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摘要
摘要
A brief, lyrical novel with a powerful emotional charge, Rules for Old Men Waiting is about three wars of the twentieth century and an ever-deepening marriage. In a house on the Cape older than the Republic, Robert MacIver, a historian who long ago played rugby for Scotland, creates a list of rules by which to live out his last days. The most important rule, to tell a story to its end, spurs the old Scot on to invent a strange and gripping tale of men in the trenches of the First World War.
Drawn from a depth of knowledge and imagination, MacIver conjures the implacable, clear-sighted artist Private Callum; the private's nemesis Sergeant Braddis, with his pincerlike nails; Lieutenant Simon Dodds, who takes on Braddis; and Private Charlie Alston, who is ensnared in this story of inhumanity and betrayal but brings it to a close.
This invented tale of the Great War prompts MacIver's own memories of his role in World War II and of Vietnam, where his son, David served. Both the stories and the memories alike are lit by the vivid presence of Margaret, his wife. As Hearts and Minds director Peter Davis writes, Pouncey has wrought an almost inconceivable amount of beauty from pain, loss, and war, and I think he has been able to do this because every page is imbued with the love story at the heart of his astonishing novel. From the Hardcover edition.
评论 (4)
出版社周刊评论
Begun in 1981, this slender, unpretentious, lyrical and deeply moving novel by the president emeritus of Amherst College was more than two decades in the making. The year is 1987, and octogenarian Robert MacIver is alone, in failing health and debilitated with grief over his wife's recent death, hiding out in the dead of winter in a remote, unheated Cape Cod house "older than the Republic." Shocked into confronting the seriousness of his plight when the timbers of the front porch collapse under his weight, he retreats back inside the house and realizes that he wants to live out his remaining days-however few in number-with dignity. Thus resolved, he formulates his Ten Commandments for Old Men Waiting, the seventh of which is "Work every morning." And so he decides to write a short story about an infantry company in "No Man's Land" in WWI, which will draw on the interviews he conducted with victims of poison gas that he used for his first book, the well-received oral history Voices Through the Smoke. Pouncey's novel thus becomes a story within a novel; and MacIver's story is elegantly juxtaposed with his memories from his own long life. Pouncey's first book is proof that sometimes greatness comes slowly and in small packages. Agent, Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
《书目》(Booklist)书评
This first novel, written by a 67-year-old former classics professor, details the last days of historian, war veteran, and proud Scotsman Robert MacIver. Upon the death of his beloved wife, MacIver is at loose ends and in rapidly failing health. Rambling around his large old house on the Cape, he determines that he will meet his fate with dignity. Without a shred of self-pity, he formulates a set of rules to get by, including eating regular meals, keeping warm, and listening to music. He also sets about writing a fairly gripping story set during World War I about a group of conflicted soldiers. This story, in turn, acts as a conduit for his own memories--his experiences in combat, his great love affair with his wife, the death of their son in Vietnam, the rewards of their respective careers as a teacher and a painter. Although mortality is its central theme, this gracefully written novel is never depressing. With its expansive scope--war, work, love, loss--it is instead a beautiful testament to one man's resilient spirit. --Joanne Wilkinson Copyright 2005 Booklist
Kirkus评论
A strong debut about a dying historian--from the 67-year-old former president of Amherst College. Robert MacIver is an 80-year-old war historian, a proud Scot long resident stateside, dying slowly and alone in an ancient house in the woods on Cape Cod. His beloved wife, Margaret, has died recently in the same house, and MacIver sees no reason to linger. He is not, as the famous Dylan Thomas poem has it, raging against his going, but neither is he going gentle, though rage and gentleness are the novel's key concepts. Instead, he chooses a middle way, an orderly departure. Alarmed by visions clouding his mind, he takes himself in hand, fixing regular meals; he also embarks on a short story, containing through art the rage that grips him at the loss of loved ones. MacIver's creation is deftly interwoven with highlights of his own life: the death of his father in WWI (his first great loss); his success as a rugby player and academic; his meeting Margaret, an accomplished painter, in New York; his blissful life with her and their only child, David; David's early death after serving as a medic in Vietnam (his second great loss); MacIver's subsequent marriage-threatening rages; and then the return of calm and marital happiness. A constant theme is MacIver's violent nature and the antidote of Margaret's gentleness. In his short story, MacIver envisions a drama played out between four soldiers in the WWI trenches. One, a good soldier but a psychopath, murders his commanding officer; that murder is avenged by a private, an outstanding artist stirred to his own murderous rage. Completion of the story eases MacIver's path to death. Despite minor flaws (sometimes overreaching, Pouncey tends to push his points too hard, and David's pivotal decision to volunteer feels manufactured), this has a power and piquant unexpectedness that raise it far above the general run of first novels. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
No longer waiting to write his first novel, the president emeritus of Amherst College offers a protagonist who looks back over his life. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
摘录
摘录
CHAPTER 1 Rules to Stop the Rot The house and the old man were well matched, both large framed and failing fast. The house had a better excuse, MacIver thought; he was eighty, but the house was older than the Republic, had been a century old when Thoreau walked the Cape, though he couldn't have seen it tucked away in the nondescript maze of scrub oak. It had been the willful seclusion of the place that had appealed to them when they first saw it--that and the equally hidden pool, about two minutes away through their woods, which must have decided the builder to choose the site. The oaks grew more substantial as they approached the pond, but the casual visitor would not have registered their rising height as the ground fell away down to the water. But when the path did its last little jink through the thicket of spare mossy trunks and last year's leaves, you stood on the edge of something suddenly spacious. A stretch of almost two hundred yards of water, more than fifty wide, a glade of water, fringed at both ends by sedge and reeds, shaded along the sides by the larger oaks. Bird-loud by day, redwings and warblers in and out of the reeds and busy water-traffic of ducks, and even, for a few seasons, the stately progressions of a pair of swans; owls with their fluttery hoots at night, and very often at the far end beyond a fallen log, the hunched figure of a black-crowned night heron, the grim presiding judge executing sentence on a surprising number of small fish and frogs. Margaret and he had watched the pond over the years at every hour in every season. In summer, it was their swimming pool, where they swam naked at any time of day. Often on hot August nights, they would have a last dip before bed. They would take one towel between them, and no flashlight, because the night sky overhead was bright enough to light their way down the faint, twisting path. MacIver, an energetic but clumsy swimmer, would thrash the water into turbulence out into the deep and then make for shore, and try to use the towel as little as possible, to leave it dry for Margaret. She would go on a while longer, parting the water gently in her rhythmic breast-stroke, the moonlight playing on her wet hair with each forward surge, a sleek and quiet otter. He would lose her in the shadowed background at the far end, and peer with great concentration into the dark, to catch the first ripple of her return. When she finally waded towards the bank where he was standing, he would stay motionless trying to register the first moment when he could see into her silhouette, and detect the dark roundness of her nipples and the triangle of her pubic hair. Then she would let him dry her off, and they would go home to bed. In other seasons, dressed for the weather, they would take their station under one of the oaks, his back to the trunk, with Margaret sitting between his legs, and simply let the life of the pool evolve around them. They had seen families of deer come down to drink, they had seen a raccoon balance on a log and try to fish with his paw, and one evening in the last of the light, they had seen a great horned owl sail out from the tree above them and swoop on a small rabbit on the other side of the pond. They had heard the short squeal, and seen the inert furry bundle dangling from the bird's talons as he passed over them on his return. Many foxes, and once he would have sworn a bobcat, though it can't have been, padding along the far bank and back into the trees. You never knew what you would see. MacIver named the pond the Blind Pool, from a favorite boyhood story, though it was called Frog Pond on his geodetic map, and Margaret had called the house Night Heron House in honor of the constant sentinel standing by his fallen branch; she did a fine woodcut of him, too, which still hung inside the front door. It was a traditional Cape house, but on a larger scale than was usual, a bold architect's airy enlargement. The front rooms were high ceilinged and framed with more massive beams, and instead of the usual chicken-run stairs inside the front door, there was a handsome Y-shaped staircase down a wide hall, breaking at a little landing halfway up and then splitting to left and right for the upper rooms. A Victorian owner had widened the two front windows and bowed them, letting in more light, and then had built a porch between the two bows, with central steps up to the front door and a simple railing on either side. The house stood by itself in a clearing, which you had to maintain vigilantly: half a summer, and the locust, oak, and birch sprigs would be crowding onto the grass. Original glass in many panes; the shapes of things outside alternately clouded and cleared as your eyes moved across the windows. Original two-foot-wide floorboards and paneling on the walls, flouting an ancient Massachusetts statute reserving such width for the absent king. A cool, self-possessed house of mellow resonance, as if you were living inside a spacious cello. Nothing too decorative. They had three and a half decades to set their rhythms, coming and going to their secret fastness, the Night Heron House with its woods and pond. When Margaret fell ill and the doctors said they could do no more for her, they had moved to the Cape, as they had always planned in such a case, "year-round"; in fact, she had three seasons left, fall to spring, 1986-1987. At first the house had seemed to banish sickness. They had moved their bed into the living room, so she would not have to manage the stairs, but in the large, airy space she bustled light-footed as ever; she set up her easel, and started a series of tree-scapes framed by the windows at different times of the day. The trees on the canvas got barer, MacIver noticed, as the season turned, but the paintings got lighter, at first because the angle of focus was raised to allow more cloud and sky, and at the end, in the unfinished ones, because the marks on the prepared white canvas, while precisely made, were fainter, less assertive: the effect left on her only viewer was of being pulled in her art past the blank of whiteness to the vanishing point of thin air. As winter approached, they would still visit the pond on good days, though they didn't stay long to absorb its more furtive movement; they would come out at the end of the path and stand a few moments looking, an old couple supporting each other in a lover's stance, heads inclined towards each other, his rangy arm around her frail shoulders, her mittened hand around his waist. Then they would work their way back; she only needed a sighting, it seemed. Things were moving faster for them now, forcing changes they could not plan. In no time the number of hours she could be up each day, the number of feet she could walk, were shortening on them. By the end of February, she was confined to bed, daily falling further away from him deeper into sickness. He was ill himself, he knew, but nothing to this. First weekly, then twice a week, he would make grim sallies to the drugstore for the morphine prescribed from New York, and come back as fast as he dared, fearful of finding another visible weakening. There was no talk of going somewhere else for final care. It would end here, in this room. He would read to her, coax her to eat a little, play Mozart to her, spin new tales she would like about his boyhood on Loch Affric, and games and battles farther afield. When she drowsed, he would stay sitting on in the bentwood rocker through the fading afternoon. She would wake up and read his unguarded face; she could see her fierce old Scot being gentled out of character by his own secret illness, never to be mentioned, and by grief. It was all grotesquely new to him; he was not a man who had ever willingly let things be taken out of his hands. Sometimes she would send him on small missions, to shake him out of his spellbound broodings. She would ask him to go down to the pond, "and report back on your findings." At first in the winter, he would have to work hard for interesting gleanings to take back to her--animal tracks on the frozen pond, an air bubble caught in the creamy ice inshore around the heron's branch, the number of trees deep he could count in the leafless screen of woods across the pond, viewed from the oak where they hung the towel. When the grudging days of early spring arrived, and the trees were fretted more with undergrowth, the views foreshortened, but there was more to report. One day in late April, he had taken her back a box turtle, patterned in a smart brown and yellow plaid, but built a little too high off the ground, like the old Volkswagen Beetle, to be aerodynamically sound. MacIver had put him on the quilt, and the little fellow had finally stuck his head out of his shell and taken a couple of steps, before pooping quite impressively right there on the bed. Margaret had given him the Scottish name of Archibald, and insisted that MacIver take him back to exactly the same leaves in which he had found him, with the added gift of a lettuce leaf for his pains. She died three days after that, on the first soft day that promised full-blooded spring. As Margaret had feared would be the case, MacIver did not do well after she had gone. He let himself go, and he let the house go. He knew it was happening and he felt bad about it as far as the house was concerned, but he didn't seem able to do much about it, except fitfully. His concentration was gone, along with the object of his attention. There was a backlog of work due on the house; they had loved it and cared for it year after year, as it needed and deserved, but in the fall MacIver had persuaded Margaret against all previous habits to delay some of the chores to the spring; they should hunker down and enjoy each other quietly, without ladders looming and workers banging. She had been sick enough to agree, but the house was showing its frailty now quite markedly; it was no longer a matter of cleaning gutters, checking storm windows, and calling the exterminator to keep the termites at bay. The fabric of the house was sagging visibly on the eastern side, and he was sure it needed a new roof. And what else? He mentally checked off the items he knew about--siding on the windward face of the house, boiler, always feeble, cheating him of more and more degrees against the thermostat (unless it was the cold, or the windows?), two sagging, buckled gutters. In the end, he did not call the contractors, because he did not want them to open up the house and tell him how bad it was. And he did not call them because he still did not want their banging, their company, or even their secret sympathy. Bereavement seemed to work on him as a kind of blanket allergy, making him edgy and irritable to all the outside world. And of course it was reciprocal: the world receded on him. Even his own Blind Pool seemed to shun him as an interloper. The lens of the water, which had taken in a full orbit of creatures and their activities, their presence and their shadows, and held them for key moments for the two of them to share and admire, now stared blankly upwards, blind indeed. He could tell that his ability to focus, to fix on a detail and hold it, had deserted him, and the loss of it had weakened his grasp on the place. He did not really seem able to see what was happening anymore. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from Rules for Old Men Waiting: A Novel by Peter R. Pouncey All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.目录
Chapter 1 Rules to Stop the Rot The house and the old man were well matched, both large framed and failing fast. The house had a better excuse, MacIver thought; he was eighty, but the house was older than the Republic, had been a century old when Thoreau walked the Cape, though he couldn't have seen it tucked away in the nondescript maze of scrub oak. It had been the willful seclusion of the place that had appealed to them when they first saw it-that and the equally hidden pool, about two minutes away through their woods, which must have decided the builder to choose the site. The oaks grew more substantial as they approached the pond, but the casual visitor would not have registered their rising height as the ground fell away down to the water. But when the path did its last little jink through the thicket of spare mossy trunks and last year's leaves, you stood on the edge of something suddenly spacious. A stretch of almost two hundred yards of water, more than fifty wide, a glade of water, fringed at both ends by sedge and reeds, shaded along the sides by the larger oaks. Bird-loud by day, redwings and warblers in and out of the reeds and busy water-traffic of ducks, and even, for a few seasons, the stately progressions of a pair of swans; owls with their fluttery hoots at night, and very often at the far end beyond a fallen log, the hunched figure of a black-crowned night heron, the grim presiding judge executing sentence on a surprising number of small fish and frogs. |
Margaret and he had watched the pond over the years at every hour in every season. In summer, it was their swimming pool, where they swam naked at any time of day. Often on hot August nights, they would have a last dip before bed. They would take one towel between them, and no flashlight, because the night sky overhead was bright enough to light their way down the faint, twisting path. MacIver, an energetic but clumsy swimmer, would thrash the water into turbulence out into the deep and then make for shore, and try to use the towel as little as possible, to leave it dry for Margaret. She would go on a while longer, parting the water gently in her rhythmic breast-stroke, the moonlight playing on her wet hair with each forward surge, a sleek and quiet otter. He would lose her in the shadowed background at the far end, and peer with great concentration into the dark, to catch the first ripple of her return. When she finally waded towards the bank where he was standing, he would stay motionless trying to register the first moment when he could see into her silhouette, and detect the dark roundness of her nipples and the triangle of her pubic hair. Then she would let him dry her off, and they would go home to bed. |
In other seasons, dressed for the weather, they would take their station under one of the oaks, his back to the trunk, with Margaret sitting between his legs, and simply let the life of the pool evolve around them. They had seen families of deer come down to drink, they had seen a raccoon balance on a log and try to fish with his paw, and one evening in the last of the light, they had seen a great horned owl sail out from the tree above them and swoop on a small rabbit on the other side of the pond. They had heard the short squeal, and seen the inert furry bundle dangling from the bird's talons as he passed over them on his return. Many foxes, and once he would have sworn a bobcat, though it can't have been, padding along the far bank and back into the trees. You never knew what you would see. MacIver named the pond the Blind Pool, from a favorite boyhood story, though it was called Frog Pond on his geodetic map, and Margaret had called the house Night Heron House in honor of the constant sentinel standing by his fallen branch; she did a fine woodcut of him, too, which still hung inside the front door. |
It was a traditional Cape house, but on a larger scale than was usual, a bold architect's airy enlargement. The front rooms were high ceilinged and framed with more massive beams, and instead of the usual chicken-run stairs inside the front door, there was a handsome Y-shaped staircase down a wide hall, breaking at a little landing halfway up and then splitting to left and right for the upper rooms. A Victorian owner had widened the two front windows and bowed them, letting in more light, and then had built a porch between the two bows, with central steps up to the front door and a simple railing on either side. The house stood by itself in a clearing, which you had to maintain vigilantly: half a summer, and the locust, oak, and birch sprigs would be crowding onto the grass. Original glass in many panes; the shapes of things outside alternately clouded and cleared as your eyes moved across the windows. Original two-foot-wide floorboards and paneling on the walls, flouting an ancient Massachusetts statute reserving such width for the absent king. A cool, self-possessed house of mellow resonance, as if you were living inside a spacious cello. Nothing too decorative. |
They had three and a half decades to set their rhythms, coming and going to their secret fastness, the Night Heron House with its woods and pond. When Margaret fell ill and the doctors said they could do no more for her, they had moved to the Cape, as they had always planned in such a case, "year-round"; in fact, she had three seasons left, fall to spring, 1986-1987. At first the house had seemed to banish sickness. They had moved their bed into the living room, so she would not have to manage the stairs, but in the large, airy space she bustled light-footed as ever; she set up her easel, and started a series of tree-scapes framed by the windows at different times of the day. The trees on the canvas got barer, MacIver noticed, as the season turned, but the paintings got lighter, at first because the angle of focus was raised to allow more cloud and sky, and at the end, in the unfinished ones, because the marks on the prepared white canvas, while precisely made, were fainter, less assertive: the effect left on her only viewer was of being pulled in her art past the blank of whiteness to the vanishing point of thin air. |
As winter approached, they would still visit the pond on good days, though they didn't stay long to absorb its more furtive movement; they would come out at the end of the path and stand a few moments looking, an old couple supporting each other in a lover's stance, heads inclined towards each other, his rangy arm around her frail shoulders, her mittened hand around his waist. Then they would work their way back; she only needed a sighting, it seemed. Things were moving faster for them now, forcing changes they could not plan. In no time the number of hours she could be up each day, the number of feet she could walk, were shortening on them. By the end of February, she was confined to bed, daily falling further away from him deeper into sickness. He was ill himself, he knew, but nothing to this. First weekly, then twice a week, he would make grim sallies to the drugstore for the morphine prescribed from New York, and come back as fast as he dared, fearful of finding another visible weakening. There was no talk of going somewhere else for final care. It would end here, in this room. He would read to her, coax her to eat a little, play Mozart to her, spin new tales she would like about his boyhood on Loch Affric, and games and battles farther afield. When she drowsed, he would stay sitting on in the bentwood rocker through the fading afternoon. She would wake up and read his unguarded face; she could see her fierce old Scot being gentled out of character by his own secret illness, never to be mentioned, and by grief. |
It was all grotesquely new to him; he was not a man who had ever willingly let things be taken out of his hands. Sometimes she would send him on small missions, to shake him out of his spellbound broodings. She would ask him to go down to the pond, "and report back on your findings." At first in the winter, he would have to work hard for interesting gleanings to take back to her-animal tracks on the frozen pond, an air bubble caught in the creamy ice inshore around the heron's branch, the number of trees deep he could count in the leafless screen of woods across the pond, viewed from the oak where they hung the towel. When the grudging days of early spring arrived, and the trees were fretted more with undergrowth, the views foreshortened, but there was more to report. One day in late April, he had taken her back a box turtle, patterned in a smart brown and yellow plaid, but built a little too high off the ground, like the old Volkswagen Beetle, to be aerodynamically sound. MacIver had put him on the quilt, and the little fellow had finally stuck his head out of his shell and taken a couple of steps, before pooping quite impressively right there on the bed. Margaret had given him the Scottish name of Archibald, and insisted that MacIver take him back to exactly the same leaves in which he had found him, with the added gift of a lettuce leaf for his pains. She died three days after that, on the first soft day that promised full-blooded spring. |
As Margaret had feared would be the case, MacIver did not do well after she had gone. He let himself go, and he let the house go. He knew it was happening and he felt bad about it as far as the house was concerned, but he didn't seem able to do much about it, except fitfully. His concentration was gone, along with the object of his attention. There was a backlog of work due on the house; they had loved it and cared for it year after year, as it needed and deserved, but in the fall MacIver had persuaded Margaret against all previous habits to delay some of the chores to the spring; they should hunker down and enjoy each other quietly, without ladders looming and workers banging. She had been sick enough to agree, but the house was showing its frailty now quite markedly; it was no longer a matter of cleaning gutters, checking storm windows, and calling the exterminator to keep the termites at bay. The fabric of the house was sagging visibly on the eastern side, and he was sure it needed a new roof. And what else? He mentally checked off the items he knew about-siding on the windward face of the house, boiler, always feeble, cheating him of more and more degrees against the thermostat (unless it was the cold, or the windows?), two sagging, buckled gutters. In the end, he did not call the contractors, because he did not want them to open up the house and tell him how bad it was. And he did not call them because he still did not want their banging, their company, or even their secret sympathy. Bereavement seemed to work on him as a kind of blanket allergy, making him edgy and irritable to all the outside world. |
And of course it was reciprocal: the world receded on him. Even his own Blind Pool seemed to shun him as an interloper. The lens of the water, which had taken in a full orbit of creatures and their activities, their presence and their shadows, and held them for key moments for the two of them to share and admire, now stared blankly upwards, blind indeed. He could tell that his ability to focus, to fix on a detail and hold it, had deserted him, and the loss of it had weakened his grasp on the place. He did not really seem able to see what was happening anymore. |
From the Hardcover edition. |