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類別：小說/文學 (agent : Mingming)
THE EMPEROR'S CHILDREN
帝王之子
- by
Claire Messud
Format: 精裝 , 448 頁 , 2006 年 8 月 出版 / Knopf
本書趁著精裝首版 10 萬本之勢 , 發行五周就登上紐約時報暢銷書榜第五名 . 英美各媒體佳評如潮 .
曼哈頓 , 2001 年 , 正當三十出頭的三位好友正往成功之路邁進 …
Danielle, 新進的電視節目製片人 , 忙著可使她功成名就的新聞紀錄片取材 ; Marina , 身為一位著名富裕的新聞工作者和知識份子的美麗女兒 , 急著證明自我價值 , 但卻沒有信心可以達成 ; Julius, 一位自由作家 , 身無分文的他一心想過著美妙的曼哈頓生活 .
本書以這三位朋友為經 , 他們重疊的社會和家庭圈為緯 , 透過他們的每日生活 , 他們追尋成功的奮鬥歷程 , 探求真理的掙扎 . 如透過顯微鏡 , 周詳地洞察關於曼哈頓生活的細微差異 , 以生動的文字呈現 . 本書是一本對於曼哈頓那特別一刻精確構圖的著作 , 在一天中的一件事件如何改變人生 , 讓讀者縈繞心頭 .
Summary
From a writer “of near-miraculous perfection” ( The New York Times Book Review ) and “a literary intelligence far surpassing most other writers of her generation” ( San Francisco Chronicle ), The Emperor's Children is a dazzling, masterful novel about the intersections in the lives of three friends, now on the cusp of their thirties, making their way—and not—in New York City.
There is beautiful, sophisticated Marina Thwaite—an “It” girl finishing her first book; the daughter of Murray Thwaite, celebrated intellectual and journalist—and her two closest friends from Brown, Danielle, a quietly appealing television producer, and Julius, a cash-strapped freelance critic. The delicious complications that arise among them become dangerous when Murray 's nephew, Frederick “Bootie” Tubb, an idealistic college dropout determined to make his mark, comes to town. As the skies darken, it is Bootie's unexpected decisions—and their stunning, heartbreaking outcome—that will change each of their lives forever.
A richly drawn, brilliantly observed novel of fate and fortune—of innocence and experience, seduction and self-invention; of ambition, including literary ambition; of glamour, disaster, and promise— The Emperor's Children is a tour de force that brings to life a city, a generation, and the way we live in this moment.
作者 About the Illustrator
Claire Messud 's first novel, When the World Was Steady, and her book of novellas, The Hunters, were finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award; her second novel, The Last Life, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and an Editor 's Choice at The Village Voice . All three books were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe Fellowship, and is the current recipient of the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Somerville , Massachusetts , with her husband and children.
國外書評
“Messud is a remarkably gifted novelist, blessed with enormous poise, authority and emotional insight. Set in New York City on the eve of 9/11, [ The Emperor's Children is] about three college classmates, now on the cusp of their 30' s, trying to sort out questions about love, work and commitment . . . inhabit[ing] the margins of Manhattan's literary-media-arts world [and] uncertain how to balance the equation between moral seriousness and success, earnestness and irony. Messud delineates this world with quick, sure, painterly strokes . . . . [She] does a nimble, quicksilver job of portraying her characters from within and without–showing us their pretensions, frailties and self-delusions, even as she delineates their secret yearnings and fears . . . [She] uses their stories to explore questions about how an individual hammers out an identity under the umbrella of a powerful family, questions about the ways in which people mythologize their own lives and the lives of those they love. Messud shift[s] gears effortlessly between the comic and the tragic, the satiric and the humane.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Like a latter-day Edith Wharton, Claire Messud, in her sparkling new novel, has given us a story of striving young Manhattanites, a confident turn from a writer whose work has always been impressive, if never quite this much fun . . . . Richly imagined and occasionally wicked . . . This is New York captured with the sharp focus of a local.”
—Taylor Antrim, Vogue
“[A] book of dazzling reach . . . Messud [writes] with precision, humour and loveliness.”
—Gaby Wood, The Observer
“A gripping story of clashing ambitions, compromised loyalties, and the love/hate relationship between the powerless and the powerful. As the characters hurl toward that terrible September day, the narrative goes beyond social satire, deepening into a hypnotic, moving read.”
—Sara Eckel, The Village Voice
“A masterly comedy of manners–an astute and poignant evocation of hobnobbing glitterati . . . On its surface, a stingingly observant novel about the facades of the chattering class–with its loves, ambitions, and petty betrayals–but it is also, more profoundly, about a wholesale collision of values . . . A penetrating testament to the power of the human imagination . . . A splendid novel . . . A novelist of unnerving talent.”
— Meghan O'Rourke , New York Times Book Review
“Engrossing . . . As the . . . appealing characters pose and evade the question of what it means to be genuine or false, they draw you in. You're all theirs–and Messud's, for as long as this witty and substantial tale lasts.”
— People
“[A] witty examination of New York 's chattering classes.”
— The New Yorker
“Flawlessly drawn . . . . engrossing . . . Messud has pinned under glass members of a striking subspecies of the modern age: the smart, sophisticated, anxious young people who think of themselves as the cultural elite. Trained for greatness in the most prestigious universities, these shiny liberal arts graduates emerge with expensive tastes, the presumption of entitlement, and no real economic prospects whatsoever. If you're one of them or if you can't resist the delicious pleasure of pitying them, you'll relish every page of The Emperor's Children . Murray Thwaite, the regal figure around which all these characters orbit, is Messud's masterpiece. A journalist who's been skating on his reputation for decades, Murray is the quintessential public intellectual, the moral conscience of the age (a pompous old windbag and a serial adulterer). He's burnt to such a crisp under Messud's laser wit that real-life windbags all over New York may want to keep their heads down till the smoke clears. Messud is that bold spectator in the crowd willing to shout out that the emperor has no clothes–and neither do his children. Messud's real audience is broad . . . in the same way that Edith Wharton focused on a particularly rarefied class but spoke to any reader who could relish her piercing cultural commentary. For us, Messud's novel, so arch and elegantly phrased, is a chance to enter a world in which everything glistens with her wit, like waking to an early frost: refreshing, enchanting and deadly. The most remarkable quality of Messud's writing may be its uncanny blend of maturity and mirth. Somehow, she can stand in that chilly wind blowing on us all and laugh.”
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book World
“A stinging portrait of life among Manhattan 's junior glitterati, [including] three best friends [who], a decade after they met at Brown, are finding it hard to be 30. . . . Messud deftly paints the neurotic uncertainties of people who know they're privileged and feel sorry for themselves anyway; she makes her characters human . . . Intelligent, evocative and unsparing.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“Messud, in her fourth novel, remains wickedly observant of pretensions–intellectual, sexual, class and gender. Her writing is so fluid, and her plot so cleverly constructed, that events seem inevitable, yet the narrative is ultimately surprising and masterful.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Riveting . . . . A cheeky expose of the pundit class in all its privileged splendor. Messud's insights are nuanced enough that her flawed luminaries survive as more than mere types, and even minor characters make their mark. Messud extracts considerable suspense from the young cultural pretenders' attempts to topple the old guard . . . . An excellent read.”
— The Atlantic Monthly
“Soft-spoken and worldly-wise beyond her years, Claire Messud has been praised for her precisely crafted, sharply intelligent fictions–her novels of manners have manners. [But] Messud's ambitious, glamorous, and gutsy new novel, The Emperor's Children , is a leap forward, a marvel of bold momentum and kinetic imagination. The story propels the tangled lives of a set of thirtyish Manhattanites right toward the historic fissure that ushered in 21st century America .”
— Elle
“Wonderful . . . fat, delicious, and very smart . . . With her own beefy degrees from Yale and Cambridge , [and] her award nominations for her previous books, Messud is clearly of the culturally elite world she writes about. But happily, she is not bound by it. She has thoughtfully overlaid this big, character-driven novel of how some of us live today with a deeply informed echoing of literary history. Rather than showing off her education by writing a flashy meta-novel about everything and nothing, Messud reaches into her literary kit-bag and reworks classic dilemmas and characters via the novels of Wharton, Fitzgerald, and Waugh, to name a few. She complicates those archetypes by unwinding the illusions that wrap her characters in a sense of superiority. By the end of this tale, the emperor's children have no clothes, although one holdout, at least, remains blind to the naked truth . . . A lot of the pleasure of reading The Emperor's Children derives from its language, which entertains because of its droll precision . . . Superb.”
—Maureen Corrigan, NPR / Fresh Air
“Splendid . . . Masterly . . . Astute and poignant, stingingly observant . . . delightful–even delicious . . . a formally nimble novel of formidable scale . . . The novel entwines the stories of [three friends] who met at Brown University and embody the different methods by which American privilege is accrued and sustained. Messud's prose is whorled and Jamesian, her plot labyrinthine and deftly orchestrated . . . Among its many pleasures, The Emperor's Children is a penetrating testament to [the] power of the human imagination . . . . Claire Messud is a novelist of unnerving talent.”
— Meghan O'Rourke , New York Times Book Review
“[A] great achievement. Claire Messud's new novel will make her name . . . intelligent and unsparing . . . The Emperor's Children is likely to be one of the most talked-about novels of the Autumn. Buy two copies; give one to a friend.”
— The Economist
“Known for her acuity in examining life's profound issues through intellectually probing and nuanced prose, Messud now evinces a higher level of sophistication in this darkly symbolic and satiric examination of the culturally enclosed world of today's East Coast media cognoscenti . . . Tangy dialogue, provocative asides [and] glittering imagery build toward an electrifying conclusion.”
—Carol Haggas, Booklist
“As if to flaunt her uncanny understanding of human nature, Claire Messud fleshes out the personalities of her characters so thoroughly and authentically [that] it is nearly impossible to imagine that they don't really exist. Add to that the book's setting–New York City in 2001, with historical events and pop-culture references accurately in place–and the story comes alive with astounding vividness . . . Messud's writing is poetic, her insights spot-on . . . [It] is heartening to read words that so skillfully capture the city, the time and such wonderfully textured people.”
—Kate Lowenstein, Time Out New York
“Delightful . . . [ The Emperor's Children ] impressively explores entitlement and waning youth.”
—Gilbert Cruz, Entertainment Weekly
“Absorbingly intelligent . . . Sure-handed . . . [ The Emperor's Children centers around] three privileged college chums who hover on the outskirts of New York intelligentsia in 2001. Months before Sept. 11, they are all questioning their choices and life goals . . . [and as] the year progresses toward fall, [their] lives take a darker turn . . . The characters are terrifically rendered . . . Messud is adroit at handling their insecurities and inner emotions . . . and her exploration of entitlement is both witty and astute.”
—Yvonne Zipp, The Christian Science Monitor
“Engaging . . . At its finest, social comedy promises a soft landing without utterly turning its back on the world. Irony bumping into realism, in other words, and in Claire Messud's case, a bit of Jane Austen bumping into Tom Wolfe. The Emperor's Children is a big ol' New York novel--more particularly, a Manhattan novel, concentrating on the echelons of power and hipness. The setup is delicious . . . In her group portrait of young privileged friends from Brown she has devised a wicked way to penetrate the realms of journalism and publishing and liberals in wolves' clothing . . . . . . Messud's perspective is fierce but unbiased . . . . She is a literary writer both brainy and deep . . . her eye is keen for the elaborate tableau she's constructed . . . The Emperor's Children is funny and captivating.”
—Gail Caldwell, Boston Sunday Globe
“The narrative point-of-view shifts freely among five characters, each reflecting on the others, alternately judging or absolving, and sometimes loving–which may, in the end, amount to the same thing. [Messud] paints them with color and detail and considerable skill. The pleasures of Messud's prose are enlivening. She turns a very elegant phrase . . . The most incidental of [her] descriptions are fresh and vivid . . . Messud wisely avoids describing the event [9/11] itself, but it has powerful reverberations for the characters and the plot. The tragedy does not offer neat redemption for anyone–each is still flawed, in his or her own way. But it does reveal how history, unexpected and irresistible, can alter lives and move us forward . . . The pulse of real life [is] on every page of The Emperor's Children .”
—Tom Beer, Newsday
“A rare gem . . . Surprising . . . Luminously intelligent . . . In its scope, style and substance, The Emperor's Children is an attempt to return the novel to its golden age; it is engaged in a conversation with George Eliot, Henry James, Dostoevsky. Its psychological realism is perfect, its characters thrillingly real, alive and utterly convincing. Messud's prose is a timely and intensely pleasurable reminder of the possibilities of the English language. To use the word clarity about her style is to return the word to its origins; this is style as illumination, shining a searching yet sympathetic light on the minds and inner worlds of her characters, and as a radiant mode of moral inquiry.”
—Neel Mukherjee, The Sunday Times (UK)
“The aspiring young people in The Emperor's Children , are each looking, in different ways, for fame, love and excitement. All are desperately eager not to be taken for ‘ordinary.' The result is an extraordinary novel . . . Messud weaves her storylines together ingeniously, portraying her characters with a shrewd perceptiveness and making their fates seem, for much of the novel, suspensefully uncertain and, by the end, morally illuminating and surprising. Her distinctive prose style reminds one of an updated Henry James . . . Ms. Messud has composed a comedy of manners, a satire on journalism and misplaced ambition, and a probing, poignant, drama about confused urban lives.”
—Merle Rubin, The Wall Street Journal
“ The Emperor's Children is a robust, canny and surprisingly searching novel [told] with a light-handed irony that is, by turns, as measured as Edith Wharton's and as cutting as Tom Wolfe's. [Messud is] an elegant, serious writer who can interweave intimate stories of individuals with wider considerations, both political and philosophical . . . In The Emperor's Children , Messud . . . creat[es] a delicious social satire about a small group of navel-gazing New York intellectuals (and their romantic and social shenanigans) on the eve of the end of the world as we knew it. Here, she shows us how history does and does not change us, how character is borne helplessly forward by external events while remaining stubbornly true to itself. This intractability is her characters' strength as well as their often hilarious–and ultimately sad–burden . . . Their self-importance, their social swagger, their intellectual gamesmanship are all drawn with satiric gusto, as Messud makes clever entertainment of her characters' parries and thrusts . . . The trouble that ensues is marvelously orchestrated and achieved with vivid winking humor, as Messud both skewers and loves her characters so that we may do the same . . . She conveys the landscape with precision and dead-on emotional accuracy . . . [Messud] is [a] keen observer of character and the world at large . . . [She] seems to be telling us that we must have our myths; we can't do otherwise and exist. They are our strength and our folly. And folly, as she so dazzlingly demonstrates, is the stuff that reveals us in all our hilarious, pathetic and, yes, sometimes even heroic glory.”
—Marisa Silver, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A splendidly entertaining achievement . . . a strikingly good story about family and betrayal, truth and ambition, fidelity and desire . . . Messud's writing is captivating. She has broad powers of embrace, catching emotion in mid-flight and giving us the feel of thought rather than the usual thoughts about feeling that many writers deliver . . . One of the slyest, most intelligent and entertaining novels of the year.”
—Alan Cheuse, San Francisco Chronicle
“[A] big, readable, ambitious contemporary comedy of manners.”
— Michelle Huneven , LA Weekly
“Delightful . . . The Emperor's Children [is] distinctive [because of] the author's uncompromising regard for the truth. [It is] a work of fiction, but one that rings true. Messud's portrayal of New York is spot-on. Her diction is precise and her characters wryly observant.”
—Andrea Katz, The Financial Times ( UK ) (August 18, 2006)
“In The Emperor's Children , Claire Messud gives us an arresting, penetrating, deeply satisfying contemporary group portrait. Her characters, and in particular the political and cultural dimensions of their agitated lives, are developed with genuine art. This novel is richer than a comedy of manners: it's a comedy of mores.”
—Norman Rush
“A delicious depiction of tangled lives ‘torn between Big Ideas and a party.' It has taken five years for Sept. 11, 2001, to receive a novelist's subtle and satisfying treatment, but it was worth the wait for Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children. Her intimation of the mark the attacks made on the American mind is convincing because in her comedy of manners, as in the nation's life, that horrific event is, oddly, both pivotal and tangential.”
—George Will, The Washington Post
“Engaging and thought-provoking . . . . the characters take on intriguing nuances as Messud satirizes and challenges perceived notions of culture, class and social mobility. Her vivid, juicy writing ensures an exhilarating read throughout.”
—Elysa Gardner, USA Today
“[A] suspenseful, dark, pitch-perfect comedy of manners and morals . . . The story is structured as a literary fugue, whose voices comprise a trio of Brown University graduates in New York City, all on the cusp of turning 30 . . . . Set in the spring, summer and fall of 2001, The Emperor's Children can also be considered a work of historical fiction: The reader is expected to open the book knowing that these late twentysomethings, who yearn to be stars in East Coast media and intellectual circles, developed their expectations of entitlement when they reached their majority in the early 1990' s, [an age] of lavish magazine start-ups and ‘renovations' of older publications . . . . Joyously for the reader, their expectations from life provide a gigantic target for the novelist, who, with grace and formidable expertise at plot-making, one by one dismantles them . . . . [Yet for] all their flaws and bad behavior, one cares about these characters . . . Outstanding.”
—Mindy Aloff , New York Observer
“Pitch-perfect, utterly irresistible . . . [Messud] strikes gold. [A] tightly knit web–a kind of mini-panorama of New York society–is at the heart of Messud's rather ingenious craft. The characters are all extraordinarily drawn . . . Stepping elegantly through the varieties of irony, Messud lifts superficially superficial characters out of the trivial; she endows them with tender complexity and then rips the carpet out from under their poor feet . . . . [Their] ambitions may be petty, but Messud's perspective on them is calibrated and so achingly real . . . Sit back and watch Messud, who takes care of [them] with style and zeal.”
—Minna Proctor, Bookforum
“Messud's gracefully written new novel, [with] prose reminiscent of Henry James, focuses on the moral dilemmas of a group of affluent young New York professionals, and the shocks delivered to their complacent self-belief by acts of personal and political violence.”
— The Independent
“[ The Emperor's Children ] carries a lot of weight: five fully developed, emotionally complex characters; a glittering city, described from the perspective of blase insiders and from the viewpoint of those newly arrived and lonely; a historic calamity; an audaciously acknowledged pantheon of literary models that includes not only the Russians but also William Empson, the James brothers, Musil, the Book of Genesis and Napoleon's journal. It is a heavy load, but Messud's book is so broadly based, so resiliently humorous that it easily sustains it . . . . Messud is satirically observant of the surfaces of the modern city. She is funny and wonderfully awake to the comedy of misunderstanding . . . As large-hearted as it is ambitious, this is a novel that combines the old-fashioned art of storytelling with a clear-eyed view of the modern world.”
— The Sunday Times
“The status of truth is one of the concerns running cleverly through Messud's new novel . . . [Messud is] attracted to the way fiction can explore existential questions, exposing the gaps between one person's view of themselves in the world and another's. The effect can be comic or satirical, and is often bracingly bleak . . . . [Yet] Messud does not invite us to judge the compelling characters who people her masterful novel, but to acknowledge that the truth can be overrated, and the myths by which we live more precious than we know.”
—Ruth Scurr, Times Literary Supplement
“Wolfi-ian chronicle of three Manhattanites who are all searching for the meaning of life. Spry and interesting.”
— Tatler Magazine Starred review in Kirkus of June 15th!
"A stinging portrait of life among Manhattan 's junior gliterati...
Messud deftly paints the neurotic uncertainties of people who know they are privileged and feel sorry for themselves anyway... Intelligent, evocative and unsparing." (First printing of 100,000)
UK praise for The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud:
‘Brilliant . . . a masterpiece' Independent on Sunday
‘Nothing less than an inquiry into the moral codes that animate us, the authenticity of human actions, and the validation and validity of such actions to both the introspective private self and the outer public world . . . In its scope, style and substance, The Emperor's Children is an attempt to return the novel to its golden age; it is engaged in a conversation with George Eliot, Henry James, Dostoevsky. Its psychological realism is perfect, its characters . . . thrillingly real, alive and utterly convincing in their subtleties of thought and the ticking of their minds. Messud's prose is a timely and intensely pleasurable reminder of the possibilities of the English language. To use the word clarity about her style – dense, chaste, luminously intelligent – is to return the word to its origins; this is style as illumination, shining a searching yet sympathetic light on the minds and inner worlds of her characters, and as a radiant mode of moral inquiry' The Times
‘Intelligent and unsparing . . . Messud excels at depicting the neurotic uncertainties of people who know they are privileged but feel sorry for themselves anyway. It is the finesse with which she satirizes thes people but still leaves you caring what happens to them that is the book's great achievement. The Emperor's Children is likely to be one of the most talked-about novels of the autumn . . . Buy two copies; give one to a friend ' Economist
‘As large-hearted as it is ambitious, this is a novel that combines the old-fashioned art of storytelling with a clear-eyed view of the modern world' Sunday Times
‘A novel which richly deserves to progress from the longlist to be among the final contenders for this year's Man Booker Prize . . . Messud beautifully captures the uncertainties, kindnesses and betrayals acted out in this playground of the privileged, using the lightest of touches . . . (and) masterfully reveals a bigger picture behind the intimate portraits' Irish Independent
‘Of all the works that have pored over the terrible events of 9/11, one novel is currently standing out from the crowd: Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children ' Scotsman
‘ The Emperor's Children is a work of fiction, certainly, but one that rings true. Messud's portrayal of New York is spot on. Her diction is precise and her characters wryly observant . . . Messud seems to be particularly fond of the way in which minute, seemingly commonplace events can have real significance in our lives' Financial Times
‘Messud writes with precision, humour and loveliness, spinning entire universes like plates . . . A book of dazzling reach' Observer
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