Something Happened Yesterday(昨日之事——班布里吉散文集)|报价￥43.40|图书,进口原版,Others 其他,
品牌：
基本信息
·出版社：Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc
·页码：176 页码
·出版日：2000年
·ISBN：0786705175
·条码：9780786705177
·版次：2000-07-28
·装帧：平装
·开本：20开 20开
内容简介
Book Description
Something Happened Yesterday holds new, various, and abundant delights for the many fans of Bainbridge's novels, not least among them her exchanges with her readers like Fred, on the history of beryl (the gemstone), or like the committee for East Clyst's "Cooker Prize" of a gas oven for winning authors. Pleasantly idiosyncratic, this collection of personal essays blends subtle observations of contemporary England with fond, personal memories of its past. The result is part diary, part memoir, all life.
Amazon.com
For six years, English novelist Beryl Bainbridge (The Birthday Boys) wrote a slightly dotty column for the London Evening Standard. Although the subject matter generally stays within the city's immediate environs, Bainbridge's skewed, droll reports will indulge her fans around the globe. Barmy digression is her stock in trade: attending a meeting to protest budget cuts in library services, she muses about playwright Joe Orton, who was "so incensed at his Islington branch failing to stock a copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that he defaced the jackets of lesser books and substantially raised the expectations of readers of Dorothy L. Sayers by incorporating the word 'knickers' in the blurb of one of her novels." Like a terrier with a juicy rat betwixt her teeth, Bainbridge grabs onto such small and large events as an MP hauled up for spanking and defended by "a medical chap" who claims "a whipping a day is more beneficial than an apple," a block fair where she is inveigled into reading fortunes, and an intrepid 5-year-old who interrupts a heated political discussion with a hose.
--Francesca Coltrera
FromPublishers Weekly
Originally when Bainbridge was asked to write a short weekly column for the Evening Standard, she "mistakenly attempted to grapple with so-called burning issues." Daunted by the amount of research and "informed comment" this required, she decided instead to focus on the daily events of her life, hence the rather modest title for this selection of 50 columns. As it happens, things that happened yesterday lead to recollections of things that happened many years previously as well as to things that didn't happen to her at all. Anyone who is familiar with Bainbridge's novels, say, The Secret Glass, will know that even the most ordinary council flat closet has some macabre skeleton ready-made for her sharp satire. Here the same applies: the structural decline of part of her house recalls the time her ex-mother-in-law tried to shoot her; thinking about exercise evokes her attempts to find out what kind of paperwork she would need to bury her mother in the back yard. She has little hobbies, like her museum with its piece of Herod's temple, her mother's teeth, a friend's gallstone, Melvyn Bragg's discarded sock. Her kids appear often, but more often is "a past which has become more real than the present." Bainbridge (who is best known in the U.S. for her novel The Birthday Boys, about Scott's expedition to the South Pole) is very English. Her humor is dry, pointed and very rooted in the culture, and some things may evade an American audience. The funniest bits, and often the most British, are the footnotes?Bainbridge's sober responses to letters from earnest eccentrics who could or should be Bainbridge's creations.
FromKirkus Reviews
A loose-knit collection of personal essays, all of them short, irreverent, and revealing, by one of Britains top novelists (Every Man for Himself, 1996; The Birthday Boys, 1994; etc.) When she first began her column for the London Evening Standard in the late '80s, Bainbridge claims that she ``mistakenly attempted to grapple with so-called burning issues,'' only to realize that such an undertaking required much research. Overwhelmed by the effort, she soon turned her attention home again. ``I'm not bothered,'' she writes, ``with causes or hard facts; my preoccupation is not with the immediate how and why of the lives we lead, but rather with a raking over of the life we once knew.'' And so she does, with self-deprecating wit and a knack for character-revealing detail. The character she exposes, however, is her own. Bainbridge casts herself as the slightly addled owner of a ramshackle house overrun by various adult daughters and their assorted children. At every turn, the author's efforts to write her column are interrupted by their comings and goings, as well as those of her secretary, her cleaning woman, her cat, her local ghost and equally local policeman. The tumult provides Bainbridge with enough centrifugal force to connect the ridiculous to the even more ridiculous, completely bypassing the sublime. Who else would link a brief discussion of philosopher David Hume to a failed attempt to rent a geriatric guest from the Council housing project for Christmas? Or use the event of a concert by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra to reflect upon a ruptured carbuncle and the decline of British manners? Although hardly profound, Bainbridge has a way of skewering her own foibles and those of the larger society with a deft pen, casually mixing and matching personal and social phenomena with the odd faux pas. Thus Bainbridge succeeds in creating a book of short essays as salty and addictive as a bag of crisps.
Book Dimension
Height (mm) 220 Width (mm) 145
目录
Preface
1 Street carnival
2 Film heroes
3 History of spanking
4 Vale of tears
5 Self-expression
……[看更多目录]
点此购买报价￥43.40
