OTHER PEOPLE’S COUNTRIES: A JOURNEY INTO MEMORY
Book ID/图书代码： 11701213B66328
English Summary/英文概要： ‘The book, Other People’s Countries, recounts pieces of a childhood in the Belgian industrial town of Bouillon, where my grandmother was a small-town dressmaker and my grandfather was a factory worker. Because my parents travelled around the world and my upbringing was peripatetic and disorientating, Bouillon was the anchor of my childhood. My grandparents spoke French, but also a Walloon-inflected patois, and my upbringing was mostly, until the age of eight or nine, conducted in French and Bouillonnais. Most of my richest experiences have come from the linguistic in-betweenness this afforded me, and which almost certainly made me want to write, since writing for me has never been about mastering language but about feeling estranged inside it (rather than simply estranged from it). As for my childhood, which I think is like all childhood, give or take a few local specificities, I feel I belong to it more than it belongs to me. Yet at the same time, and like all children, I was always outside of it, looking in. Much of it doesn’t even feel as if it was mine; I feel now, as I felt then, as if I was incubating a childhood for someone else, like a kind of surrogate. Most of that childhood feels more real to me now than it did then.
In terms of its structure, the book is made up predominantly of prose pieces of various lengths (from two lines to three or four pages), with a dozen or so photographs (taken by Patrick) and a few poems. It is organized according to spots of time, memories, scenes, feelings, people and anecdotes, which amount to a sort of mosaic. By “mosaic” I don’t just mean pieces vaguely fitting together secured in place by the grouting of subjectivity, but a whole that is made up of brokenness, which is what I think memory is, and what we are. The photographs perhaps require some explanation here, because they are part of how the book arose: pictures of old people’s houses, abandoned stations, derelict shops, images of places that were once dynamic and full of life and commerce, work and play. The town is now in the endgame of economic depression, and the places I photographed have all disappeared. Many of the people I knew and loved have died, some old and in their due time, others young and before their time. In fact, what disturbs me most about the book is that I must have started to write it with a sixth sense of the place’s endangeredness: each time I go back someone has died, a building has been torn down, a house has been gutted or a shop has finally closed. If I were superstitious, I’d see a connection between my writing about it and its going, as if, by remembering it when it was still there, I was hastening its end.
“Liquidation totale” is the sign we see now in most of the shops and businesses I knew, while nearly half of the town’s houses are now boarded up, crumbling and eaten up by damp. Some of the houses have not even been emptied: you can look through a window and see tables set for meals or old three-piece suites, moth-eaten and rotting but still aimed at the black-screened TV in the corner of a living room.
The book is fed by two kinds of feeling. One is simply raw and painful: the sense of loss I have when I think of the people and the place and the language, and myself in relation to that world, which I will never return to though I may occasionally visit. I can’t think of a better provocation to writing than loss. More intellectually, the book comes from a dissatisfaction with the ways we have on offer to talk about ourselves. If I were able to I’d invent a new tense with which to replace those three stooges, the past, the present and the future, which seem to me hugely reductive ways of conveying how we experience the inside of our lives. Since I couldn’t invent a new tense, I made do with something else, a composite tense: a sort of long-past-but-still-unfolding present, and tried in this book to keep faith with that. An analogy would be the post-amputation tug or tingle of a lost limb: something gone but always making itself felt, and that is still used in a ghostly way, in a parallel world, and no less real for not being there. It also seemed to me to be an answer to the perennial question about how to write childhood, by conveying that paradoxical sense that all children have of being both central and marginal to their own lives.
Chinese Summary/中文概要： 获得 2014年度杜尔夫-库珀非小说奖
2015年度威尔士年度最佳图书奖
入围 2015年度詹姆斯·泰特·布莱克纪念奖
2015年度 彭阿克利奖
2014年度温特赖特奖
让我带你到比利时边境步永小镇精鹅卵石的街道上。让我带你进入这条通往过往的小巷。这是一处充满着魅力, 危机和奇迹的，和怪诞居民的小镇。在电视还没出现之前的日子里, Marie Bodard的糖果店, 纳粹占领时期和意想不到的合作者。因为猪和土豆的不幸一个邻居谋杀了另一个的地方。这里有法国诗人Verlaine和他的情人Rimbaud，为了逃避家庭, 债主和法律，而隐藏的一家旅馆。
这种对地点、时间和记忆的精妙冥想，是对其他人国家的非正规式的窥视，进入他们所居住的记忆空间，可能会让你以一种新的、令人惊讶的方式重新审视自己的国家。(Sandy)
Awards/获奖情况：Disarming, eloquent and illuminating, this meditation on place, time and memory, could only have been written by a poet, or a novelist, or a professor. Happily, Patrick McGuinness is all three, and Other People’s Countries is a marvel: a stunning piece of lyrical writing, rich in narrative and character – full of fresh ways of looking at how we grow up, how we start to make sense of the world.
This book evolved out of stories the author told his children: stories about the Belgian border town of Bouillon, where his mother came from, and where he has been going three times a year since he was a child – first with his parents and now with his son and daughter. This town of eccentrics, of charm, menace and wonder, is re-created beautifully– ’Most of my childhood,’ he says, ’feels more real to me now than it did then’. For all its sharp specifics, though, this is a book about the common, universal concerns of childhood and the slowly developing deep sense of place that is the bedrock for our memories.
Alert and affectionate, full of great curiosity and humour, Other People’s Countries has all the depth and complexity of its own subject – memory – and is an unfashionably distilled, resonant book: unusual and exquisite.
About the Author/作者介绍： Born in Tunisia in 1968, Patrick McGuinness is the author of The Last Hundred Days, which was longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the 2011 Costa First Novel Award and won the 2012 Wales Book of the Year Award. His other books include two collections of poems, The Canals of Mars (2004), and Jilted City (2010), He is a Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford, where he lectures in French.
Format:PROOF
Rights Status/版权销售情况：Simplified Chinese/简体中文：AVAILABLE
Complex/Traditional Chinese/繁体中文：AVAILABLE
Sales in other countries/其他国家销售情况：New title, OTHER PEOPLE’S COUNTRIES: UK: Jonathan Cape (pub February 2014); France: Grasset
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