首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
No matter what you write, your mother will always believe it’s about her. So said author Ann Beattie a few years ago at a book
No matter what you write, your mother will always believe it’s about her. So said author Ann Beattie a few years ago at a book
admin
2011-01-02
74
问题
No matter what you write, your mother will always believe it’s about her. So said author Ann Beattie a few years ago at a book talk in Connecticut. You could write about a family of dogs living on Mars, Beattie went on, and your mother will be convinced that she is the mother dog. (And who are we kidding, she probably is. )
Amy Tan is a writer who has fully embraced this concept. Her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, plumbed the gulf between American daughters and their Chinese mothers. Now, after the death of her own mother, Tan has returned to these themes with a renewed poignancy and lyricism in The Bonesetters Daughter.
In recent magazine interviews and the novel’s foreword, she makes it clear how much she has drawn from her own life. Like her heroine, Ruth, Tan experienced yearly bouts of psychosomatic laryngitis--unable to speak for days at a time. And like Ruth, Tan didn’t learn her mothers’ real name until just before she died.
Ruth is a ghost write—a job she’s been training for since she started editing her mother’s English as a girl. "Ruth had always been forced to serve as Luling’s mouthpiece," the narrator writes. "By the time she was ten, Ruth was the English-speaking ’Mrs. Luling Young’ on the telephone, the one who made appointments for the doctor, who wrote letters to the bank."
As in her previous books, Tan captures the humiliated embarrassment of the assimilated child (as well as a parent’s terror that her American girl is rejecting her home culture, and by extension, herself). "Her mother couldn’t even say Ruth’s name right. It used to mortify Ruth when she shouted for her up and clown the block. ’Lootie! Lootie! ’ Why had her mother chosen a name with sounds she couldn’t pronounce?"
But the writing turns out to be more than a figure of speech. In a ritual she has dreaded since she was a child, Luling has used Ruth as a medium, making her scribble in sand messages from a nursemaid, the bonesetter’s daughter of the title, who killed herself in China when her mother was a girl.
Tan powerfully evokes the pain mothers and daughters cause one another, seemingly effortlessly, but redemption is always lurking a chapter away.
The novel begins with the pages Luling has frantically written to capture her memories before Alzheimer’s strips them away. Ruth, not fluent in Mandarin, gave up trying to read them years before, but once Luling’s disease is diagnosed, they provide a way for her to reunite with her mother.
"(The doctor) said the disease had probably started ’years ago’... Maybe there was a reason her mother had been so difficult when Ruth was growing up, why she had talked about curses and threats to kill herself."
The Bonesetter’s Daughter shifts all the way into magical realism in one section, with not entirely believable results. Also, Tan’s generally fine writing occasionally veers into the over-wrought: "She sensed her mother’s life was at stake and the answer was in her hands, had been there all along."
Far more effective are Luling’s experiences before and after the Japanese invasion of China and the sections where Ruth tries to care for her mother. Here again, Tan has drawn from experience, sharply detailing a child’s fear in the face of a parent’s growing helplessness.
For Luling and Ruth, Alzheimer’s .acts like a "truth serum", allowing a lifetime of lies to fall away. In fact, Luling’s narrative to her daughter begins: "These are the things I know are true."
Finding emotional healing in the face of disease has launched a thousand Movies of the Week, but in the hands of a writer as generous as Tan, it’s a Subject that still resonates as an antidote to grief.
The comment made by the author of this passage on Tan’s writing tends to be______.
选项
A、sarcastic
B、poignant
C、laudatory
D、critical
答案
C
解析
倒数第四段中作者提到:Tan总体上精美的文笔偶尔会过于矫揉造作(the over— wrought)。此外,从最后一段我们也可得知作者对作家的评价是“大气”(in the hands of a writer as generous as Tan)。由此可见,作者对他作品的总体评价是肯定的、赞赏的。因此正确答案为C。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/GPeO777K
0
专业英语八级
相关试题推荐
Inordertogetyourpointacrossinyourtargetlanguage,youhavetolearnplentyofwords.Howdoyousetaboutit?Dr.Paul
WhatIsAnAmerican?"Ican’tmakeyouout,"HerryJameshasMrs.TristramsaytotheAmeri-can,"whetheryouareverysimpl
Incontrasttotraditionalanalysesofminoritybusiness,thesociologicalanalysiscontendsthatminoritybusinessownershipi
曹雪芹的小说《红楼梦》在中国文学发展史上,树立了一座辉煌灿烂的艺术丰碑。小说以贵族青年贾宝玉、林黛玉的恋爱婚姻悲剧为主要线索,描写贾家荣、宁两府这个封建贵族大家庭的衰亡败落。作者还通过这个家族的社会联系的描写,笔触深入到封建社会的各个方面,生动地展开了封建
Theamazingsuccessofhumansasaspeciesistheresultoftheevolutionarydevelopmentofourbrainswhichhassledtotool-usi
AftersomanyyearsofstudyingEnglish,youmaystillgetconfusedlikeyoufirstcomeherejustbecauseoftheslangthestude
AtypicalfeatureoftheEnglishVictorianliteratureisthatwritersbecamesocialandmoral_______,exposingallkindsofso
Inordertogetyourpointacrossinyourtargetlanguage,youhavetolearnplentyofwords.Howdoyousetaboutit?Dr.Paul
在我国社区教育的发展中,政府统筹是重要保证,要始终充分依靠政府的领导和有效管理,统筹安排、合理配置社区教育资源区分社区教育中的非功利性教育与功利性教育,非功利性教育是社区教育的本质体现,功利性教育是社区教育的重要组成组建高效运作的社区教育实体,发挥龙头作用
ThanksgivingDayiscelebratedin______.
随机试题
我国选举国家主席、副主席的权力属于()
小弟入医院前,正负责组织航空工业部系统的一个课题组,他任主任工程师。他的一个同志写信给我说,1981年夏天,西安一带出奇的热,几乎所有的人晚上都到室外乘凉,只有“我们的老冯”坚持伏案看资料,“有一天晚上,我去他家汇报工作,得知他经常胃痛,有时从睡眠中痛醒,
女性,20岁,左肺结核,咯血后出现胸闷、气短,查体左下肺呼吸音减弱,可能为男性,40岁,3年前患肺结核,抗结核治疗1年,病变吸收好转,痰菌阴转,近3个月来出现间断小量咯血,查痰结核菌阴性,X线胸片双上肺野纤维条索影,患者咯血的原因可能为
长春新碱的抗恶性肿瘤作用机制是氟尿嘧啶的抗恶性肿瘤作用机制是
犬静脉穿刺最常用的血管是
“视而不见,听而不闻”的现象,典型地体现了()
下列机关之间进行工作联系,应当使用函的是()。
【蔫骑】兰州大学2003年中国古代史真题
某个实验把一批吸烟者作为对象。实验对象分为两组。第一组是实验组,第二组是对照组。实验组的成员被强制戒烟,对照组的成员不戒烟。3个月后,实验组成员的平均体重增加了10%,而对照组成员的平均体重基本不变。实验结果说明,戒烟会导致吸烟者的体重增加。以下哪
有如下说明:inta[10]={1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10},*p=a;则数值为9的表达式是()。
最新回复
(
0
)