基本信息出版社：Picador
页码：250 页
出版日期：2002年01月
ISBN：0330480871
条形码：9780330480871
版本：2002-01-11
装帧：平装
开本：32开 Pages Per Sheet
外文书名：像房子一样
内容简介 Book Description
This is Jim Fraser's story: an incredible, often chilling account of his life as an army deserter living through the terrible upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, when China descended into a moral and physical chaos so extreme that cannibalism became, for some, the only way of survival. Unable to speak the language and totally ignorant of local customs, Jim Fraser makes his home in a community so isolated that even the Cultural Revolution impinges little on the ways of the villagers. Except that the village's very isolation has made it the perfect location for experiments of sheer, indescribable terror ...'I suspect this book will be compared with "Robinson Crusoe" (the outsider building his own abode) and "Lord of the Flies" (the long-term effects of context on individual mortality). It is a profound and sophisticated work of fiction' - "Observer".
Amazon.co.uk Review
Journalist Sid Smith's debut novel is a brave excursion into little-known and alien territory. Armed with stocks of historical, political and medical information, he has somehow made the imaginative leap into a realm few understand: the sealed-off world of China during the Cultural Revolution.
James Stuart Fraser, a private in the British Army, deserts and ends up spending 35 years "among the unshiftable Chinese". Many of those years are spent in the wretched poverty of a village of the despised Miao people, where life revolves around the solitary buffalo. The incredible tedium of Fraser's rural subsistence (existence is too strong a term) is evoked in a taut prose, filled with enthralling and convincing detail.
However, as time passes Fraser grows aware of the pseudo-academic work going on at the clinic, where eugenicists wreak havoc with village life in their search for the scientific "truth" of race. As years suddenly pass in a paragraph, the pace races unannounced to thriller speed and the carefully wrought momentum Smith had achieved is lost. Notwithstanding, Smith has an important story to tell, and at its best, Something Like A House is very good indeed.
--Alan Stewart
Book Dimension
length: (cm)19.7 width:(cm)12.8
作者简介 Sid Smith spent the first seven years of his working life in labouring jobs - including woodsman, hod-carrier, railway labourer, gravedigger and gardener. Born in Preston, Lancashire, he now lives in London and writes extensively for newspapers and magazines. His first novel, Something Like A House, won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and forms a sequel to A House By The River and now with China Dreams.
媒体推荐 Reviews
1."Smith is a mercurial stylist, his prose by turns confounding and comforting, earth-bound and star-gazing... Phrase-making of breathtaking beauty jostles with stunted English, poetic finesse with language of purely functional use. And all the time you are spell-bound, mesmerised by a disturbing arrhythmia, the most enduringly unsettling aspect of this haunting and original novel."
Charlie Hill, The Independent on Sunday
2."Smith's sparse narrative well evokes the bleak environment..."
Lisa Darnell, First Novels, The Guardian
3."An advance copy of Sid Smith's Something Like a House forces my year to end in January 2001. Never mind the 'first-novel' tag: this amazing, authoritative tale of a deserter in China - the only round-eye in the Red Guards - stains the mind indelibly, like a beautiful, harrowing dream."
Graham Robb, Books of the Year, Daily Telegraph
4."I suspect this book will be compared with Robinson Crusoe (the outsider building his own abode) and Lord of the Flies (the long-term effects of context on individual mortality). It is a profound and sophisticated work of fiction."
Robert MacFarlane, The Observer
5."...it is an impressively well-researched and sensitively imagined picture of an almost unknown society as it comes up against state politics, told in haunting, piercingly spare prose which never fails to make an impact. Smith's next novel should be eagerly awaited."
Anthea Lawson, Fiction Shorts, The Times - 10.1.01
6."Smith's real achievement is to have created a work that is dense with politics, history and science, but which has a ring of absolute truth about it. It reads not so much as a novel about an experience but as one that renders the experience itself - startling, strange, unmediated."
Melissa Denes, The Daily Telegraph - 13.1.01
7."The peasant life of routine filth, leaking roofs and bad-tempered water buffalo is beautifully evoked, and as Smith turns from a discussion of soil erosion to the finer points of Confucian thought, you can only admire the breadth of his research."
Dan Linstead, Sunday Express - 14.1.01
8."...Something Like a House is a moving and inspiring account of a people and a way of life which, against difficult odds, manages somehow to continue."
John Burnside, The Scotsman - 13.1.01
9."Smith's parable is haunting in its simplicity, and arrestingly told."
Andrew Crumey, Scotland on Sunday
10."This story of a foreigner's long sojourn in an alien culture, under-scored with a sub-plot involving the development of germ warfare science, is truly extraordinary, and is told with a skill which would be impressive in an experienced novelist, let alone a beginner."
Graeme Woolaston, The Herald [Glasgow]
11."The beauty of the author's approach is the way in which he subverts our sensibilities through stealth, using language to tease wisps of mist across meaning, forcing us to look more carefully, forcing us to consider nuances that may ordinarily have passed us by. The result is a book that simultaneously eats away at your heart whilst challenging our very understanding of what a novel should be. It is an extraordinary debut."
Charlie Hill, The Birmingham Post
12."This is not a book to read if you are in a sensitive frame of mind, but one to savour in more robust moments, both for its writing and its sheer energy."
Carolyn Hart, Marie Claire - February 2001
13."Smith's narrative is beautifully spare and lean without a trace of sententiousness; his unemotional tone contrasts pognantly with the sometimes lurid and horrific events that engulf Fraser and the 'medieval' villagers. Once you start reading this book, ut everything else on hold. Definitely the bee's knees. Buy it."
Malcolm Reid, Time Out