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
32
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
______wasNOTwrittenbyHemingway.
Whichofthefollowingistheworld’soldestnationalnewspaper?
Arab-Israelibloodshedhasincreasedbecause______.
ItispossibleforstudentstoobtainadvanceddegreesinEnglishwhileknowinglittleornothingabouttraditionalscholarlyme
A、IsraelisoldierscarriedouttheappealtostopfireB、IsraelisoldierscontinuetopatrolunderinterimpeacedealsC、Israeli
Themagnetfortourists,thesymbolofthecity,Manhattanisprobablythemostdeceptiveoftheboroughstooutsiderswhogener
1Thecaseforcollegehasbeenacceptedwithoutquestionformorethanageneration.Allhighschoolgraduatesoughttogo,
Inhisessay"TheParableoftheTapeworm,"MarioVargasLlosaarguesthatattheheartofthewriter’swilltowriteisrebelli
Thesealaylikeanunbrokenmirrorallaroundthepine-girt,lonelyshoresofOrr’sIsland.Tall,kinglysprucesworetheirreg
HowtoConductEmploymentInterviewsGenerallyspeaking,thepurposeofemploymentinterviewsarethree-fold:a.tomatcha
随机试题
小蒋是一位中学教师,在教务处负责初一年级学生的成绩管理。由于学校地处偏远地区,缺乏必要的教学设施,只有一台配置不太高的PC可以使用。他在这台电脑中安装了MicrosoftOffice,决定通过Excel来管理学生成绩,以弥补学校缺少数据库管理系统的不足。
抗菌药物的不合理应用表现在诸多方面
A.巯基酶失活B.细胞色素氧化酶失活C.胆碱酯酶失活D.二氢叶酸还原酶失活E.环化酶失活金属中毒的机制是可使
女,78岁。因剧烈心前区疼痛6小时不缓解,急诊心电图提示广泛前壁心肌梗死。查体:BP100/60mmHg,呼吸急促,30次/分,口唇发绀,双肺底闻及细小水泡音,心率120次/分,心尖区第一心音减弱,可闻及舒张期奔马律。最可能的诊断是
锅炉压力容器定期检验时,以()为主,必要时才增加()方法。
关于气体的可缩性和膨胀性特点说法错误的是()。
《金融机构反洗钱规定》自()起施行。
供应商的企划与物流管理情况认证的内容主要有()。
关于成语或俗语所揭示的声学、热学现象,下列表述错误的是()。
A、邻居B、同事C、父子D、不认识D
最新回复
(
0
)