基本信息出版社：HarperPerennial
页码：448 页
出版日期：2007年01月
ISBN：0007200285
条形码：9780007200283
版本：2007-01-15
装帧：平装
开本：32开 Pages Per Sheet
外文书名：黄色太阳的一半
内容简介 Book Description
卓越亚马逊为您奉上2007年度亚马逊畅销书之一-------《黄色太阳的一半》
The sweeping novel from the author of 'Purple Hibiscus', shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and winner of the Commonwealth Writers Award. This highly anticipated novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood. The three main characters in the novel are swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer's house. The other is a young middle-class woman, Olanna, who has to confront the reality of the massacre of her relatives. And the third is a white man, a writer who lives in Nigeria for no clear reason, and who falls in love with Olanna's twin sister, a remote and enigmatic character. As these people's lives intersect, they have to question their own responses to the unfolding political events. This extraordinary novel is about Africa in a wider sense: about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race; and about the ways in which love can complicate all of these things.
Book Dimension
length: (cm)19.4 width:(cm)12.8
媒体推荐 Customer Reviews
1. Adichie is a prodigiously gifted storyteller..., 20 Aug 2007
By A. O. AKEMU (The Hague)
The first time I saw the author was on BBC's Hardtalk and I wondered why there was much fuss about her. I took sometime to buy Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, so as to let the dust "settle". I wish I did not wait that long.
Chimamanda Adichie is a consummate storyteller. Small wonder Half of a Yellow Sun won the Orange Prize for fiction. As a Nigerian living in the West, I was transported to the University campus of my childhood in Lagos. I could immediately identify with the characters in the book: Ugwu, the all-observing houseboy, Odenigbo the idealistic University Professor caught between the traditional and the modern, Olanna, the quiet, educated daughter of the typical Nigerian "Big Man", Richard, the somewhat naive Englishman and Susan, the patronising and condescending "colonial" and of course the Big Man himself. The book set in 1960's in Nigeria covers the Biafran war from the point of view of these characters.
The author uses a brilliant device, a book within the book, to give a brief history of Nigeria. What becomes clear (to those who do not know) is that Nigeria is an artificial country forged out of disparate tribes for British colonial interests. Having being held together by fragile institutions (and tried-and-tested divide and rule tactics), it was inevitable that the system would collapse, with devastating consequences.
The sheer brilliance of the book is its pace: She starts out slowly, painting a picture of idle, intellectual banter on the campus as the lecturers gather for meetings every saturday in Odenigbo's house. It is a time of hope in the new country. Beneath the veneer of the blase campus life one can sense the tension among the lectures: tribalism, conflict between the traditional and modern ways of life and resentment to the legacy of colonialism. Slowly but surely, this peaceful unreal world starts to unravel. A coup attempt in 1963 looks suspiciously like an Igbo coup. This in turn unleashes the demons of ethnic hatred that had been seething against the Igbos in Northern Nigeria. There is a devastating pogrom. Women are raped and killed in cold blood. Businesses are looted and razed to the ground. What becomes clear to the Igbos is that they are not safe in "Nigeria". They retreat to their ancestral lands in the South East but the worst is yet to come.
The ensuing war tests the relationships between Odenigbo, Olanna, Richard and Kainene. Ms Adichie then lets us in on a secret: Richard had been unfaithful to Kainene with none other than her sister, Olanna. Yes, the prim and proper "uppity" native girl. The character that won me over was Kainene. The author portrayed Kainene's sarcasm, pragmatism and utter disregard for the social strictures of her time with exemplary brillance.
It is a shame that Odumegwu Ojukwu was treated rather lightly in the book. He was a disgrace to his people, having fled the country at the end of the war, leaving millions of his people to suffer starvation and deprivation. I guess this is a forgivable "oversight" because the author did not set out to do a historical expose but tell a story of human experience in a time of war. And that she does well: She gives colour and depth her characters.
If you are satisfied with glib, superficial or stereotypical portrayals of Africa then this book is not for you. I'd recommend any number of books by Western arm-chair "experts". If, however, you appreciate a more complex, nuanced view of African life told by a supremely gifted African storyteller, who appreciates the traditional as well as the modern world, then this book is for you. It deserves my 5 stars.
2. 'They [the British] may have collected the firewood, but we lit the match', 12 Dec 2007
By Mr. T. Coote "Trevor Coote" (Tahiti, French Polynesia)
This is a stunningly accomplished work of great scope and maturity, written in exquisite English and fully achieving `emotional honesty', one of the stated aims of the author. Although the novel is actually rather old-fashioned in concept and - sorry, Chimamanda - very English in style, I feel that it is superior to anything recently penned in the United Kingdom.
The setting is post-independence Nigeria in the 1960s. For my generation the word `Biafra' became synonymous with mind-numbing images of starving children, an apparently grotesque testimony to intransigent African tribalism and governmental incompetence and corruption. However, the historical background to the Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960s remained elusive to the majority. Although no serious historian would use a novel as primary source material, especially one composed four decades after the event, it is clear that Half of a Yellow Sun is even-handed enough to point towards the likely culprits of the disaster that occurred in her country: white mischief and colonialist arrogance, international realpolitik, and deliberately exploited, deep-rooted ethnic divisions. As ever, the victims were ordinary people trying to do their jobs and feed their families. The catastrophic events are seen through the eyes of a number of intertwining lives from the successful but minority Igbo community: Ugwu, the houseboy of the university professor, Odenigbo; Olanna, the professor's lover; and Richard, a white `honorary Igbo', wannabe chronicler of Biafra and lover of Olanna's twin sister, Kainene. It is the creation of these characters that is the triumph of the novel. I personally did not especially like them, as I found them rather haughty (except Ugwu) and self-important, but that does not matter. The author gave access to their every thought and feeling, their flaws and their foibles, their insecurities and their motivations; and they lived and breathed. The early part of the novel concentrates on the lives and loves of these individuals while political events begin to unfurl around them. When things start to go wrong the country rapidly slides into the abyss, old hatreds are revealed and avenged, and civil war ensues as the Igbo people (led by the greedy and ambitious Ojukwo) declare the eastern part of the country (with its oilfields) as the Republic of Biafra. The rest of Nigeria, backed by Britain, America, the Soviet union and Muslim North African countries, makes war on Biafra and the horror results. Some incidents in the book feel a little staged but in a world where our imagery is shaped by Hollywood this is inevitable and makes literary descriptions of war and its atrocities problematic. Mostly, however, the country's descent into brutal chaos and the hardships and horrors endured by the principal characters were described with sensitivity and intelligence. It was a little disappointing, however, that in the time of adversity it seemed that many people were too busy stealing from, lying to, or cheating on each other to achieve the unity that was desperately needed under siege conditions. The whole episode was a pitiful fiasco.
On this book alone Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is approaching the world's finest living novelists, and is a writer whose English prose rivals that of V S Naipaul and Kazio Ishiguro in its lucidity. Outstanding.