《紐約時報》年十大好書

The year’s best books, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.
年度最佳書籍，由《紐約時報》書評版編輯評選。
FICTION
虛構類
ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE
《我們看不到的所有光明》(All the Light We Cannot See)
By Anthony Doerr
安東尼·多伊爾(Anthony Doerr)著
Scribner, $27.
斯克里布納出版社(Scribner)，27美元。

With brisk chapters and sumptuous language, Doerr’s second novel follows two characters whose paths will intersect in the waning days of World War II: an orphaned engineering prodigy recruited into the Nazi ranks, and a blind French girl who joins the Resistance. Tackling questions of survival, endurance and moral obligations during wartime, the book is as precise and artful and ingenious as the puzzle boxes the heroine’s locksmith father builds for her. Impressively, it is also a vastly entertaining feat of storytelling.
這是多伊爾的第二部小說，以輕快的章節和豐富的語言講述兩個人物的人生道路如何在“二戰”之後交匯：一個是被招募爲納粹士兵的工程天才孤兒，另一個是加入抵抗組織的失明法國女孩。本書探討戰爭期間的生存、忍耐與道德困境，如同女主人公做鎖匠的父親爲她打造的謎箱一樣精確而巧妙。它令人難忘，在敘事上也展現出引人入勝的技巧。
DEPT. OF SPECULATION
《猜測部門》(Dept. of Speculation)
By Jenny Offill
詹尼·奧菲爾(Jenny Offill)著
Alfred A. Knopf, $22.95.
阿爾弗萊德·A·克諾普夫出版社(Alfred A. Knopf)，22.95美元

Offill’s slender and cannily paced novel, her second, assembles fragments, observations, meditations and different points of view to chart the course of a troubled marriage. Wry and devastating in equal measure, the novel is a cracked mirror that throws light in every direction — on music and literature; science and philosophy; marriage and motherhood and infidelity; and especially love and the grueling rigors of domestic life. Part elegy and part primal scream, it’s a profound and unexpectedly buoyant performance.
|奧菲爾的第二部小說纖弱而結構精巧，由碎片、觀察、沉思與不同觀點組成，描繪出一段混亂的婚姻。這部小說既扭曲又可怕，像一面龜裂的鏡子，向四面八方折射光線——它涉及音樂與文學，科學與哲學，婚姻、母性與不忠；特別是家庭生活中的愛與嚴酷。它半是哀歌，半是原始的驚叫，既深沉，而又有着出人意料的輕快一面。
EUPHORIA
《欣快》(Euphoria)
By Lily King
莉莉·金(Lily King)
Atlantic Monthly Press, $25.
大西洋月刊出版社(Atlantic Monthly Press)，25美元。

In 1933, the anthropologist Margaret Mead took a field trip to the Sepik River in New Guinea with her second husband; they met and collaborated with the man who would become her third. King has taken the known details of that actual event and created this exquisite novel, her fourth, about the rewards and disappointments of intellectual ambition and physical desire. The result is an intelligent, sensual tale told with a suitable mix of precision and heat.
1933年，人類學家瑪格麗特·米德(Margaret Mead)與第二任丈夫到新幾內亞的塞皮克河做田野調查；他們遇見了一個男人，並與其合作，後來他成了米德的第三任丈夫。金採用這樁真實事件的已知細節創作了這本精巧的小說。這是她的第四本小說，探討知性抱負與身體慾望帶來的回報與失望。這是一個既聰慧又感性的故事，將精確與熱情融合得恰到好處。
FAMILY LIFE
《家庭生活》(Family Life)
By Akhil Sharma
阿克希爾·沙瑪(Akhil Sharma) 著。
W. W. Norton & Company, $23.95.
諾頓出版社(Norton)，23.95美元。

Sharma’s austere but moving novel tells the semi-autobiographical story of a family that immigrates from India to Queens, and has just begun to build a new life when the elder son suffers severe brain damage in a swimming pool accident. Deeply unnerving and gorgeously tender, the book chronicles how grief renders the parents unable to cherish and raise their other son; love, it suggests, becomes warped and jagged and even seemingly vanishes in the midst of mourning.
沙瑪的這部小說樸實而感人，是一個半自傳性質的故事，講述了一個印度家庭剛移居紐約皇后區，開始建立新生活不久，長子便由於泳池事故患上嚴重的腦損傷。本書令人深深不安而又極爲溫柔，講述了悲傷如何令父母無法去珍惜和撫養另一個兒子的故事；它令人想到，在悲哀的濃霧之中，愛也會變得粗糙扭曲，甚至看似消失。
REDEPLOYMENT
《重新部署》(Redeployment)
By Phil Klay
菲爾·克雷(Phil Klay)著。
The Penguin Press, $26.95.
企鵝出版社(The Penguin Press)，26.95美元。

In this brilliant debut story collection, Klay — a former Marine who served in Iraq — shows what happens when young, heavily armed Americans collide with a fractured and deeply foreign country few of them even remotely understand. Iraq comes across not merely as a theater of war but as a laboratory for the human condition in extremis. The collection is hilarious, biting, whipsawing and sad: the best thing written so far on what the war did to people’s souls.
克雷是一位曾在伊拉克服役的前海軍陸戰隊戰士，在這部精彩的處女短篇小說集中，他寫了重重武裝的年輕美國戰士們在破敗的異國腹地鄉村發生的事，他們幾乎沒有人瞭解這個地方。伊拉克不僅是戰爭發生的舞臺，也是緊急關頭的人性實驗室。這部小說集時而令人捧腹，時而極度辛酸，時而深刻，時而悲傷，是迄今爲止關於戰爭對人類靈魂影響的最佳作品。
NONFICTION
非虛構類
CAN’T WE TALK ABOUT SOMETHING MORE PLEASANT?
《我們能說更愉快的事嗎?》(Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?)
By Roz Chast
羅茲·查斯特(Roz Chast)創作並繪畫
Bloomsbury, $28.
布魯姆斯伯裏出版社(Bloomsbury)，28美元。

Cartoons, it turns out, are tailor-made for the absurdities of old age, illness and dementia. In Chast’s devastating and sublime graphic memoir, the odd dramas and repetitive minutiae find perfect expression in her signature antic drawings as she describes helping her parents navigate their final years — from packing up their cluttered Brooklyn apartment to getting a seat at the “right” table in the nursing home. No one has perfect parents, and no one can write a perfect book about them. But Chast has come close.
書中的卡通彷彿是爲年老、疾病與癡呆症所帶來的荒謬情況而量身定製的。在查斯特的這本悲傷而莊嚴的圖文回憶錄中，描繪了她如何幫助父母度過晚年——從打掃他們凌亂的布魯克林公寓，到在療養院裏爲他們在“合適的”桌邊找到坐的地方，她那標誌性的滑稽繪畫完美地表現了書中奇異的戲劇效果與重複的細節。沒有人擁有完美的父母，也沒有人能爲他們寫一部完美的書，但查斯特很接近了。
ON IMMUNITY: An Inoculation
《免疫：接種》(On Immunity: An Inoculation)
By Eula Biss
歐拉·比斯(Eula Biss)。
Graywolf Press, $24.
格雷沃夫出版社，24美元

In this spellbinding blend of memoir, science journalism and literary criticism, Biss unpacks what the fear of vaccines tells us about larger anxieties involving purity, contamination and interdependency. Deeply researched and anchored in Biss’s own experiences as a new mother, this ferociously intelligent book is itself an inoculation against bad science and superstition, and a reminder that we owe one another our lives.
這部引人入勝的書混合了回憶錄、科學新聞寫作和文藝評論。比斯揭示出，對疫苗的恐懼顯示了我們對於純正、污染與相關性的深層焦慮。她建立在自己初爲人母經歷的基礎上展開深入研究，創作了這本極爲聰明的書，講述疫苗如何對抗僞科學與迷信，並提醒人們，人類在生活中是互相依存的。
PENELOPE FITZGERALD: A Life
《佩妮洛普·菲茨傑拉德：生平》(Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life)
By Hermione Lee
赫米奧尼·李(Hermione Lee)著。
Alfred A. Knopf, $35.
阿爾弗萊德·A·克諾普夫出版社，35美元。

The life and times of that elusive, original miracle worker, the English novelist and biographer Penelope Fitzgerald, have been brilliantly captured by Lee, previously the author of masterly portraits of Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather and Edith Wharton. Growing up steeped in literature but sidetracked by the vicissitudes of life, Fitzgerald published her first book at 58 and did not become famous until she was 80. But her fiction, when it finally emerged, had a tamped-down force and intense compression, as if the decades-long wait had worked its own clarifying, crystallizing magic.
李曾爲維吉尼亞·伍爾夫(Virginia Woolf)、薇拉·卡特(Willa Cather)與伊迪絲·沃頓(Edith Wharton)寫過精彩的傳記，這一次亦出色地捕捉了難以捉摸、另闢蹊徑的英國小說家與傳記作家佩妮洛普·菲茨傑拉德的人生與時代。菲茨傑拉德從小浸淫文學，人生飽經滄桑，直至58歲才發表第一部作品，80歲才成名。她的小說壓抑凝練，彷彿幾十年的等待都成爲清澈透明的魔法。
THE SIXTH EXTINCTION: An Unnatural history
《第六次滅絕：非自然史》(The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History)
By Elizabeth Kolbert
伊麗莎白·科爾伯特(Elizabeth Kolbert)著
Henry Holt & Company, $28.
亨利·霍爾特與公司出版社(Henry Holt & Company)，28美元

Kolbert reports from the front lines of the violent collision between civilization and our planet’s ecosystem — from the Great Barrier Reef to her own backyard — in this, her third, book. Traveling to some of the world’s remotest corners, she examines how man-made climate change threatens to eliminate 20 to 50 percent of all living species on earth within this century. This is environmental writing at its most rigorous and richly detailed — and as riveting as any thriller.
這是科爾伯特的第三本書，她站在人類文明與這個星球生態環境激烈衝突的最前沿寫作——從大堡礁到她家後院。她走訪了這個世界最偏遠的若干角落，檢視人爲氣候變化如何在本世紀內威脅到20%至50%的現存物種的生存。這本環保書極爲嚴謹，細節豐富，而又如同驚悚小說般引人入勝。
THIRTEEN DAYS IN SEPTEMBER: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David
《九月裏的13天：卡特、貝京與薩達特在戴維營》(Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin and Sadat at Camp David)
By Lawrence Wright
勞倫斯·懷特(Lawrence Wright)著
Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95.
阿爾弗萊德·A·克諾普夫出版社，27.95美元。

In 1978, over 13 days at Camp David, Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin and Jimmy Carter hammered out a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt that remains the most profound diplomatic achievement to emerge from the Mideast conflict. In a fascinating account of the talks, Wright combines history, politics and, most of all, a gripping drama of three clashing personalities into a tale of constant plot twists and dark humor. He reminds us that Carter’s visionary idealism and doggedness represented an act of surpassing political courage.
1978年，安瓦爾·薩達特(Anwar Sadat)、梅赫納姆·貝京(Menachem Begin)與吉米·卡特在戴維營中度過了13天，艱苦地達成以色列與埃及之間的和平協議，這份和平協議迄今仍然是中東衝突中意義最爲深遠的外交成就。懷特精彩地描述了這些會談，將歷史、政治與三個衝突的人格之間發生的引人入勝的戲劇融爲一體，寫成了這個充滿陰謀轉折和黑色幽默的故事。他提醒我們，卡特富於遠見的理想主義和固執代表了一種卓越的政治勇氣。