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摘要
摘要
In this lush, lyrical, and marvelously evocative novel, Catherine Texier takes a mystery from her family's past and draws from it a portrait of a remarkable woman--her great-grandmother Victorine. A young schoolteacher in a quiet province in France, Victorine had married and had two children. But when she falls desperately in love, she makes a startling choice, leaving her family for her lover and a new life in Indochina. On a single day in 1940, as Victorine reflects on her past, we travel back with her, from the willow-lined canals of her childhood home in Vendée to sun-drenched days and languorous nights along the Mekong River at the dawn of the twentieth century. Hers is an unforgettable story of adventure and self-discovery--of a woman's struggle between duty and independence, tradition and freedom, longing and regret. From the Hardcover edition.
评论 (4)
出版社周刊评论
Texier, author of the 1998 memoir Breakup and three previous novels (Panic Blood, etc.), spins a steely, delicate fictional tale of unaccounted-for years in the life of her own great-grandmother, Victorine, who was rumored to have run off with a customs officer in the late 1890s, leaving behind her husband and two children in Vend?e, France. Victorine first met Antoine when she was 16; she was soon to become the youngest teacher in France, and he was intent on venturing to one of the French colonies. As Victorine settles into her work, she meets dark-eyed fellow teacher Armand Texier and pushes Antoine into the recesses of her memory. She and Armand marry in a hurry when Victorine becomes pregnant, but years later, Victorine meets Antoine again and plans rendezvous with him, feeling a "shameful pleasure at the idea that her secret evened out the power" between herself and her womanizing husband. After some deliberation, Victorine agrees to leave her family to move to Indochina with Antoine, where he guarantees to "show [her] a world that [she] will fall in love with." She leaves without confronting her husband or children, and immediately begins to feel regret. As she wrestles with the prospect of contacting her sister, who also lives in Indochina, or even her family back in Vend?e, Victorine remains entrenched in a "split reality" where she must convince herself that the present can, in fact, always be reinvented. Texier offers seamless transitions between the past and present, and even the future as an older Victorine reflects upon her days in the Mekong Delta. Lurking questions of empire and expansion lend an extra dimension to this bittersweet romance, reminiscent both of Madame Bovary and Duras's The Lover, making plain the temptations and risks of expanding beyond one's borders. Agent, Joy Harris. (Apr. 20) Forecast: Texier is best known for her memoir of her breakup with her husband, with whom she co-edited the literary magazine Between C & D. This book should reach a broader readership than her previous novels, and give her a fresh start in the fiction arena. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
Female sexuality--the driving force of Texier's abrasive earlier fiction (e.g., Love Me Tender, 1987; Panic Blood, 1990)--takes a much more romantic form here. Billed as a mixture of fact and fiction and based on the little Texier knew about her eponymous great-grandmother, it's the story of a grand amour and its bittersweet aftermath. The narrative juxtaposes a day in 1940 when the elderly Victorine, living in France under German occupation, goes to the beach with her middle-aged youngest son--with Victorine's staggered memories of her youth, marriage, adultery, and repentance. The latter are revealed in gorgeously written extended flashbacks in which we observe, in the early pages, a young girl who is "good at pretending" growing up in provincial VendÉe, briefly encountering handsome teenaged Antoine Langelot, then entering an increasingly unhappy marriage to worldly--and rather officiously masculine--schoolteacher Armand Texier. Victorine bears Armand two children, but dreams of a different, more exotic life. And when Antoine reenters hers and importunes her to travel with him to employment opportunities in Indochina, she vacillates nervously, then, in 1899, leaves her family and joins him. Texier shapes Victorine's Indochina adventure as a series of disillusionments: Antoine's repeated business failures, his slow fall into an expatriate culture absorbed in the pursuit of luxury and the consolations of opium, the "message" implicit in a text she uses to study native languages ("The Tale of Kieu," a narrative poem about a woman who gave up everything to be with her lover), and Victorine's own burgeoning guilt and unhappiness. The close comes with her sorrowful (though resolute) parting from Antoine and her return to VendÉe, and Armand. Echoes of both Madame Bovary and Kate Chopin's The Awakening suffuse a nevertheless inventive and artfully composed delineation of a beguiling and complicated woman's arduous journey toward self-understanding. A subtly textured fourth novel: Texier's best yet. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
《书目》(Booklist)书评
Texier based this mesmerizing novel on the family legends surrounding her great-grandmother, Victorine, who left her husband for a year in 1899. At 16, Victorine was the youngest schoolteacher in all of France, but her father's dreams for her are dashed when she meets Armand Texier and becomes pregnant at 17. The couple marries hastily and settles into a life in Vendee with their two children. But Victorine is never completely satisfied, and when handsome Antoine, a man she loved as a girl, reenters her life, he ignites a deep passion in Victorine. When he tells her he is going to Indochina, he asks her to go with him. She does, and she travels to a world where she is able to reinvent herself. But Victorine has never been a woman to fall easily into any one role, and she finds herself as out of place in Indochina as she thought she was in Vendee. With lush, vivid description, Texier brings to life both the world around Victorine and the woman herself. --Kristine Huntley Copyright 2004 Booklist
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
This dark romance grew out of family rumors concerning the author's great-grandmother, who inspired the title character. Victorine exemplifies the successful French middle class of the late 1800s. Once the youngest teacher in France, she is now a working mother who walks home daily with her husband, also a schoolteacher. Though she finds the family routine dull, she is content until the startling reappearance of Antoine, an attachment from her fun-loving girlhood. The two rediscover their old passion, and Victorine agrees to the unthinkable: she deserts her spouse and children to travel with Antoine to French Indochina (now Vietnam). Overwhelmed by her exotic new surroundings and profoundly disturbed by Antoine's involvement with the highly dangerous, though legal, opium trade, Victorine nevertheless manages to cope by teaching and immersing herself in the local language and culture. Yet neither her love for Antoine nor her new pastimes can distract her from the guilt that virtually consumes her. Texier (Breakup) moves the action seamlessly back and forth between the aging Victorine's reminiscences in 1940 and her earlier adventures in coastal France and the Mekong Delta. Fans of historical novels and Francophiles will devour this one. For most fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/03.]-Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.