout, but they are intermittent as you might expect, as when viewed from a passing train.