恶棍来访 – A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

美国著名作家、普利策奖和国家书评奖双料得主珍妮弗•伊根（Jennifer Egan）的获奖作品——《恶棍来访》一书犹如一张音乐唱片，由Part A 和Part B两个部分组成。全书用13个既相互关联又相互独立的片段13个“曲目”讲述了一系列有趣的人物的故事：一位身染盗窃癖的女秘书；一位在采访时试图非礼女明星而为此坐牢数年的八卦杂志记者；一位事业上遭受挫败之后铤而走险的前公关经理；一位在事业上走下坡路的唱片公司监制；还有这位监制的老师——一位曾经叱咤风云的唱片业老大；此外还有当年那群中学生中的摇滚明星、如今却落魄成一位清洁工的不得志中年人；一群迷恋摇滚乐的70年代中学生；两个热衷于研究摇滚乐和制作PowerPoint幻灯片的（零零后）少年………这些看似独立而又个性化的人物故事犹如各个精彩曲目散落在全书的十三个章节之中，作者用音乐这条主线巧妙地将这些故事串联起来，展现了整个美国音乐产业、不同时代的科技与文化现象，一代摇滚青年的青春与理想，在时间的流逝中兴衰、起落与幻灭。音乐产业的辛酸流变，科技的突飞猛进，情感的起起落落，无不刻上了时间“恶棍”的无情烙印。

该书传达了一个让人慨叹的主旨——时间这条“恶棍”依次造访这些故事里的主人公，青春逐渐消逝，梦想消耗殆尽，在时间这条长河的岸边回望逝去的爱情、友情、遗憾、创伤，不禁令人唏嘘。

Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.

We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city’s demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life—divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house—and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco’s punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang—who thrived and who faltered—and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou’s far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progress of time—in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.

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