首页
登录
职称英语
No matter what you write, your mother will always believe it’s about her. So
No matter what you write, your mother will always believe it’s about her. So
游客
2025-01-01
14
管理
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. [br] 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://tihaiku.com/zcyy/3894424.html
相关试题推荐
Nomatterwhatyouwrite,yourmotherwillalwaysbelieveit’sabouther.So
Scholarandstudentshavealwaysbeengreattravelers.Theofficialcasefor
Scholarandstudentshavealwaysbeengreattravelers.Theofficialcasefor
Mymothertoldmeastoryeveryeveningwhilewewaitedforfathertoclose
Mymothertoldmeastoryeveryeveningwhilewewaitedforfathertoclose
Mymothertoldmeastoryeveryeveningwhilewewaitedforfathertoclose
Dependingonwhomyoubelieve,theaverageAmericanwill,overalifetime,w
[originaltext]W:HelloFred.Youdon’tlooksogood.What’sthematter?M:Iju
[originaltext]W:HelloFred.Youdon’tlooksogood.What’sthematter?M:Iju
[originaltext]W:HelloFred.Youdon’tlooksogood.What’sthematter?M:Iju
随机试题
Thesimpleactofsurrenderingatelephonenumbertoastoreclerkmaynots
PassmethedictionarywhenJack(use)______it.hasused本题测试的是动词时态的用法。本句是祈使句。从句
嗜酸性粒细胞不升高的疾病是A.猩红热 B.伤寒 C.慢性粒细胞白血病 D.
自然数P满足下列条件:P除以10的余数为9,P除以9的余数为8,P除以8的余数为
实施教师聘任制的步骤、办法由( )规定。A.所在学校 B.当地教育局 C.
(2016年11月)技术等级工资制由()组成。A.工资等级 B.工资等级线
确立辨证论治理论体系的著作是A.《黄帝内经》 B.《伤寒杂病论》 C.《神农
下列哪些选项属于法院应当终止审理的情形?A:张某涉嫌销售赃物一案,经审理认为情节
A.精神分析学派 B.行为主义学派 C.人本主义学派 D.心理生理学理论
患者,女,48岁。放置宫内节育器(IUD)10年,不规则阴道流血3个月。妇科检查
最新回复
(
0
)