基本信息出版社：Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
页码：288 页
出版日期：2006年05月
ISBN：0747584583
条形码：9780747584582
版本：2006-05-01
装帧：平装
开本：32开 Pages Per Sheet
外文书名：地下孩童
内容简介 Book Description
From the author of While I Was Gone, a magnificent new novel that showcases Sue Miller's singular talent for exposing the nerves that lie hidden in marriages, families, and the lives of women.
Maine, 1919. Georgia Rice, who has cared fro her father and two siblings since her mother's death, is diagnosed, at 19, with tuberculosis and sent away to a sanitarium. Freed from the burdens of caretaking, she discovers a nearly lost world of youth and possibility, and meets the doomed young man who will become her lover.
Vermont, the present. On the heels of a divorce, Catherine Hubbard, Georgia's granddaughter, takes up residence in Georgia's old house. Sorting through her own affairs, Catherine stumbles upon the true story of Georgia's life and marriage, and the misunderstanding upon which she build a lifelong love.
In the stories of these two women—linked by bitter disappointments, compromist, and powerful grace—Sue Miller offers us a novel of astonishing richness and emotional depth. The World Below captures the shadowy half-truths of the visible world, and the beauty and sorrow submerged beneath the surfaces of our lives—the lost world of the past, our lost hopes for the future. An extraordinary novel from one of our finest storytellers.
Amazon.com
There is nothing remarkable about the plot of Sue Miller's graceful novel, The World Below. Cath Hubbard, a San Francisco woman in her 50s, returns to her grandmother's small Vermont house after the death of an aunt who left the property to Cath and her brother Lawrence. Cath had lived with her grandparents for a few years in her teens, after her mother's suicide, and now makes her wounded way back, in the wake of a divorce, to sort through her memories of her beloved grandmother, Georgia. This is the standard fare of American literary fiction: a life change prompting a search into the past. What is far less ordinary is Miller's placid, nuanced depiction of her protagonist's emotional journey. None of Cath's feelings can be easily predicted by the reader, but all of them ring true. She finds her grandmother's diary and begins to fill in the stories that Georgia had hinted at over the years. What Cath discovers in her grandmother's journal is a secret that has lost its power to shock; and that very wearing away of taboo adds to the poignancy of Georgia's restricted life. Her story unfolds against a backdrop of Cath's more immediate griefs and concerns and begins to recede as Cath's San Francisco life returns to claim her. Miller's prose appears effortless, but is like the gestures of a magician that conceal how the trick is accomplished. The result is a sage, continually surprising novel about finding peace of mind in a combination of habit, love, and self-determination.
--Regina Marler
Amazon.co.uk
In Sue Miller's graceful novel, The World Below, Cath Hubbard, a San Francisco woman in her fifties, returns to her grandmother's small Vermont house after the death of an aunt who left the property to Cath and her brother Laurence. Cath had lived with her grandparents for a few years in her teens, after her mother's suicide, and now makes her wounded way back, in the wake of a divorce, to sort through her memories of her beloved grandmother, Georgia. This is the standard fare of American literary fiction: a life-change prompting a search into the past. What is far less ordinary is Miller's placid, nuanced depiction of her protagonist's emotional journey.
None of Cath's feelings can be easily predicted by the reader, but all of them ring true. She finds her grandmother's diary and begins to fill in the stories that Georgia had hinted at over the years. What Cath discovers in her grandmother's journal is a secret that has lost its power to shock; and that very wearing-away of taboo adds to the poignancy of Georgia's restricted life. Her story unfolds against a backdrop of Cath's more immediate griefs and concerns, and begins to recede as Cath's San Francisco life returns to claim her. Miller's prose appears effortless, but is like the gestures of a magician, that conceal how the trick is accomplished. The result is a sage, continually surprising novel about finding peace-of-mind in a combination of habit, love and self-determination.
--Regina Marler, Amazon.com
From Publishers Weekly
While Miller's gorgeous new novel, her sixth, works graceful variations of her perennial theme - our intimate betrayals - it also explores new terrain for the author: just what we can know of the past and of its influence on us. At the heart of Miller's story are two women, 52-year-old Catherine Hubbard and Catherine's now-deceased grandmother, Georgia Rice Holbrooke. At first blush, Catherine and Georgia couldn't seem more different. Catherine is a twice-divorced San Francisco schoolteacher, while her grandmother was a faithful country doctor's wife. But as the novel progresses, parallels emerge - the early deaths of their mothers, for instance - and their lives come to seem more deeply entwined. As the novel opens, Catherine and her brother have just inherited Georgia's old house in Vermont, and it is up to Catherine to figure out what to do with it. Still shell-shocked from her second divorce, Catherine decides to give life in Vermont a try, and, once settled, she discovers diaries and account books her grandmother kept, books that allow Catherine to reconstruct her grandmother's life. What Catherine discovers is a world she never imagined beneath the placid surface of Georgia's life. While she knew that Georgia was sent to a sanatorium for tuberculosis, she did not know the "san" changed Georgia's life. As Catherine sorts through her grandmother's life, she also sorts through her own: her mother's death, her two marriages, her boyfriends and her children. As readers have come to expect, Miller limns contemporary life in deft, sure strokes, with an unerring ear for the way parents and children talk; no one can parse a modern marriage as well as she can. But in this novel Miller's special gift to readers is her rendering of Georgia's life, particularly the two love stories that mark it. Miller portrays the feverish period in the san - the intrigues, the romances, the very romance of taking a cure - vividly and sensuously. (Surely her research was rigorous.) Likewise, Miller captures the early, fragile years of Georgia's marriage with great poignancy, ever dividing our sympathies between Georgia and her husband. In the Holbrookes, Miller has created a marriage that survives despite its fault lines, a marriage that seems both modern and old-fashioned: recognizably fraught, yet enduring, the sort of marriage readers hunger to read about. Perhaps that's why this novel is so satisfying. Random House audio (ISBN 0-375-41993-4). (Oct.) Forecast: Miller's many, many (mostly female) fans will relish this dip into the past, released in a 200,000-copy first printing. A 20-city author tour, advertising on Oprah and word-of-mouth should attract plenty of new readers, too.
From Library Journal
Miller (While I Was Gone) has a remarkable talent for paying scrupulous attention to the details of domestic life and nuances of personal relationships and then, with such seeming ease, relating them both truthfully and lovingly. Here she also shows the timelessness of the courses that human lives can take and the events that shape them. At 52, twice-divorced Cath Hubbard takes a sabbatical from her San Francisco teaching job to take possession of her grandparents' home. Contemplating starting a new life there in small-town Vermont, she uncovers truths about her beloved grandmother, Georgia Rice, on whom much of the story centers. Confined to a tuberculosis sanatorium before she was 20, Georgia found a different world with rules of its own where people behaved "scandalously," and her life was irrevocably changed. Cath finds parallels between her life and that of her Gran and insight into her grandparents' marriage that sheds light on her own failed ones, as events take the path of her own life out of her hands. A beautifully crafted and supremely satisfying work of fiction.
- Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA
From School Library Journal
When Catherine Hubbard goes to live in her grandmother Georgia's house, she discovers secrets about Georgia's past that affect her now. The 20-city author tour and 200,000-copy first printing speak volumes.
From Booklist
When Catherine Hubbard discovers the diary of her deceased grandmother, Georgia, she gains new insight into her family history. Georgia's mother died when she was 16. Forced to assume the role of caretaker to her younger siblings, she at first feels lost and alone; then, miraculously, she begins to build a truly independent life, setting her own almost-feral schedule--reading until midnight, climbing trees in the front yard with her sisters, shrieking and carrying on. But her "particular box of happiness" comes to an abrupt end when the local town doctor decides, by fiat, to send Georgia to a TB sanitarium; there she meets a young man and becomes his lover. When she finally returns home, she is no longer comfortable with her old life. Miller (While I Was Gone, 1999, an Oprah Book Club selection) excels at writing domestic fiction, and her novel fairly brims with vivid details of day-to-day family life, which she underpins with the overarching themes that mark all of her work: How much control should one person have over another? How do you move from misunderstanding and regret to intimacy? Although this novel might not be a good starting point for those new to her work--her subtle explorations of emotional nuance sometimes border on the obscure--veteran Miller devotees will not be able to put it down.
Joanne Wilkinson
From AudioFile
After her grandmother, Georgia, dies, Catherine Hubbard goes to live in her house, where she discovers Georgia's letters and diaries. However, to say this is merely the story of two women would be shortsighted. Miller's writing is spare and polished. She illuminates the details of life. We taste the flavor of ripe fruit and the crystalline crunch of sugar on bread and butter on Sunday after church. She brings into sharp focus the differences between what we say and what we mean, the worlds below our words. Judith Ivey's performance is as complex as a Mozart flute quartet. Her ear is tuned to Georgia's Downeast cadences in the Maine of 1919, and to Cath's contemporary voice, a continent and almost a century away. The future and the past come together in this celebration of the simplicity of human experience. S.J.H.
Book Dimension
length: (cm)17.8 width:(cm)11.1
作者简介 Sue Miller is the author of the bestselling novels While I Was Gone, The Good Mother, Inventing the Abbotts, Family Pictures, For Love, and The Distinguished Guest. She lives in Boston.