One book with the power to reflect and illuminate that life; one book that will forever inform how we navigate the little strip of time we are given, while also helping us to clarify and catch hold of its most vital moments. For me, that book is To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s novel about her parents, Julia and Leslie Stephen, who died when Virginia was thirteen and twenty-two, respectively.
《正常人》里提到这本书。决定找来读一读。也算从虚构类读物中暂时解脱出来吧。James Baldwin在美国种族和民权史上，可以说是举足轻重。最近他的小说If Beale Street Could Talk被搬上银幕。书和电影都没看，但我读过他的Go Tell It on the Mountain。
powerful stuff:
“God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”
MY DUNGEON SHOOK
Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation
And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.
DOWN AT THE CROSS
Letter from a Region in My Mind
Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!
巧得很，今天上网看到Normal People by Sally Rooney刚得了科斯塔图书奖（Costa Book Awards）的小说奖。看来的却值得读。当时打算读这本书是因为读了Sally Rooney的第一部小说，Conversations with Friends，的书评，打分很高。这些年涌现出大量年轻女作家，形成一股潮流，要在其中脱颖而出已经不是一件容易的事。Sally Rooney写第一部书时还在学校读书，属于90后的爱尔兰作家。
My Michael是他的早期作品，具有很强的地域性。这样说似乎太宽泛。用最近走红的意大利小说，《那不勒斯四部曲》，作比较倒是很贴切: My Michael是发生在耶路撒冷的故事。
小说里的Michael是一位地质学家。这大概是我喜欢这部小说比较独特的视角。
My Michael是Oz作品中翻译成英文的第一部。翻译家Nicholas de Lange强调以色列希伯来文来源的多样性，有波兰语，意地绪语，另外还有大量讲俄语、德语、阿拉伯语、波斯语的以色列人。这些变化在英文里就很难准确表现出来了。这也和《那不勒斯四部曲》的英译类似。书中的那不勒斯方言也很难用英语表达。另外译者强调英文翻译得到了Oz本人的合作。
