可借阅:*
图书馆 | 资料类型 | 排架号 | 子计数 | 书架位置 | 状态 | 图书预约 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
正在检索... Branch | Book | M 22 | 1 | Fiction Collection | 正在检索... 未知 | 正在检索... 不可借阅 |
正在检索... South | Book | FIC MAC | 1 | Fiction Collection | 正在检索... 未知 | 正在检索... 不可借阅 |
链接这些题名
已订购
摘要
摘要
Claudia had the misfortune to be born with an ugly face. Growing up in a modest, loving Vermont family, she painfully learned to compensate for her looks in other ways--ways that led to a good marriage to Dan, a young man from a well-off New York City family. Appalled by their new daughter-in-law's appearance, Dan's parents encourage plastic surgery, and suddenly, amazingly, at age thirty, Claudia experiences life for the first time as an attractive woman. Claudia barely has time to accustom herself to her newly sculpted features when Dan's work transfers the couple to a small town in the South. There, she begins to feel an affinity not just to the lush, hot landscape but also to the black people who live, as she once did, at the margins of the affluent white society she and Dan are welcomed into. Claudia's lifelong wish for prettiness has come dazzlingly true, but behind her remade face, she struggles to believe in it. Increasingly isolated from Dan, who is relishing their new life and friends, Claudia finds herself rebelling against the subtle, pervasive racism that imbues Southern life and, in search of an honest, true connection, unconsciously drawn to the black man who does their yard work. Claudia's fascination with him sets off an explosive chain of events through which the layers of her physical disguise begin to disintegrate. Boldly assured, electrifying in its emotional impact, Passing Strange heralds a major new talent. From the melancholy romanticism of Scott Fitzgerald to the fearless honesty of Flannery O'Connor, MacLeod recalls the masters, but she forges her own territory with a vision that is troubling, wise, yet surprisingly unsentimental. Our obsession with physical appearance is laid bare in this love story of bittersweet beauty, a work of resounding complexity and insight.
评论 (4)
出版社周刊评论
This uneven debut novel has a terrific idea going for it, but it runs out of steam in a windup that's supposed to be poignant but is merely confusing. The first-person narrator, Claudia Isham, is an ugly duckling teenager growing up in Vermont whose sense of herself is completely governed by her awkward appearance. But her oddity and passion captivate Dan, a young New Yorker from a wealthy family, who marries her and then persuades her to have major cosmetic surgery. Claudia's altered appearance galvanizes her life, and MacLeod brilliantly illuminates the transformation in a woman's personality that can result from the unexpected arrival of attractiveness. When Claudia and Dan move down to the Carolinas for his salesman's job, the strange atmosphere of the contemporary South is evoked with great subtlety and keen observation. Here Claudia, in her new beauty, feels socially at home but emotionally adrift as much on the edge of the still racially divided society as the blacks who surround her. She takes their black yardman, the assured, laconic Calvin, as her lover and entertains thoughts of running away with him and leaving the heedless Dan and his instinctively racist friends behind. So far the story has been riveting, and Claudia's narrative voice thoroughly believable. But suddenly the book swerves into murder mystery territory, and MacLeod loses her grip. Dan is shot and killed, perhaps by Calvin, and Claudia becomes the center of attention in a trial that has only one possible outcome. It's a messy, hasty-seeming ending to a book that began with huge promise. (June 11) Forecast: MacLeod is a highly promising writer and her theme, as well as her skillful portrait of today's South, are strong selling points, even if the murder mystery angle fails to strike sparks. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
《书目》(Booklist)书评
Claudia has grown up with a face so unattractive that it causes people to look twice, but she marries a man who can see past it--or so she thinks until he and his wealthy parents suggest that she get «fixed up.» Rather inexplicably, she undergoes expensive plastic surgery and is transformed into a beauty. She and her husband move to North Carolina to begin a new life, and the more time she spends behind her new face, the more detached she seems from the world around her. Turning away from her husband's expensive toys, rich friends, and a lifestyle she sees as inauthentic, Claudia becomes fascinated with the black people living on the fringes of their society and falls in love with black yardman Calvin. Their affair seems to bring the promise of something better for both of them, until reality disastrously intervenes. A sharply observed study of the many ways that people judge each other, this dark debut gains momentum after a shaky start. Carrie Bissey.
Kirkus评论
Prejudice against unattractive women is equated with racism, in a self-important first novel about a young woman whose cosmetic surgery dramatically alters her life. Claudia is a working-class girl from Vermont with a big nose and a weak chin. MacLeod leaves it ambiguous whether her protagonist is grotesquely ugly or merely plain, but Claudia definitely thinks she's the former. Her self-absorption, although acknowledged, tries the reader's patience and limits her credibility. While she identifies with Anne Frank as a fellow sufferer who was "not pretty," Claudia (or MacLeod: the author/narrator boundary is hard to decipher in the sometimes graceful, often overblown prose) zeroes in on others characters' physical imperfections. In adolescence she becomes obsessed with Dan, a good-looking preppie bad boy. Five years later they meet again, fall in love, and marry despite (or perhaps because of) the disparity between them. He has all the money and looks, she the brains and imagination. Soon he wants children, but she puts him off for reasons never quite clear. Then Dan gets a job transfer to North Carolina. Claudia arrives there as a newly minted pretty woman, thanks to the nose job and chin implant he has suggested, influenced by his snobbish mother. Claudia obsesses about the implications of the change while enjoying the benefits. She and Dan make friends with a stereotypical rich good ol' boy and his wife, racists like every other white southerner they meet. Dan adapts to the South by becoming even more boorish; Claudia begins a torrid affair with her black yardman Calvin. When Dan is murdered, innocent Calvin is charged. Sensitive Claudia is naturally devastated and chastened by her responsibility in these events. Nevertheless, she'll find a new rich white husband with whom she can continue to "pass" as pretty. Difficult to take seriously, despite MacLeod's obviously serious intentions.
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
In MacLeod's debut novel, a white woman from Vermont, new to the rural town of Beasley, NC, is oddly drawn to the local blacks, especially the yardman Calvin. When Claudia and Calvin become lovers, their relationship stirs up more trouble than one might expect from reading novels by contemporary Southern writers like Lynne Hinton, whose The Things I Know Best suggests that interracial relationships are by now better accepted below the Mason-Dixon line. MacLeod's plot thickens when we learn that Claudia's rich husband had paid to surgically transform her once dreadful looks into something beautiful prior to moving South. Is Claudia drawn to blacks because she's the only person in this stereotypical Southern town who isn't racist? Or does she draw preposterous parallels between her former life and the outsider status of local blacks? These are important questions, but because the pacing changes in the final third of the novel, speeding toward an unsatisfactory ending, the beauty/race issue is never quite unraveled. Not recommended. Faye A. Chadwell, Univ. of Oregon, Eugene (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.