I was eleven, no more, when the wish came to me to be a writer; and then very soon it was a settled ambition. But for the young V. S. Naipaul, there was a great distance between the wish and its fulfillment. To become a writer, he would have to find ways of understanding three very different cultures: his family's half-remembered Indian homeland, the West Indian colonial society in which he grew up, and the wholly foreign world of the English novels he read.
In this essay of literary autobiography, V. S. Naipaul sifts through memories of his childhood in Trinidad, his university days in England, and his earliest attempts at writing, seeking the experiences of life and reading that shaped his imagination and his growth as a writer. He pays particular attention to the traumas of India under its various conquerors and the painful sense of dereliction and loss that shadows writers' attempts to capture the country and its people in prose.
Naipaul's profound reflections on the relations between personal or historical experience and literary form, between the novel and the world, reveal how he came to discover both his voice and the subjects of his writing, and how he learned to turn sometimes to fiction, sometimes to the travel narrative, to portray them truthfully. Along the way he offers insights into the novel's prodigious development as a form for depicting and interpreting society in the nineteenth century and its diminishing capacity to do the same in the twentiethÑa task that, in his view, passed to the creative energies of the early cinema.
As a child trying to read, I had felt that two worlds separated me from the books that were offered to me at school and in the libraries: the childhood world of our remembered India, and the more colonial world of our city. ... What I didn't know, even after I had written my early books of fiction ... was that those two spheres of darkness had become my subject. Fiction, working its mysteries, by indirections finding directions out, had led me to my subject. But it couldn't take me all the way. -V.S. Naipaul, from Reading & Writing
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这本书的装帧和纸张质量,坦白说,是那种让人忍不住想去触摸和拥有的类型。内页的微黄色调,极其柔和,即便是长时间盯着屏幕后转而阅读它,眼睛也不会感到明显的疲劳。但比物理感受更深刻的,是它在“信息密度”上的精准拿捏。它没有过度地填充理论,而是将每一条洞见都包装在一个恰到好处的案例或实例之中。比如,在探讨如何构建引人入胜的开场白时,它没有给出“悬念”或“冲突”的笼统定义,而是直接展示了六种不同类型的开场白,并清晰地标注了它们各自适用的语境和潜在风险。这种“展示优于告知”(Show, Don't Tell)的教学哲学,贯穿了全书,这本身就是对读者所学内容最好的示范。我发现,在学习如何更好地阅读和写作时,最有效的教学工具,恰恰是那些本身就写得极好的材料。这本书本身,就是一本活生生的范本,它用它自己的结构、它的论证方式、它的文字选择,教会了我如何去欣赏和构建高质量的文本。读完之后,我对待每一份我需要阅读或产出的文件,都会不自觉地进行更深层次的审视,那感觉就像是眼睛的清晰度被永久地调高了一个档位。
评分这本书的魅力在于它的“不完整性”——它不试图提供终极答案,反而鼓励你提出更好的问题。在讨论创意写作的部分,作者引用了大量看似毫不相关的艺术形式作为类比,从音乐的对位法到摄影的景深运用。我记得其中有一个观点,探讨了“留白”在叙事中的力量,它不是指你少写了多少字,而是指你成功地引导读者去“想象”了什么。这种开放式的引导,让我感到非常自由,而不是被某种既定的框架所束缚。它不像那些速成手册那样,承诺给你一条直线通往成功,而是提供了一系列迷宫的入口,鼓励你去探索内部的复杂性。我尤其喜欢其中穿插的一些阅读者笔记和反思,它们看起来像是作者在写作过程中的自言自语,真实且毫不设防,这极大地拉近了我和这本书的距离。阅读这些片段时,我感觉自己不是在接受知识的灌输,而是在和一个经验丰富的导师进行一场跨越时空的对话,他既指明了方向,又留下了足够的空间让我去犯错和成长。这本书是一份邀请函,邀请你去质疑你所读到的一切,包括它本身。
评分这本书给我的震撼,更多地来自于其对“声音”的强调。我们总以为,阅读和写作是关于文字本身的,但这本书却把“语调”提升到了一个至关重要的地位。我以前的习惯是,写完初稿后,总是匆匆扫一眼,觉得只要意思表达清楚就行了,根本不在乎它听起来如何。这本书里有一章专门分析了不同体裁在“内心朗读”时会产生什么样的效果。比如,一篇严肃的评论,如果其句式结构过于跳跃和碎片化,即使内容正确,也会让人感觉轻浮;反之,一篇轻松的随笔,如果句式过长、过于繁复,则会显得矫揉造作。我尝试着按照书中的建议,对着自己的几个草稿进行“默唱”,立刻就发现了那些生硬、拗口的句子,它们在纸面上看起来正常,一经“听觉化”,就暴露无遗。这种“从耳朵校对文本”的方法,简直是打破了我的固有思维。它让我明白,优秀的文字是具有音乐性的,它有自己的韵律、高低起伏和呼吸感。这本书让我学会了倾听我自己的文字,这不仅仅是修改错别字那么简单,而是对文字生命力的深度尊重。
评分这本书,坦白说,我拿到它的时候,是抱着一种近乎绝望的心态。我的阅读理解能力在过去几年里像被抽走了骨头一样,每当我尝试去啃那些经典的、或者即便是稍微复杂点的现代小说时,我都会感到一种强烈的挫败感。它不是那种枯燥的教科书,封面设计得很有质感,那种深邃的靛蓝色,让人联想到深夜里伏案苦读的时光。我原本以为它会充斥着各种晦涩的语法规则讲解,或者是一些老掉牙的修辞手法分析,但一翻开,我就被那些精心挑选的阅读材料吸引住了。第一部分的选文,那些短篇散文,简直是直击灵魂。作者(或者说编者)的功力在于,他/她似乎懂得如何用最日常的语言,去描绘最深刻的内心挣扎。比如其中一篇关于“遗忘的几何学”的文章,读完后,我盯着天花板发呆了快一个小时,那种感觉就像是有人终于用我能理解的地图,标示出了我脑海中那些混乱的角落。它没有直接告诉我该怎么写,而是通过示范,展示了“如何观察”世界。这本书的排版也极其人性化,大段的文字被巧妙地分割,关键的词汇和短语都会以不同的方式被强调,不是那种生硬的加粗,而是一种微妙的留白和字体变化,引导着你的视线自然地流动,这对于我这种容易走神的读者来说,简直是救命稻草。它让我重新找回了阅读的节奏感,那种文字在脑海中清晰构建画面的能力,正在慢慢复苏。
评分如果让我用一个词来形容这本书带给我的感受,那一定是“解构”。我过去写东西,总是感觉像是在堆积砖头,每一块砖都想堆得又高又漂亮,结果就是一堆歪七扭八、随时可能倒塌的废墟。这本书的厉害之处在于,它把写作过程这个本应是高度个人化的黑箱,打开了一个小小的透气孔。它没有提供那种“写出畅销书的七个步骤”之类的流水线公式,那样太肤浅了。它探讨的是结构本身——论点的骨架是如何支撑起血肉的。我特别欣赏其中关于“段落间的逻辑张力”的讨论。作者通过对比几个不同风格的议论文片段,展示了同一个信息点,如何因为一个句子的微小前置或后置,产生完全不同的说服力效果。这种细致入微的分析,让我意识到,写作不仅仅是信息的传递,更是一场精密的心理博弈。我开始在读其他材料时,习惯性地去寻找那个“连接器”,那个让上下文无缝衔接的胶水。这种思维模式的转变,比学会任何一个新的写作技巧都更有价值。它让我从“我该写什么”的焦虑,转向了“我该如何组织才能最有效地表达”,这是一种质的飞跃,从工匠心态迈向了建筑师的视角。这本书无疑是我的写作“工具箱”里,新增添的一把精密尺规。
评分run into it in library
评分“So, as my world widened, beyond the immediate personal circumstances that bred fiction, and as my comprehension widened, the literary forms I practiced flowed together and supported one another; and I couldn't say that one form was higher than another. The form depended on the material; the books were all part of the same process of understanding
评分run into it in library
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评分很诚实
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