苜蓿叶子

The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk

Jonathan Coe

The slippery, equivocal texture of Orhan Pamuk's second novel — written between 1985 and 1989 — is a reflection both of its literary aesthetic and of the modern Istanbul where the story is set. This is a world in which "everything imitated everything else — where all the stories and the people were simultaneously themselves and their own imitations, and where all stories alluded to other stories". It would be possible, then, to describe the book in terms of plot (lawyer's wife disappears leaving a curt note, he spends the next week searching for her), or theme (national and personal identity, loss of self, nostalgia, storytelling). But given its own obsession with narrative allusions, an equally direct avenue of approach is through the numerous other recent novels to which it bears a resemblance.

Comparisons with Eco's monumental Foucault's Pendulum are inevitable: both books immerse the reader in mad political conspiracy theories, labyrinthine accounts of underground sects and buried histories, in order to bring theories of modern linguistics (like the disjunction between signifier and signified) to narrative life. Its concern with a reluctant investigator gradually shedding his own identity calls to mind Paul Auster's New York Trilogy; its highly intellectualised preoccupation with face and gesture as the expression of character suggests Kundera's Immortality. The plot device of a decent, bewildered man deserted without explanation by his wife, triggering a search which itself becomes an exercise in self-examination, was used recently by Tim Winton in The Riders. Pamuk's novel shares with Milorad Pavic's Landscape Painted With Tea a structural and thematic fascination with anagrams, word-puzzles and acrostics. But most of all, it resembles Francisco Goldman's The Long Night Of White Chickens — a similarly long, complex, metaphysical thriller, also with a journalistic background, in which the hero sets off in futile pursuit of a vanished woman and comes up against an impenetrable wall of double-talk and political corruption.

In part, these comparisons simply point up an interesting overlap between a whole sequence of novels published during the last 10 years, all from very different cultures; but also, paradoxically, they alert us to what is most original in Pamuk's work. For none of them have quite the note of sly, generous, rueful humanity which makes The Black Book so consistently engaging across its span of 400 otherwise demanding pages.

How much of this is an intrinsically Turkish quality, and how much a product of Pamuk's own distinctive authorial voice, is difficult to say. Certainly we get a strong sense of the city as Pamuk's appealing young hero, Galip, plods randomly through the snowswept, nocturnal streets of Istanbul, searching for his wife Ruya and — more assiduously — her half-brother Jelal, one of the country's most famous political columnists. His writing is full of sympathy for families crammed into monolithic, impersonal apartment buildings, commuters let down by non-existent buses, dreamers gawping at Westernised images of perfection in Sunday afternoon movie theatres. And he's good on the small comedies of family life, awkward domestic suppers, ageing aunts and uncles caught up in the rituals of a lifetime (like Uncle Melih who insists on rereading the newspapers in different rooms, "as if the same news might conceivably be interpreted differently downstairs than it was upstairs").

All of this adds a profound social and human dimension to a novel which might otherwise run the risk of confining itself too rigorously to the world of ideas. The structure is rigid and schematic, with chapters describing Galip's search alternating with examples of Jelal's learned, wide-ranging columns. These columns form the scholarly backbone of the book, and gradually cohere into a massive disquisition on folklore, Islam and recent Turkish political history, so that a parallel emerges between Galip's personality crisis and the struggle of an entire culture to maintain a sense of identity in the face of seductive Western overtures.

Whodunnit fans seeking tidy solutions should take heed of an early sentence in which Galip suggests that "the only detective novel worth reading would be one in which the writer himself didn't know the identity of the murderer". The whole temperament of the novel is resistant to closure, but the final pages do have the affecting stamp of emotional rightness. "Istanbul is a grand place, an incomprehensible place," Galip concludes. Pamuk's novel, which raises far more questions than it answers, mirrors these qualities and makes of them something at once both complete and unsettling.

原本定于8月8日的献血活动，因为生理期的不期而至化为了灰影。献血没有献成本来就很遗憾了，而更难的是每次都得要把不献血的原因讲给男辅导员听，这又无形中凭添一些尴尬。而且我遇到这样的情况已经是第二次了。讲多了就觉得好象你这人道德败坏，一献血就。。。实在是太囧了。

考试完回家，情绪就一直比较低落。睡觉前躲在枕头里哭泣。就算哭累了睡觉也会做噩梦。整天也不知道在干写什么。上日语课的时候，被老师抽到回答问题。我没留意到老师叫到的时候，她把问题读了几遍我也没回应。到最后别人都往我这里投来奇怪的目光我才反应过来。早上起来也不梳头，房间里的东西堆地乱七八糟。

说到做噩梦，我来nail down一下。

梦的主旨就是我要被杀了。I narrowly escaped being killed. 这句话老是被用来考narrowly的用法，没想到却在自己的身上应验了（梦也算是半个现实）。地点是在奉贤校区。好象是我暗中目睹了某人被杀害，而杀手知道了我是唯一一个可能导致事情败露的人。并且我也知道杀人者发现了我的存在。此时我正好住在医院里。当天下午就有个护士推推搡搡地带着我去注射治疗。但我怎么都觉得这个护士面带凶相，怎么都觉得一旦我被注射了这个药剂，我就会死。一切都准备妥当了，袖管也撩上去了，手的姿势也摆好了，就等着打针了。我却不甘心了。我怎么能白白送死呢？明知道这个护士是坏人是一伙的？我想了一个实在是很拙劣的一听就会被揭穿的借口：我要上厕所。护士将信将疑地同意了。大概她觉得我多半也跑不了吧。结果是我的确跑了。我跑下医院，穿过大学生活动中心，教学大楼，逃出了学校。一边逃一边把套在身上的病服给脱了。（一个穿着医院病服的人疯狂地在路上奔，准被拦下来。）而且我的时间不多，一旦护士发现我消失了，必定报告还潜伏在校园里的杀手，而若杀手出动来找我，我就基本上完结了。（我还蛮佩服自己的，虽然是做梦，但思路还是蛮清晰的）我跑到了隔壁的兄弟学校，在一对我认识的夫妇家先暂时安顿了下来。（这对夫妇的原形就是我爸妈）我大致跟他们说了事情的大概。他们决定周五学校车辆进出比较频繁地时候再把我安全带回市区。就在我在他们家藏了不到半天，下午，便门铃声响，看来有人来访。我曾经跟他们说过这个星期不要接待任何客人。但他们觉得没有应该没有危险，而且是熟人，就让客人近来了。我则藏在房间隐蔽处，听他们在客厅里聊天。

然后，我就醒了。

醒来我还觉得不过瘾，就想了两个可能的结局。

大结局一：来者的确是熟人。一个小时后客人离开。我也被夫妇俩用车安全地运出学校，躲过了杀手的视线，逃脱了被杀害的命运。

大结局二：来者的确是熟人，但他还有第二重身份，就是他是杀手组织的雇佣探子。机敏的他嗅出了空气中的不安气氛，并确定我就在这间屋子里。于是他残忍地杀害了夫妇俩，并且把我从房间暗处揪了出来。于是我还是逃脱不了呜呼的命运。

说完。

梦其实不是重点。

重点是哪位深谙弗洛伊德精神分析法，或者把《梦的解析》从头到尾再从尾到头看过三遍的朋友能为我解释下我为什么做这种那么没营养的梦呢？

重点是作完梦的第二天我就带着我的妈妈奔丧去了……妈妈老同学的妈妈过世了。殡仪馆是在宝山的。所以我们换了三部车，在烈日下一边酝酿沉痛的心情一边横跨了上海市，从南端颠簸到北端，参加这么个说来也比较突然的葬礼。别说，等哀乐响起，真的是有想哭的心情。尤记得上一次参加葬礼是在十二年前外婆去世时。那时我年少无知，对中国传统丧葬仪式一无所知，在大人的挟持下扮演了一个外孙女应扮演的角色。而现在再来看这大殓的过程，觉得的确博大精深。唯一不如意的是喝的好象是不洁红糖水，回家后有轻微腹泻的倾向……

最近饿补村上春树取得了显著的成效。如今除了《奇鸟行状录》，《世界尽头与冷酷仙境》这两部重要长篇手头没有之外，村上的长篇小说读的差不多了。越读越喜欢，越读越爱不释手。

孤独
人就是如此地矛盾：一方面渴求着不断地探求自我，一方面又将所有的外来的接近包括来自自己的接近拒之门外。到最后，每个人都孤独地生活在这个世界上。这孤独感与生俱来，想要消除大概是万万不可能的。孤独。纵然日月光华消逝，也无非再为这个暗红的烙印增几道疤痕罢了。

I’m Johnny
Johnny退居于自己的oyster中，以自我为中心拉下了警戒线。一旦陌生人闯入，在“哔——哔——”的警报声中，Johnny断然转向oyster的更深处……
有时，我就是Johnny。 

流水帐
“没有一个人能理解我”的沮丧和无奈会像早已淡忘的朋友发来的问候短消息那样时不时地作祟一阵，然后怀揣着要发誓从今天开始爱自己的决心在行将过期的日子上打个红叉。 

大世界·小戏子
以前说我喜欢某某小说，若是通俗小说通常情节曲折离奇，场面宏伟瑰丽，若是文艺小说一般不是先锋一骑绝尘，就是现实娓娓道来。即使读至精彩出击掌赞好，也是给作者的与己无关。最近重拾村上，心灵的契合如盛着红酒的高脚玻璃杯的碰撞，一泻千里，酣畅淋漓。而鼓掌，不仅仅为了村上，也为和村上笔下的主角有点相似的，自己。

PS：庆幸自己终于写出一点象样的东西。