凯瑟琳·奇吉、凯文·威尔逊与约瑟芬·罗谈历史、旅行与近乎圣徒

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这里是图书节目，今天我将为您带来关于孤儿三胞胎、旅途中的新兄弟姐妹以及一位近乎圣人的遗体的故事。我是克莱尔·尼科尔斯，今天与我一起的还有来自新西兰、美国和澳大利亚的作家凯瑟琳·奇吉、凯文·威尔逊和约瑟芬·罗伊。请别走开。如果第二次世界大战以不同的方式结束会怎样？如果在1945年盟军胜利之外，战争提前两年以和平条约告终呢？

This is the book show, where today, I'm bringing you stories of orphan triplets, new siblings on the road, and the body of an almost saint. My name's Claire Nichols, and with me today are authors from New Zealand, America, and Australia, Catherine Chidgee, Kevin Wilson, and Josephine Roe. Don't go anywhere. What if the second world war had ended differently? Instead of an allied victory in 1945, what if the war had ended two years earlier with a peace treaty?

如果德国和英国的科学家们分享了他们的知识和研究成果，我想知道这对欧洲基因研究的未来意味着什么。凯瑟琳·奇吉的最新小说《罪恶之书》探讨了这些想法及其他内容。凯瑟琳是新西兰作家，以其小说《愿望之子》和《遥远的同情》闻名。而这本新作《罪恶之书》是一部文学惊悚小说，讲述了三胞胎男孩和他们称之为家的奇怪地方。嗨，凯瑟琳。

If scientists from Germany and The UK had shared their knowledge, their research, I wonder what that could have meant for the future of genetic research across Europe. These ideas and more are explored in Catherine Chidgey's latest novel, The Book of Guilt. Catherine is a New Zealand writer, best known for her novels, The Wish Child and Remote Sympathy. And this new one, The Book of Guilt, it's a literary thriller about triplet boys and the strange place they call home. Hi, Catherine.

嗨，克莱尔。

Hi, Claire.

所以这是一个第二次世界大战以不同方式结束的平行历史。在你想象的第二次世界大战结束时发生了什么？

So this is an alternate history where the Second World War ended differently. What happened at the end of your imagined Second World War?

在我的历史版本中，1943年末对阿道夫·希特勒的暗杀行动成功了。因此，这结束了战争，迫使统治各方做出让步。于是达成了一项条约，没有人真正获胜。每个人都必须做出某些牺牲，我想这种牺牲的想法是我写这本书时的核心。是的，正如你在介绍中提到的，如果你愿意这样看的话，确实有一些积极的影响，其中之一就是分享了战争期间和战前进行的科学研究。

So in my version of history, the assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler in late nineteen forty three was successful. And so that brings an end to the war and forces the the ruling powers to kind of make concessions on all sides. So a treaty is agreed upon, and nobody really wins. Everybody has to make certain sacrifices, and I guess that idea of sacrifice is something that was central in my mind when I was writing the book. So yes, as you said in your introduction, it does mean that there are some positives if you want to look at it that way, and one of those positives is the sharing of scientific research that was conducted during the war and immediately before the war.

但当然，如果你想到像SS医生约瑟夫·门格勒这样的人，其中一些研究是野蛮的。对吧，凯瑟琳？

But of course, some of that research that was done, if you think of someone like the SS doctor Joseph Mengele, some of that research that was done was barbaric. Right, Catherine?

是的。我想这本书源于我之前写的两本小说，它们都以二战时期的德国为背景。其中一本的背景是布痕瓦尔德集中营及其周边，那本书叫《遥远的同情》。另一本叫《愿望之子》。

Yeah. I guess this book grew out of two earlier novels that I wrote, both of which were set in World War II Germany. And one of them is set in and around Buchenwald Concentration Camp. That one was called Remote Sympathy. The other one was called The Wish Child.

我沉浸在那段材料和黑暗历史中多年，我想大约有十七年，当时我正在写那两本书。一个一直困扰我的问题是，你能为在集中营进行的研究辩护吗？我知道这仍然是一个非常现实的问题，尤其是在幸存者圈子里，这真的让我难以释怀，这也是这本书的早期种子之一。

And I sat with that material and that dark history for many years, I think about seventeen years while I was writing those two books. And one question that kept gnawing at me was, can you ever justify using the research that was undertaken in the concentration camps? And I know this is still a really live issue, especially in survivor circles, and it's something that really got under my skin, and that was one of the early seeds for the book.

正如你所说，你之前写过关于第二次世界大战的内容，那两本前作。你写过纳粹党的遗产。凯瑟琳，今天我在新西兰与你交谈。为什么这段欧洲历史对你和你的作品如此重要？

You've written about the World War two before, as you said, with those two previous novels. You've written about the legacy of the Nazi party. I'm speaking to you in New Zealand today, Catherine. Why is this European history so central to to you and to your work?

是的。我在高中六年级时曾去德国交换，那时候甚至还不叫‘六年级’——这暴露了我的年龄。那是1986年，我16岁。后来我继续学习德语，并在大学本科阶段主修德语专业。

Yeah. I went to Germany on an exchange when I was in sixth form, which is not even called sixth form anymore. This is showing how old I am. So that was in 1986 when I was 16. And then I continued studying German and majored in it at university for my first degree.

我获得了德国政府提供的奖学金，在柏林生活学习了十八个月。尽管十六岁时有过在德国的早期经历，但二十岁出头在柏林的时光彻底震撼了我这个来自新西兰小地方的狭隘心灵——战争对我们国家的冲击远不及柏林这样的地方。由于我是在九十年代初到访的，柏林墙刚倒塌不久。战争的伤痕依然清晰可见，尤其是在前东柏林地区，许多建筑仍保留着被轰炸和弹片损毁的原始状态。那就像置身于时间胶囊中，让我亲眼目睹了破坏的严重程度，以及历史如何依然铭刻在这片土地上。

And I received a government scholarship from the German government to live and study in Berlin for eighteen months. And although I'd had that early experience as a 16 year old in Germany, being in Berlin in my early twenties blew my mind, my tiny provincial Kiwi mind, because the war had not touched our country in the same way that it touched a place like Berlin. And because I was there in the early nineteen nineties, it was very soon after the wall had fallen. So there was still the scars of war, particularly in the former east of the city where a lot of buildings had just been left in their bombed, shrapnel damaged state. And it was kind of like being in a time capsule, and I could see just how severe the damage had been and how written on the landscape that history still was.

我记得新闻里时不时会报道，比如在城市工地上挖出了二战时期未爆炸的炸弹，需要专业人员小心翼翼拆除。我甚至遇到过一个英国人，他和他父亲就住在那里专门负责拆弹工作。这让我着迷，也成了历史仍潜伏在表面之下随时可能爆发的绝妙隐喻。正是在那时，我开始认真考虑写作。我想作家长期远离故土时都会有类似体验——他们会以身处其中时难以实现的视角重新聚焦故乡。所以我的第一部小说极具自传色彩，背景就设在新西兰。

And I remember every so often in the news, you'd hear a story about, you know, on a construction site in the city, they'd unearthed an unexploded bomb from World War two, and so it had to be very carefully diffused. And I even met an English guy who was living there working with his father on on defusing these bombs. So that was, like, fascinating to me and an amazing metaphor for how history is still just sitting there underneath the surface ready to explode. And so that's when I started thinking about taking my writing seriously, and I think that's a common experience for writers when they're away from their home for a lengthy period of time is that they start sort of focusing in on that home in a way that is not quite possible when you're in the thick of it. So my first novel was very autobiographical and set in New Zealand.

但柏林的那段经历无疑为后来两部以二战德国为背景的作品埋下了种子。

But that time in Berlin definitely planted those seeds for those two later books set in World War two Germany.

你如何看待德国人面对二战遗产的态度？

What did you make of the way the German people were grappling with the legacy of World War two?

我一直对此深感钦佩。德语里甚至有个很长的专有词来形容‘直面过去’，我非常喜欢这个词。给我的感觉是，他们真正努力不去回避历史罪行，承认它们，并尽可能治愈那些伤痕。德国大城市有个令人惊叹的项目（可能始于汉堡，我不太确定），在人行道上镶嵌着叫做‘绊脚石’（德语Stolpersteine）的黄铜铭牌，上面刻着曾居住在该建筑、却在希特勒时期遇难者的姓名和生平细节。这是种美丽的宣示：历史永远在你脚下，即使你正走在看似平常的街道上。

I've always been so admiring of that. You know, the Germans even have a really long word for coming to terms with the past, which is which I love. But it always felt to me that there was a real effort not to look away from the crimes of the past, and to acknowledge them, and to try to try to heal those scars if they could. There's a really amazing scheme in big German cities that I think started in Hamburg, I might have that wrong, where these little brass plaques called stumbling stones or Stolpe Stolpesteine in German are embedded into the footpath, and they carry the names and details of the people who had lived it, the particular building at that spot who had been killed under Hitler. And it's just a really beautiful acknowledgment that, yeah, the past is always under your feet, even if you're just walking down a perfectly normal suburban street.

过去始终触手可及。

The past is always just right there within reach.

你提到‘移开视线’很有意思，因为在《罪恶之书》里，太多人都在这样做。这部小说设定在1979年的英格兰，你改写了二战结局——这个历史变动对你笔下1979年的英格兰意味着什么？

And I love that you spoke about looking away, because in this novel, The Book of Guilt, so many people are looking away. Yeah. In this in this novel, so we've had this different end to World War two. This novel is set in England in 1979. What has the little changes you've made to history meant for what England is right now in your version of 1979?

是的，这里的历史轨迹不同。登月计划提前实现，某些疾病的治疗手段更早出现。虽然我没有详细展开，但通过细节暗示了战后世界发展的差异。

Yeah. So there has been a different history. The moon landing happened earlier. Various treatments and cures for various diseases has happened earlier. I don't go into that in too much detail, but I do drop these little clues that things have unfolded differently after the war.

所以1979年的英格兰在某些方面与现实中的1979年很像——我借鉴了当时糟糕的电视节目、难看的衣着打扮和饮食文化（用‘我们’是因为那时新西兰也差不多）。但不同之处在于，这是个更残酷的世界：公众乐于享受战后条约带来的利益，却对条约造成的可怕后果视而不见。

So 1979 England, in some ways, looks very like the real 1979 England, and that I draw on, you know, the terrible TV shows we used to watch then and the terrible clothes we wore and and the food that we ate. And I guess I'm saying we because New Zealand felt very much in that mold then too. But the way that it's different is I suppose it's a crueler place, and it's a place where people, the general public, are willing to take the gains from this treaty that's been established at the end of the war, but to look away from the terrible consequences of that.

有个叫‘梧桐计划’的项目，凯瑟琳，虽然你不能透露全部细节，但这些孩子分散居住在英格兰各地的不同家庭里。你能谈谈这个吗？

And there's something called the sycamore scheme, which you can't tell us everything about, Catherine, but there are these children living in these various homes around England. What can you say about that?

是的。梧桐计划——我想我在书的第一页就提到过——是战后建立的。这些由破败老宅改造的孤儿院，分别收容男孩和女孩。小说发生时，这些机构即将关闭，少数剩余的孩子将被释放到社区，这让当地居民相当不安。

Yeah. So the Sycamore scheme, I think I say this on the very first page of the book. The Sycamore scheme was established after the war, and these houses built old sort of crumbling stately homes that have been repurposed as orphanages, and are home to boys and girls, separate homes for boys and separate homes for girls. And at the time of the novel, the homes are about to be closed down, and the remaining children, the few remaining children, are about to be released into the community. And this is making the community quite nervous.

随着故事展开，我们会明白原因，孩子们也会发现真相。每家孤儿院由三位按轮班命名的女性管理：晨母、午母和夜母。每隔几个月，罗奇医生会像神祇般降临，检查孩子们的健康状况——他们都易感染一种名为‘虫疾’的神秘病症，症状因人而异。母亲们必须每天谨慎配药，帮助他们对抗病魔。

And we find out why, and the children also find out why as the book progresses. But the way that the homes are run is that each home is overseen by three women who are named according to their shift. So there's mother morning, mother afternoon, and mother night. And then once every couple of months, this godlike figure, doctor Roach visits to examine the children and see how they are health wise because they are all very susceptible to a mysterious illness that's known only as the bug, and it affects different children in different ways. So the mothers have to be careful to administer daily medication to the children to try to allow them to recover from the bug.

若幸运痊愈，孩子们会在睡前发现枕边放着一本宣传册，介绍英国海滨胜地马盖特。那里有座大宅院，康复的孩子们将在此生活：畅游大海、尽情享用棉花糖，与其他康复院友团聚。

And if they do recover, if they're lucky enough to recover, then they are rewarded with finding a brochure on their pillow as they're going to bed at night, and this brochure is all about Margate, the British seaside resort of Margate, which is where recovered children, once they're definitely well, get to go and live in the big house and, you know, enjoy a life of swimming in the sea, and eating as much candy floss as they like, and catching up with the other children from the various homes who have recovered as well.

这本书充满谜团，但有一点从第一页就显而易见：马盖特绝非表面看起来那么简单。

And I think there are lots of mysteries in this book, but one thing that is not mysterious from page one is that Margate is not going to be what it seems.

恕我不能剧透。为写书我去过马盖特调研，它完美符合我的预设——我筛选过多个褪色浮华又带粗粝感的英国海滨小镇，最终选定它是因为发现那里有座叫‘梦境乐园’的游乐园，而‘梦’在书中至关重要。

I couldn't possibly comment. I went to Margate as part of my research for the book, and it was so perfect. It was a place that I decided on before I went there. So I'd been auditioning various British seaside resorts, and I wanted my chosen one to have that kind of faded glamour and to be a little bit rough around the edges. But the reason I settled on Margate was because I realized it had this amusement park there called Dreamland, and dreams are really important in the book.

晨母的主要职责之一是用《梦境之书》记录男孩们的梦。她每天早晨逐个询问梦境并誊写下来。书开头我们并不清楚为何要如此详尽记录——尤其是噩梦。

So one of the duties, mainly of mother mourning, is to record all the boys' dreams in a ledger known as the book of dreams. So she comes to them each morning and asks them individually, what have you dreamt? And writes it down in this book. And we're not quite sure why at the start of the book, why it's so important that their dreams, and in particular their nightmares, are recorded.

还有另外两本关键之书：《知识之书》和《罪愆之书》，请讲讲它们如何影响男孩们的生活。

There's two other books too. There's the book of knowledge, and The Book of Guilt. Tell us about these other two books that are so pivotal in these boys' lives.

《知识之书》其实是真实存在的儿童百科全书（我参考的是1950年代版本），到了1979年已显过时，带着不容置疑的大英帝国口吻。这些是孤儿院图书馆仅有的藏书，也是孩子们接触的唯一文本。

Yeah. So The Book of Knowledge is it's actually a real set of children's encyclopedias, and the ones I used were from the early nineteen fifties. So even in 1979, they're kind of outdated, and they kind of speak with that British voice of empire that is is never to be questioned. So these are the only books in the boys' library. These are the only texts that they're exposed to.

每天晨母会选取《知识之书》的章节授课。另一本《罪愆之书》则记录男孩们所有过失。我以这三本书结构全文，通过它们诠释角色成长：第一部分《梦境之书》描绘男孩们懵懂梦幻的乌托邦生活。

And every day, they have lessons with mother mourning who chooses a section from the Book of Knowledge to to teach them about. So that's the book of knowledge, and then the other book is the book of guilt. And this is another ledger like the book of dreams, but in this ledger, every misdemeanor, every crime that the boys commit is recorded in the book of guilt. And I chose to structure the novel around those three books, and to to speak about the character's development by thinking about what those books mean. So the first section, the first third is the Book of Dreams when the boys exist in this unknowing, quite idyllic, dreamlike world.

中间三分之一是知识之书，当他们开始质疑自己曾经以为的认知时。最后三分之一是愧疚之书，我认为这是某些角色将背负一生的遗产。

And then the middle third is the book of knowledge when they're starting to question what they thought they always knew. And the third third is the book of guilt, which I think is the legacy that some of the characters will carry with them for the rest of their lives.

是啊，凯瑟琳，这是那种越往后越精彩的书。我们现在还剩三个男孩在这个家里。我们在的这所是斯科特船长之家，这里有三个同卵三胞胎男孩。我们的叙述者是文森特。

Yeah. It's one of those books that just gets better and better as it goes on, Catherine. We've got three boys left at this home. The home we're at is the Captain Scott home, and we have these three identical triplet boys. Our narrator is Vincent.

关于这些男孩我们需要了解什么？

What do we need to know about these boys?

是的，他们13岁，是同卵三胞胎。我想通过他们来探讨那个古老的问题：先天与后天。尽管他们基因相同，性格却迥异。文森特是本书的主要叙述者。

Yes. So they're 13 years old, and they are identical triplets. And I guess I was interested in using them as a lens to explore that old question of nature versus nurture. Because although they're identical, they have very different personalities. So Vincent is the main narrator of the book.

他尤其亲近弟弟威廉，但威廉对他和其他人都很残忍，对文森特尤其恶劣。然而文森特总是维护他，为他找借口打掩护，以免他被记入愧疚之书。

And he is particularly close to his brother, William, but William is pretty cruel to him and to others, treats Vincent pretty badly, and yet Vincent always sticks up for him and makes excuses for him and covers for him so he won't be written up in the book of guilt.

他最爱的就是他。

He loves him best.

他最爱的就是他。比对另一个弟弟劳伦斯的爱更深。劳伦斯是个非常温柔的男孩，热爱动物，梦想长大后成为兽医。

He loves him best. He loves him better than he loves his other brother, Lawrence. And so Lawrence is a really gentle boy. He loves animals. He wants to be a vet when he grows up.

他热爱自然，在新森林散步时会收集椋鸟掉落的蛋壳——那里是本书故事发生地，也是他们家的所在地。按理说这应该是你最爱的兄弟，但事实并非如此。我对探索这种复杂的家庭动态很感兴趣，现实中我们常被那些对我们不利的人吸引，无论出于何种原因。

He loves nature. He collects dropped eggshells from starlings when they go on their walks in the New Forest, which is where the book is set and and where their home is. And you would think, you know, logic would say, well, that would be the brother you'd love the most, but that just isn't the case. And I was really interested in exploring that complex family dynamic and the way that in real life, often we're drawn to people who are not good for us for whatever reason.

这个先天与后天的问题太迷人了。你为什么会思考这个命题？

And this question of nature versus nurture, I find it so fascinating. Why were you thinking about that idea?

这始终让我着迷。大约15岁时我就想，长大后要成为临床心理学家。除了德语学位，我还辅修了心理学。但在学习过程中发现，这门学科似乎与现实人群或真实世界脱节，充斥着大量统计学内容——那并非我的兴趣所在，所以本科毕业后就没再继续深造。

It's something that has always fascinated me right when I was about 15 years old and thought, right, I'm going to be a clinical psychologist when I grow up. And I just along with my degree in German, I did do a degree in psychology. And while I was doing that degree, I thought, this doesn't actually seem to be very connected with real people or the real world at all. It's an awful lot of statistics, and that's not really my bag. And so I didn't continue with that degree beyond undergraduate level.

我现在意识到，或者说，当我完成那个学位时，我基本上明白了最初吸引我的原因是因为我对人类的动机如此着迷——是什么驱使我们行动，是什么让我们做出错误的选择，犯下将对我们产生巨大影响的可怕决定。我想我一直都在等待一部能让我探索这些复杂问题的小说出现，而这部作品似乎就是那个契机。

And I realized now, or I realized, you know, pretty much when I came to the end of that degree that the reason I was attracted to it in the first place was because I was so interested in what motivates us, you know, what makes us tick, what makes us choose the wrong paths, make terrible decisions that will have enormous ramifications for us. And I guess I was, you know, always waiting for a novel to come to me where I could explore those complex questions, and this this seemed to be the one.

是的，这设定非常巧妙。书中设有孤独大臣一职，所以这个故事带有政治色彩。政府正在关闭梧桐树计划，而这位孤独大臣被任命来负责整个系统的关闭工作。

Yeah. It's really delicious. There is a minister for loneliness. So there's a political angle to this story. The government is shutting down the Sycamore scheme, and the minister for loneliness has been appointed to kind of run this close down of the system.

听起来像是纯粹的文学创作——孤独大臣，但这实际上是真实存在的职位对吧？英国确实设立过这个职务。

It sounds like a purely literary creation, a minister for loneliness, but this is actually something real, right, that has existed in The UK.

确实如此。我开始写这本书时甚至不知道这个情况。这个角色的灵感来源于日本孤独大臣的新闻，当时我就想：哇，多惊人的头衔啊，我一定要在书里用到它。

It is. And I didn't even know that when I started writing the book. So the spark for her character came from hearing a news story about a minister of loneliness in Japan. And I thought, wow, what an amazing title. I really want to use that in a book somehow.

我总是会收藏这样的小片段，然后它们会以某种神奇而神秘的方式在我需要时重现——这种魔力我不敢深究，生怕会消失。构思这部小说时，我突然想起那个头衔，决定让'孤独大臣'出现在书中。写作过程中才发现英国要么刚设立这个职位，要么是我刚知晓它的存在。

And I I always tuck away little snippets like that, and and then, you know, they return to me when I need them in a kind of magical and mysterious way that I don't want to interrogate too hard in case it stops working. But I remembered when I was thinking about this novel, I remembered that title and thought, oh, okay. I'm I'm going to have Minister of Loneliness in this book. And started writing it, and I think it was actually during the writing of it that either that position was created in The UK or I found out about it.

在你设定的1979年平行世界里，这位孤独大臣的职责范围包括哪些？

And what comes under the portfolio of your minister for loneliness in your alternate version of 1979?

书中她的主要任务是监督这些福利院的解散，并制作精美目录寄给有意收养梧桐树儿童的家庭。她还负责囚犯福利事务，比如探访斯特兰奇韦斯监狱（当时仍用此名）。从很多方面来说她并不胜任这份工作，而且由于对梧桐树之家的了解让她倍感压力——更何况她知道的还不全面。随着真相逐渐揭露，她的性格和道德准则也在不断变化。

So in the book, her main task is to oversee the disestablishment of these homes and to create glossy catalogs that will be sent out to interested families who might want to add one of the Sycamore children to their home. But she also handles things like prisoner welfare, so we see her visiting Strangeways Prison, it was as it was still called then. She's really not cut out for the job in a lot of ways, and she feels quite uneasy about taking on the Sycamore homes because of what she already knows about them, but she doesn't know everything. And so her character and her moral compass change as she finds out more and more.

这是1979年的英国。她有位上司——那位头发梳着紧实发髻的女首相。玛格丽特·撒切尔在这本书里就像是'那个不能提名字的人'，凯瑟琳，这个评价公允吗？

And this is 1979 in Britain. She has this boss, the prime minister, this female prime minister with this very firm bun in her hair. Margaret Thatcher seems to be the kind of she who will not be named character in this book. Is that a fair assessment, Catherine?

算是吧。她既是又不是撒切尔。我有意让这个角色外形不同，但显然以撒切尔为原型，时间线也设定在撒切尔刚执政时期。因为那正是英国社会剧烈动荡、充满变革与不安的年代，作为小说背景非常有趣。

I think that's fair. She both is and isn't Thatcher. Like, I I was careful to make her look different, but clearly, that's the template for her and and the timing is the same as Thatcher coming to power. Because it was such a time of huge upheaval in The UK and huge change and just enormous unrest, it felt like a really interesting era to set a book in.

就像我说过的，这本书很难讨论，因为随着情节推进会揭示太多重要细节，而且处理得如此精妙，凯瑟琳。你在创作初期就知道所有故事线索会如何交织吗？

This is one of those books that, as I've said, it's kinda hard to talk about because there's so much important detail that is revealed as the book goes on, and it is so neatly and cleverly done, Catherine. Did you know from the start of this process how all the pieces of the story were going to fit together?

我花了很长时间才把它弄好。我为这本书做了很多计划，用了很多便利贴，还在办公室的墙上贴了很多给自己的便条。这是我过去几本书中使用的相当不错的方法，既能保持固定的模式，又能轻松地从墙上撕下来重新排列。我还绘制了一个图表，记录书中的高潮时刻、转折点和启示，确保它们分布得当，节奏感对我来说刚刚好。是的。

It took me a really long time to get it right. I did a lot of planning for this book and went through many pads of post it notes and stuck up so many notes to myself around the wall of my office. It's been quite a good technique for me that I've used over my last few books to be able to have those there as kind of a fixed pattern, but also to be able to to shift them around because they're really easy to unpeel from the wall. So I did and I did make a graph of the sort of peak moments or those the shocks in the book and the revelations to make sure that they were spaced out enough and that the pacing felt right to me. Yeah.

所以这确实是一个相当复杂的拼图。

So it it was quite a complex jigsaw puzzle.

当你把所有部分都安排妥当后，实际写作时是否很难偏离这个计划？

When you've put all those pieces in place, is it then hard to deviate from that when you're actually trying to write it?

某种程度上是的。但我写作时会同步调整这些部分，确保一切正确。不过随着写作经验的增长，我发现自己越来越倾向于按时间顺序写书，以前不是这样的。

At a certain point, it is. Yeah. But I write in tandem with sort of shifting those around and shuffling and making sure that I get it right. Although, as I've grown older as a writer, I've found that more and more, I do work chronologically with my books. I didn't used to.

所以更按时间顺序写作让这个过程不那么痛苦。

So working much more chronologically makes it a less painful process.

而且你做这些的同时还保有一份全职工作，对吗？

And you're doing this all while also holding down a full time job. Is that right?

是的。我在新西兰汉密尔顿的怀卡托大学教授创意写作，这是份全职工作。我们还有个快10岁的女儿和四只猫。不知怎么的，如果把所有时间加起来，我也算全职写作了。我自己都不太清楚是怎么做到的。

Yes. So I teach creative writing at the University of Waikato in Hamilton in New Zealand, which is a full time job. And we also have a nearly 10 year old daughter and four cats. And somehow, I I kind of if you add up the hours, I write full time as well. I'm not quite sure how I do that.

我基本上没有社交生活。

I I mean, I basically have no social life.

嗯，对我们来说是好事，但对你可能就不太妙了。几周前我们在悉尼见面时聊得很愉快，你当时告诉我这些猫的事。你有四只猫，它们都有同样的遗传病对吧？

Well, I mean, it's good for us, but maybe not great for you. You and I met in Sydney a couple of weeks ago, which was such a pleasure, and you were telling me about these cats. Because you've four cats, and they all have this same genetic condition. Right?

是的。它们都是异色瞳猫，眼睛颜色不同，一只蓝色一只黄绿色。我们刚收养了第九只异色瞳猫。

Yeah. They're all heterochromic cats. So they have different colored eyes, one blue and one yellowy green. And yeah. We've just got our ninth heterochromic cat.

我和我丈夫都有这种疯狂的收集癖好。所以我得说我们其实没有九只猫。目前总共养了四只，最多时同时养过五只。

We My husband and I both have the crazy collecting gene. So I I will say we don't have nine. In total. We have four at the moment. We've had five at any one given time.

它们都是救助来的猫。尤其是白猫，似乎有种奇特的基因缺陷。

They're all rescue cats. It's just a weird kind of genetic quirk that happens particularly with white cats.

你们是怎么成为这种特殊猫咪的收藏家的？是不是设置了什么谷歌提醒之类的？

And how do you become like a collector of this particular type of cat? Are you on some sort of, you know, Google alert?

当我们从本地防止虐待动物协会领养第一只时，我们惊叹道：天啊，这简直是动物界的珍宝。如果奇迹般再遇到这样的猫，请务必通知我们。三周后他们真的来电说：嘿，我们又有一只了。虽然它们看似稀有珍贵，但我也说不清...

When we got our first one, which was from the SPCA here, we said to them, oh my god. This is what a jewel of an animal. Please, if, you know, if by some miracle you ever get another one, please do let us know. Three weeks later, they rang us and said, hey, we have another one. So even though they do seem quite rare and beautiful, I think I don't know.

要么是本地水质有问题，要么它们没我们想象得那么稀有。后来这事就像滚雪球，社交媒体上的人知道我们养这种猫后，一发现新线索就会通知我。有次我甚至专程开车十四小时往返惠灵顿去接猫。

There's either something in the water here or they're not quite as rare and beautiful as we thought. But then but it kind of feeds on itself, so people on social media know that we have these cats. So they alert me if there's another one. I did a fourteen hour round trip drive to Wellington to pick up one.

是啊。凯瑟琳·奇吉，和你聊猫咪与小说真是愉快。非常感谢你的时间。

Yeah. Well, it's been so lovely to chat cats and fiction with you, Catherine Chidgee. Thank you so much for your time.

谢谢克莱尔，这是我的荣幸。

Thanks, Clea. My pleasure.

凯瑟琳·奇吉的小说《罪之书》由企鹅出版社出版。我特别喜欢这本书，更期待她的新作设定：想象你幼时被父亲抛弃，后来发现他在全国各地都有遗弃的子女。在《逃往山间》中，这群刚相认的兄弟姐妹踏上了穿越美国的旅程，准备质问抛弃他们的父亲。

And Catherine Chidgee's novel, The Book of Guilt, is published by Penguin. I really liked it. I love the setup for this next book. Imagine your father left you as a child, and you find out he's fathered and abandoned other children across the country. In Run for the Hills, a group of newly discovered siblings take a road trip across The US to confront their father for abandoning them.

这部小说延续了美国作家凯文·威尔逊标志性的古怪风格，他上次做客书展是宣传小说《现在不是恐慌的时候》。凯文正在与书展制作人莎拉·莱斯特兰奇对话。

The novel features the trademark quirkiness of American author Kevin Wilson, who was last here on the book show talking about his novel, Now Is Not the Time to Panic. Kevin is with the book show's producer, Sarah Lestrange.

凯文，你经常旅行吗？

Kevin, are you much of a traveler?

嗯，我认为自己已经或正在成为一个旅行者，这仍然让我感到些许焦虑。

Well, I think I am or I have become a traveler, and it's still something that gives me a little bit of anxiety.

所以你成了旅行者。是因为骑行让你不得不穿梭于乡间吗？

So you've become a traveler. What? Because of your riding, you have to travel around the countryside?

更多是因为有了孩子后，你不能永远把他们关在家里。他们会感到无聊，于是要求接触我们无法提供的事物。所以我习惯了旅行，因为这丰富了我们的家庭生活——这是我以前从未考虑过的。

It's more that when you have kids, you can't just keep them in the house forever. They get bored. So they demand access to things we can't provide them. So I've gotten used to traveling because it enriches our family, which is not something I had thought about previously.

但你一直住在从小长大的那个县，对吗？

But you have lived in the same, county where you grew up. Is that right?

我现在住在田纳西州一座叫苏万尼的山上，而我是在山谷里长大的。是的，我人生大部分时间都在这片相当小的牧区度过。

I live on a mountain now in Tennessee called Suwanee, and I grew up in the valley. So, yeah, I've spent most of my life in this in this pretty small little patch of lamb.

能和我聊聊这个地方吗？

And what can you tell me about it?

我长大的地方是个相当偏远的农业区，但山顶上有所很小的大学，约1800名学生，叫南方大学。我们穿着学术袍授课，学校仿照牛津模式，却是田纳西州山顶上这个奇特的小地方。有段时间我们学校在招生时真的告诉人们这里很像霍格沃茨。

Well, I mean, where I grew up, it's a pretty rural agricultural place, but on top of the mountain is a very small university of about 1,800 students. It's called the University of the South, and we teach in our academic robes and it's modeled on Oxford, but it's this strange little place on top of a mountain in Tennessee. There was a period of time where our school really was, for admissions, telling people the school was a lot like Hogwarts.

这挺疯狂的。说实话，你的作品里确实有种狂野的敏感气质，或许就来自这些会做古怪事情的小镇生活。

That's pretty wild. And honestly, there is a bit of a wild sensibility in your writing. Maybe maybe you've got that from living in small towns that do wacky things.

我觉得只要生活在与世隔绝的地方，无法轻易获得想要的东西，你就必须创造，得用自己的想象力来解决问题。所以我认为这很有帮助。

I think anytime you live in an isolated place and you you can't readily access the stuff you may want, you have to make it, and you gotta use your own, you know, imagination to figure out how you're gonna make it. So I think it helped.

那么在你最新的小说《凯文，奔向山野》中，这是部关于追寻的冒险小说——通常涉及旅行，这也是你生活中必须适应的。让角色穿越乡野时，你是什么感受？

So, in this latest novel, Kevin, Run for the Hills, this is a quest novel, which typically involves travel, which you've had to get your head around in your life. What about for sending your characters out across the countryside? How did you feel about that?

噢，我之前真的很担心。我是说，在我之前的许多书中，我总是试图让角色们永远不离开。即使不出小镇，我也尽量让他们连家门都不出。我钟爱的创作手法是，你看，空间越是压缩，越能积累张力，滋生怪诞感。但最终，当剧情需要一场冒险时——如果只是沿着马路走五十码就结束，那也称不上什么激动人心的冒险了。

Oh, I was really worried. I mean, a lot of my previous books, I would try to get the characters to never leave. If not the town, I tried to get them to not even leave the house. A lot of what I love is, you know, the more that you can kind of keep the space compressed, a lot of tension can build up and you can get weirdness. But eventually, when when you have a storyline that requires a quest, you know, it's not an exciting quest if they just go 50 yards down the road and it's over.

所以我明白必须让这些角色动起来，但我有点忐忑，因为我不习惯这样写，也可能担心自己不擅长描写角色移动。最终我的解决方案是：没错他们会移动，他们将横穿整个美国，但始终待在车里。只要那辆车存在，我就有了让我安心的小型压缩空间，这样我就能继续创作了。

So I knew I had to get these characters moving, and I was a little worried because I'm just not used to it or maybe worried that I wasn't skilled at getting my characters to move. And really what I landed on was, yes, they will be moving. They're they're moving across the entire United States, but they're always in a car. So as long as the car is there, I've got that little compressed space where I feel comfortable, and I was ready to go.

这本书讲述的是一个不了解自己家族的家庭。鲁本四十多岁，母亲去世后，他孤独漂泊，不知道自己是谁，该做什么。于是他开始寻找三十年前抛弃他的父亲。

So this book is about a family who don't know their family. Rube or Ruben, he's in his forties. His mother has died. He's alone, adrift, doesn't know who he is, what he's doing. And so he looks for his father who left him, like, thirty years ago.

他发现了什么？

What does he discover?

当他开始揭开这个只在生命中出现过十年的男人的秘密时，他发现父亲查尔斯·希尔大约每十年就会横穿美国一次，组建新家庭，再生个孩子，重塑自己的人生并改变身份。十年期限一到，他似乎就会感到厌倦，离开并组建新的家庭。就这样鲁本发现自己有这么多同父异母的兄弟姐妹。

Well, as he starts to uncover some things about this man that had only been in his life for ten years, he realizes that that Charles Hill, his father, has every ten years basically traveled across The United States starting new families, having another kid, reimagining his own life and kind of changing his identity. And then after ten years pass, he seems to get bored, leaves, and starts a new family. And so he he finds out that he has all these half siblings.

天啊，得知这种事该怎么办？

I mean, wow. What do you do when you find that out?

我想你会坐上车，去寻亲。

I think you get in a car and you go find go find your family.

是啊。

Yeah.

我的作品常常探讨家庭这个概念——你的构成，那些塑造你的人。但我也着迷于

I think it's I think, you know, so much of my work, I'm really interested in the idea of family, like how you're made and the people that shape who you are. But I'm also really interested in found families where you you you find and surround yourself with these people who can help you keep going and to keep surviving. And all of a sudden, I just thought, oh, what if your found family was your biological family? What if you just didn't know it? And I'm just always interested in the ways in which we're connected to each other, and I thought, how wild would it be that there were always these threads connecting you to this other person, but you'd never once known they were there?

你从未感知过这些连接你们之间的丝线所发出的震颤。

You never knew the vibration of those threads between you.

是的。我是说，鲁布就这样开始了与玛德琳（大家叫她玛德）的旅程。他去农场拜访她，因为你看，对他而言，父亲是个悬疑小说家。但对玛德来说，父亲却是个农夫。他拥有这种惊人的能力，能将心思转向某件事并擅长它。

Yeah. I mean, and so Rube starts his journey with Madeleine, known as Mad. He visits her at a farm because, you know, with him, his dad was a mystery writer. But with Mad, his dad was a farmer. He's just this incredible he got this incredible capacity to turn his mind to something and be good at it.

所以玛德现在是个农夫。她三十多岁，最后一次见到父亲是在她十岁左右。然后鲁布突然出现说，嘿，我是你哥哥。想不想一起去找找其他兄弟姐妹？

And so Mad is a farmer now. She's in her thirties. She last saw her dad when she was, 10, I think. And, yeah, Rube rocks up and says, hey, I'm your brother. Do you want to go find some other siblings?

我只是很难想象该如何回应这种事。

I just it's hard to imagine how you respond to that.

我认为，尽管他们是同父异母的兄妹，性格却截然不同。鲁布是那种会跳上车追寻兄弟姐妹的人，而玛德作为农夫，与她耕耘一生的土地紧密相连，对这次旅程要犹豫得多。所以需要鲁布的鼓励才能踏上这趟旅程，去弄清他们的身世之谜，以及父亲到底怎么回事——我们一直对他离开耿耿于怀，但发现他还抛弃了其他孩子时，这种痛苦更深了。

And I think, you know, even though they are half siblings, they're very different in temperament, and Rube is the type of person who would get in a car and track down his siblings. And I think Mad, who is a farmer and is so connected to the land that she's worked on her whole life, I think she's a lot more reluctant to do it. And so I think it it requires Rube's encouragement to to try to set out on this trip, to figure out how they were made and what the heck is going on with our dad, who we had always been kind of unhappy that he'd left us, makes you even more unhappy when you realize he made other kids and left them.

这正是他们矛盾的根源。当他作为他们的父亲时，是个好爸爸。那么问题出在哪里？

Because that's part of the tension for them. He when he was their dad with them, he was a good dad. So what went wrong?

这本书里我真正想强调的是：查尔斯·希尔与孩子们在一起时是个好父亲。问题全在于之后的离开。是的，我希望他们保留对父亲的美好回忆，但当你只有十年美好记忆，其余全是谜团时，这意味着什么？

That's the thing I really wanted to stress in this book is when Charles Hill is with his kids, he's a good dad. It's just everything that follows. It's the leaving. And so, yeah, I wanted them to have good memories of their father, but what what does it mean when you only have ten years of good memories and the rest is a is a mystery?

这种自我重塑的概念——父亲不断重塑自己，作为作家是否也吸引着你？毕竟你一直在创造角色。

And this idea of reinvention, so the father reinventing himself, is that appealing to you as a writer as well? That I mean, you're inventing characters all the time.

确实吸引我，

It is appealing to me,

但我要说，谁的人生中没有想过：如果我当初追求另一个兴趣或痴迷会怎样？我有很多痴迷的事物，但老实说，我写这个角色部分是因为——虽然我能理解重塑自我的渴望，但无法理解怎能离开所爱之人。我确信他爱他们。所以尽管我喜欢重塑这个概念，却无法想象抛下孩子重新开始。正如书中孩子们一样，这对我也是个谜。

but I will say, like, I think one of the things is who who hasn't in their life wondered, oh, what if I had pursued this other interest that I had or this obsession? And I have lots of obsessions, but honestly, I wanted to write about this guy partly because I although I can understand the desire to reinvent yourself, what I couldn't understand was how you could leave the people that you loved. And and I do think he loves them. And so, you know, as much as I like the idea of reinvention, I can't imagine leaving my kids and starting over. It's it's it's, like I said, a mystery to me as well as the children in the book.

因此我写作的部分原因，也是想自己弄明白这个问题。

So part of what I was writing was to try to figure this out myself.

他们必须弄清楚，如果我们找到了父亲，该怎么办？

And they they have to figure out, well, what do we do if we find out dad?

是啊。我是说，问题是，

Yeah. I mean, the thing is,

就像，在我脑海里，每当有人问起我在做什么的时候——这种情况很少——我会说这是关于一群孩子发现他们是同父异母的兄弟姐妹，然后他们前往西部去揍他一顿的故事。我这么说有点开玩笑的意思，但我在想，除此之外还能发生什么呢？除了试图揍这个抛弃你的人，你还能做什么？然而，和这些孩子在车里待得越久，我就越难让他们真的这么做。

like, the whole time in my head when I would tell, you know, the few times anyone asked, like, what I was working on, I said it's about these kids who find out they're half siblings because of their dad, and they head out West to go beat him up. And I mean, I meant that in a flip way, but I kind of, in my head, was like, what else could happen? You know? What what else would you do except try to beat up this guy that left you? And then the longer I spent in the car with those kids, the harder it was for me to let that happen.

我变得和他们一样好奇。

The more I really was as curious as they were.

我是说，因为这本书的一个反复出现的主题是他们在一起时更强大。所以即使他们的父亲让他们失望，他们找到了彼此。

I mean, because one of the refrains of this book is that they're stronger together. So even if their father has stuffed them up, they've found each other.

这容易多了。是的。当四个人对一个人的时候，你立刻就有了人数上的优势。但我想每次他们遇到另一个兄弟姐妹时，那个人对他们的父亲有着完全不同的看法。所以他们很难以同样的方式恨他们的父亲，因为他并不一定是同一个人。

It's a lot easier. Yeah. You you you immediately have numbers on your side when there's four against one. But I think also each time they meet another sibling, that sibling has a completely different version of their dad. And so it's hard for all of them to hate their dad in the same way because he wasn't necessarily the same one.

所以我想谜题在于，如果我们揍了他，他可能不会告诉我们他为什么这么做，而这对我来说更有趣。

So I think the mystery is if we beat him up, he might not tell us why he did what he did, and that was more interesting to me.

鲁贝四十多岁。麦迪三十多岁。佩普，你知道，她是个篮球明星，所以查尔斯·希尔又多了一项才能，他是篮球教练。汤姆还是个孩子，他喜欢拍电影。你看，所有这些年龄段都被代表了。

Rube is in his forties. Maddie's in her thirties. Pep, you know, she's this basketball star, so here we have another string to Charles Hill's bow, his basketball coach. Tom is just a kid, and he's into filmmaking. You know, you have all of these ages represented.

你想看看时间对这种遗弃的影响吗？

Did you want to see, you know, the impact of time on the effects of this abandonment?

是的。我在想，一个40岁的人在30年前被抛弃，对他们来说更痛苦，还是一个10岁的人，几年前父亲才消失，对他们来说更痛苦？我想我无法区分。我不知道谁的痛苦会更大，我真的想看看当你对这个男人的记忆如此遥远，以至于你实际上比他离开你时还要老，或者和他离开你时一样大，而不是仍然很难不把他当作你真正的父亲时会发生什么。

Yeah. I wondered in my head, I just wondered, is the person who's 40 and was left thirty years ago, is it more painful for them, or is it more painful for the person who's 10 and only just a few years previously had their dad disappear? And I think I I couldn't differentiate. I didn't know whose pain would be greater, and I really did wanna see what happens when your memory of the man is so far away that you're actually older or as old as when he left you as opposed to when it would be so hard to not still think of him as your actual father.

凯文，我还很感兴趣地发现，这部小说的种子其实也埋藏在你之前那本关于迷茫青少年的书《现在不是恐慌的时候》里。事实上，我们上次就聊过这个话题。但这部小说的灵感当时是如何萌芽的呢？

And I was also interested to find out, Kevin, that the seeds for this novel were also planted in your previous book about teenagers adrift called Now Is Not The Time To Panic. In fact, we got to speak to each other about that. But how were the seeds for this novel planted then?

有时候我觉得，关于我的写作方式可能存在不太善意的解读，比如可能认为我比较懒，所以总是从刚写完的书里继续挖掘点子。但我觉得更多是因为我热爱创作，有时为了故事需要，你无法在某主题上花费理想的时间。在上一本书里，我塑造了个成年后成为作家的主角，她写的就是这类'你'视角的书。她提到我为成年人写的那本书彻底失败了，没人喜欢。

Sometimes, I think, you know, there's uncharitable ways to think about how I write, and one of them is maybe I'm lazy, and so I just keep going back into the book I just wrote for more ideas. But I think it's more that I just love making these things, and sometimes for the purposes of that story, you can't spend as much time as you'd like on a topic. And in the previous book, I have a main character who is, as an adult, is a writer, and she writes these kind of You books. And she talks about the one book I wrote for adults was a big failure. No one liked it.

那本书讲的是个死去的男人，他有好多女儿却给她们起相同的名字，不断离婚又生育。最年长的女儿要带着所有同名的异母弟妹去参加他的葬礼。我不知道这反映了什么——明明在上一本书里我自己都承认这是个糟糕的设定，读者也不买账，可不知为何我又觉得'这题材好像很有趣，我想写写看'，这个念头一直萦绕不去。

And it was about a man who dies, and he had had all of these other daughters and gave them all the same name and kept divorcing and having more kids. And the oldest is picking up every single one of her half siblings with the same name to go to his funeral. And I don't know what that says about me that I admitted that it was a bad idea and no one liked it in my previous book that for some reason I thought, oh, that seems like fun. I would like to write about that. And I couldn't stop thinking about it.

所以我清楚自己...我的意思是，我知道自己不是那种会把虚构角色当真人的艺术家。但某种程度上，确实是故事里的这个角色给了我新书的灵感。

And so I know that I may I mean, I know I'm I'm not like, you know, I'm not that kind of an artist where I think, oh, you know, the character character is a real person. But in some ways, it was as if the character in the story gave me the idea for my next book.

你骨子里似乎有种挑战欲，像是偏要证明'不，我能把这个故事写好'。

And there's something in you that where you like to challenge someone like, no. I can make that story work.

是啊，我觉得...

Yeah. I think a

很多时候...应该说90%的灵感刚冒出来时都是馊主意。所以不能干等着完美创意出现。你要做的就是发现某个奇特之处，然后带着探索欲直接动笔，必须相信这个过程。

lot of times I I would say 90% of my ideas are bad ideas when I first think of them. So you can't just wait around for a perfect idea. You just say, there's something weird here. I'd love to explore it, and you just have to go. You just have to trust.

要是非得等完美创意，我可能到现在连一本书都写不出来。

If you waited for the perfect idea, I don't know if I'd ever written a book yet.

凯文，上次聊天时你说每晚都给孩子读书。那时他们14岁和10岁，差不多两年前的事了。现在他们更大了些，不知道这个习惯还在坚持吗？还是说你们的亲子仪式有了新变化？

And, Kevin, last time we spoke, you told me you read to your children every night. At the time, they were 14 and 10, and this was, like, two years ago. They're a bit older now. So I just wondered if you're still doing that or if your rituals have evolved.

还在坚持。现在大孩子17岁，小的12岁，我仍然会给大儿子读书。

No. We still do. I was reading to my oldest seven they're 17 and 12 now.

天哪。

Oh my goodness.

有趣的是，我17岁的大儿子，以前都是我拿着书去找他说，我读这本书时很喜欢。但现在他会主动拿书给我说，我真的很想读这本书，而且通常都是我没听说过的书。所以我不知道，我有点喜欢这样。曾有一度我以为，我只要把我爱的书都给他就行，却没想过他可能会向我推荐我没读过的书。

And what's interesting is my oldest who's 17, I mean, he re it used to be that I would bring books to him and say, loved this when I read it. But now he brings books to me and he says, I'd really like to read this book and it's usually books I've not heard of. So I don't know. I I kind of love that. I think there was a point where I thought, I'm just gonna give him all the books that I love and I didn't consider the fact that he might introduce me to books that I haven't read.

至于我最小的孩子，我正努力避免简单重复对大儿子的做法。所以这变得很有趣，你在寻找那些你未曾体验过的书。

And then with my youngest, it's I'm trying really hard not to just repeat what I did with my oldest son. So it becomes kind of fun. You're searching out books that you've not experienced.

而且你是朗读给他们听？是这样吗？

And you're reading aloud. Is that it?

一直都是。是的，我会朗读。我妻子有她与孩子们共读的书籍生活，她也会和他们一起读两本书。

Always. Yeah. I I read aloud. My wife has her own book life with the kids. She reads, two books with them as well.

所以我们总是轮流来。有时候我能听到妻子给一个儿子读书，同时我在给另一个读。但说真的，我不知道...我想说，可能之前提过，如果你有孩子，或者哪怕只是和某人共同生活——当一天结束，无论好坏，你们并肩坐在床上，为彼此朗读一个专为你们而写的故事时，那几乎总是我一天中最美好的时刻。

So we're always alternating. And so sometimes I can hear my wife reading to my one son while I'm reading to the other. But, yeah, it's I don't know. I I will say, like, I probably said it before, but if you have kids or even if you I would just say if you are connected to another person, like, you live with somebody, that moment at the end of the night after everything that's happened, bad or good, when you sit in bed and you read aloud a story that has been made for you with this person that you love, it is almost always the best part of my day.

我很感动他仍在坚持给孩子读书。这是凯文·威尔逊对莎拉·莱斯特兰奇的分享。《逃往群山》由Text出版社发行。您正在收听的是我和克莱尔·尼科尔斯主持的《书香节目》。我有个理论：写短篇小说其实比写长篇难得多。长篇小说可以无限延展。

I love that he's still reading to his kids. That was Kevin Wilson speaking to Sarah Lestrange. Run for the Hills is published by text. You're listening to The Book Show with me, Claire Nichols, and I have a theory that it's actually much harder to write a short book than it is to write a long book. Long novels, they can go on and on.

对吧？但短篇需要克制力，必须榨干每个词句的最后一丝意蕴与美感，在寥寥数页中迸发最大张力和故事性。这让我想到澳大利亚作家约瑟芬·罗威的《小小世界》。这本小书仅132页，却巧妙串联起三个时空隔绝的人物，以及一具近乎圣徒的遗体如何将他们联结。

Right? But a short book, it requires discipline, a commitment to squeezing every last drop of meaning and beauty out of a single word or sentence, creating as much power and as much story as you can in a very small number of pages. And this brings me to Little World by the Australian author Josephine Rowe. This is a really slim thing, just 132 pages. But Josephine, she manages to create a clever and moving story about three people seemingly disconnected over time and geography, and the body of an almost saint that joins them together.

约瑟芬，写一本极短的书有多难？

Josephine, how hard is it to write a very small book?

啊，首先非常感谢邀请，克莱尔，也谢谢你精彩的介绍。写短篇难吗？难道我还知道其他写作方式吗？我想这更多源于本能地对冗余填充的反感。所以这本130页的书里，每个字都经过斟酌。

Oh, first of all, thank you so much for having me, Claire, and thanks for the beautiful introduction. How hard is it to write a short book? Do I know the way to write any other book? I think a lot of it is just an instinctual dislike and distrust of waste and filler. So there's, you know, there's what's between the covers here at a 130 pages.

此外还有所有未收录进书中的文字。我希望它们仍能以某种方式产生共鸣，或作为根基与暗影存在于读者所遇见的场景与人物之中，营造出更为浓厚的氛围。

And then there's all of the all of the writing that doesn't appear within the book. And what I hope is that it's sort of it still resonates somehow or is there as a root or a shadow to watch the reader is encountering. And it sort of it creates a denser atmosphere about the places and the characters that that they meet.

所以你的意思是，这本书在其他地方还有大量被删减、被舍弃的文稿？

So what you're saying is there is a lot more writing to this book somewhere else that has been cut, that has been got rid of.

没错。而且由于我经常手写创作，这些文字具有非常切实的存在感——这可能也挺有用的。它们并非消散于虚无的劳动成果，而是实实在在可触知的东西。

Yeah. And because I write longhand a lot as well, it's it's a very kind of tangible present, which is maybe that's that's kind of useful too. It's not it's not labor that's just disappeared into the ether. It's actually it's a tactile thing.

现在还有很

Are there a lot

多像你这样年纪的人坚持手写吗，约瑟芬？

of people of your age that write longhand these days, Josephine?

说实话我不太清楚。我确实认识几个这样做的人。有次我在纽约公共图书馆尝试在类似办公室的环境写作，甚至带了打字机去。结果第二天就放弃了——我实在不明白人们怎么能忍受工作时的键盘声，那种噼里啪啦的动静倒未必会打扰别人，但可能太引人注目了。所以那次之后我就把这招从备选方案里划掉了。

You know, I I don't know. I definitely know a few people who do. The one time I've tried to be in a sort of office situation, which was actually at the New York Public Library, I took in my typewriter. And on day two, I gave that up because it was like, you know I don't know how people ever did it, you know, listening to or being listened to as you work and the the clattering was, I think, not necessarily distracting for other people, but maybe too interesting. So I I kind of wrote that out of the the playbook for that particular time.

所以手写确实更安静。嗯...当你反复修改时，是在逐字逐句地调整吗？

So I guess, yeah, longhand, it's quiet. Mhmm. And what you're rewriting and rewriting and rewriting? Like, are you doing that on a word and sentence level?

完全正确。在极少数状态极佳的日子里，大部分构思会提前在我脑海中成型——我甚至会带着已然成型的词句醒来，那些话语仿佛是用别人的声音在脑海中回响。

Absolutely. Yeah. I I think a lot of composition happens in my mind beforehand on very very good days. But they're rare. I will kind of wake up with the words already there in my head, almost in somebody else's voice.

不过这种神奇体验确实只是偶尔发生。

But that's that's a sort of charmed experience that it it does happen semi semi occasionally.

那么当你不断打磨句子时，如何判断某个句子已经完美，可以继续写下一句了呢？

So if you're refining and refining and refining, when do you know that, okay, that sentence is now right? Move on to the next one.

是啊，我也说不清。我觉得当出版社从你手中夺走作品时，其实还有些内容——如果再给我几个月时间，我想最终阶段就是那样，你知道的，就像反复调整家具位置，可能做出的决定相当随意，却要耗费整个上午。也许那正是该放手的时候。

Yeah. I don't know. I think I really think when the publishers are pulling it out of your hands, there were still things that if you had have given me a few more months, I would have I think by the end of the process, you get to that, you know, moving furniture around, and then maybe, you know, that it's you're making very kind of arbitrary decisions, but you're spending all morning on them. And maybe that's the point where you need to let it go.

你创作这部小说用了多久？

How long were you working on this novel for?

这部作品有点像三联画，读者会发现它横跨约一个世纪。故事始于金伯利和瑙鲁，中间部分是七十年代穿越纳拉伯平原，最终落脚在新冠疫情爆发时的当代维多利亚州乡村。前三分之一和最后部分我基本是2018、2019年同步写的，那些骨架或者说基础当时就搭好了。

Okay. So it's it's kind of a triptych, as readers will find, and spans probably about a century. It sort of starts out in the Kimberley and Nauru, and then in the middle, it's the nineteen seventies crossing the Nullarbor Plain and lands in contemporary rural Victoria at the outbreak of coronavirus. So that's sort of the suggestion. I wrote the first part and the third part kinda simultaneously about 2018, 2019, the sort of bones of those or the foundations of those were were laid.

实际上这两部分早期曾以不同版本单独发表过。而中间那段漫长的迷幻梦境般的内容——创作过程要曲折得多，部分原因是我在疫情期间搬到了纽约，那段经历很有意思。我所有作品无论长短体裁，往往都始于某个意象。

And actually, those two pieces were published as as separate stories in kind of earlier versions. And then there is this long expansive fever dream of a middle bit. And that that was a lot. The process for that was much more protracted, partly because I moved to New York during the pandemic, which was an interesting experience. And I think a lot of my works, of whether they're short or long or poems or whatever sort of genre or genre shadow zone they live in, they tend to start with an image.

第二章节的开篇意象我很早就有了，也确定了书中段女主角的形象——她是个失眠者，已连续驾驶十七天。我自己一直饱受失眠困扰，2021年搬到曼哈顿后这种情况更严重了。

So I had the opening image for that second section, and I had a sense of who the protagonist was going to be for that that middle third of the book. She's an insomniac. She's been driving for seventeen days. And I was having a lot I've always had a lot of trouble sleeping. And I think the insomnia had been kind of ratcheted up by moving to Manhattan in 2021.

这得怪你自己，偏要搬到'不夜城'。怎么想的？

I mean, this is your fault. You moved to the city that never sleeps. What were you thinking? Well,

那时曼哈顿正从那些史诗般空荡凄凉的电影场景中苏醒，反而特别迷人。往常人们总说你错过了'真正的纽约'，说十年前或五十年前才是。但这次相反，酒吧重新营业，中央车站生蚝吧重开，人们摘下口罩，地铁里重现生机，仿佛见证着纽约真正的回归。

it was a really fascinating time to be in Manhattan because it was just coming out of those epic, cinematic, devastating scenes of emptiness and and sort of deep sleep in a way. And generally, every time you go to New York, people are telling you that you've missed the real New York, that it was ten years or twenty years or fifty years behind you. That's when the real New York was. But this was an inversion of that because bars were opening again and, you know, the Grand Central Oyster Bar was opening again and face masks were coming off and people were riding the subways a little bit more boldly. And so if you got told that this was the real New York kind of coming back, and it was really incredible to kind of see the city opening up that way.

不过住在上东区六层无电梯公寓确实无助于睡眠，何况隔壁就是医院。奥密克戎来袭时救护车日夜呼啸。这种状态下我反而觉得——当疲惫到分不清人事物界限时，正是塑造玛蒂尔达这个角色的绝佳状态。中间部分耗时这么久，整体算来可能五六年吧。

But, yes, moving to a Sixth Floor walk up on the Upper East Side does not do does not do wonders for your patterns of sleep, maybe. And and it was also around the corner from a hospital. And then I suppose when when Omicron kind of came in and everything shut it down again, there were lots of ambulances. Anyway, this to say, the the insomnia was was kind of more acute through this time. And I, again, hated the idea of waste maybe.

这本该是副业创作，却莫名占据了我全部精力——虽然我迟早会完成原本该写的那部作品。

But I also thought this is the perfect state to be writing Matilde's character from this sort of whether you're so tired that the delineations between things and people and incidents start to break down. So that's kind of where that's a long answer to to where the to how long the middle bitch took. But overall, go to woe, it was probably five five or six years of writing it kind of to the side of the thing I was supposed to write, which I will still write, that that this kind of consumed me for some reason.

所以你原本还有另一个创作计划？

So there was another project you were supposed to be doing?

有的。就是那部让我获得海外研究奖学金的大部头小说。但它已经等待了很久，而且相当有耐心。所以它会继续等待下去。

There is. There's the there's the big novel that was the reason I was on a research fellowship overseas. But, yeah, it it's waited a long time, and it's it's pretty patient. So it will continue to

嗯，我想我们感觉到你确实不紧不慢，约瑟芬，我认为这在作品呈现上得到了回报。你提到过同时写了开篇故事和终章故事。嗯。你在发表这两个故事时就知道它们可以联系起来吗？

Well, I think we're getting a sense that you do take your time, Josephine, and I think that pays off in what we see on the page. You were talking about having written the beginning story and the final story simultaneously. Mhmm. Did you know when you were writing those two stories for publication that they could be linked?

是的。我确实强烈感觉到它们是有关联的。书中有个让我印象深刻的场景：金伯利地区有个男人正等待接收一具由马匹拖车运送的儿童圣徒遗体。虽然不确定这个意象从何而来，但它在我脑海中如此强烈，我知道必须用它做些什么。我翻查了笔记本，这个意象大约出现在2018年。

Yeah. I had I had the sense definitely that they were linked. There was, again, a strong image for me is the book opens with the scene of a man in the Kimberley waiting to receive the body of a child saint who is being couriered by horse float. I don't know where that image came from necessarily, but that was the image in my head and it had such a charge about it that I knew I had to do something with it. So I think I think I flipped back through notebooks and I think that appears in 2018 sometime.

所以有这个意象，而马匹拖车也如我之前提到的，在...

And so there's that and I the horse float kind of appears again as I mentioned before in the

第三个故事里再次出现。

last In the third story.

书的第三部分，大约是70页后，那时可能是新冠疫情初期或刚刚出现苗头的时候。

Third of the book, which is what, 70 later in what is probably the the outset of coronavirus or just the first intimations of that.

我们来谈谈这个1950年代金伯利地区的开篇章节。你提到一个儿童圣徒，我说是近乎圣徒，她到底是什么...

Let's talk about this opening section in the Kimberley in the nineteen fifties, because you've talked about a child saint. I said an almost saint, like, what what What is

她是什么...

she? What

人？

is she?

我也说可能是圣徒。在书开头，退休工程师奥伦·伯德曾在瑙鲁磷酸盐工业工作，他在那里某种程度上是为自己参与那场大规模破坏性开采赎罪。他等待接收的据说是儿童圣徒。几页后我们实际上会读到她的视角...

I I I say maybe saint as well. At the opening of the book, Oren Bird, who's a retired engineer, has worked in Naru in the phosphate industry, is kind of out there atoning in a way for his for his part in that massive and devastating extraction. He's out there waiting to receive who he believes or who he is told is a child saint. A few pages on, we actually get we get her point of view

嗯。

Mhmm.

从她那具——我猜是静止不动的躯体内部，却有着极其鲜活愤怒的意识。她会全心全意反对关于圣徒身份的说法。

From from within her sort of, I guess, immobile body, but very very vivid and angry consciousness. And she would disagree wholeheartedly about the idea of sainthood.

所以她处于所谓的'不朽之身'状态。这具体意味着什么？

So that she's in what's called an incorruptible body. Like, what does that actually mean?

本质上就是指尸体不会腐坏。这可能是多种科学现象导致的结果。但在天主教封圣程序中，肉身不腐是圣徒候选人的首要重要标志之一——如果遗体没有腐败迹象，没有留下任何尘世暴力或伤害的痕迹。我最早关注的圣徒可能是德卡尼维达的凯特瑞，她出现在莱昂纳德·科恩的小说里。我最近试图重读这本15岁读过的书，不得不佩服当年的自己——现在40岁的我读起来相当吃力。

Well, essentially, it just means that your your body doesn't break down. So that's, you know, numerous scientific phenomena that might that might allow for that. But in terms of Catholicism and canonization and beatification, this is sort of like one of the first or one of the big markers of potential sainthood is that if your body does not break down, if it doesn't retain any any evidence of earthly violence or earthly harm. So I think maybe the first saint I was interested in is Kateri Tekakwita, who appears in a novel by Letter Cohen, which I tried to reread recently. I read it when I was 15, and good on 15 year old me because 40 year old me had a lot of trouble with it.

这是本问题重重的书，我读了一半就放下了，因为内容充满猎奇感且令人不安。后来了解到作者八月在伊兹拉岛顶着正午烈日，不戴帽子不穿衬衫写作时，似乎就能理解了。但凯特瑞的故事始终吸引着我。当我年长些在美加生活，了解更多背景后，意识到她可能是首位原住民圣徒。而她获得圣徒身份的其中一个标志，就是死后所有天花疤痕消失，皮肤变得百合般洁白。

It's a very problematic book, and I I had to put it down after a while, because it's quite fetishist and and unsettling. It it makes more sense when you realize he was writing it in the noonday sun, hatless, shirtless on on Idra in the August or something. But I think her story, I think, Kateri Tukukwyther always compelled me. And when I became a bit older and lived in America and Canada and learned a bit more about it, the idea that this I think she might be the first indigenous saint. And one of the one of the factors or one of the markers of her sainthood was that all of after death, all of her smallpox scars disappeared and she went lily white.

这实在太尴尬了。仿佛圣徒资格就是抹去所有暴力与错误的痕迹。

And that's so cringey. And, like, that that is what qualifies for sainthood is that there's sort of no evidence of violence or wrong.

容我问一句，约瑟芬，你有宗教信仰吗？

May I ask, are you religious, Josephine?

没有。绝对不属于任何宗教组织。或许可以说有灵性追求，但即便这种说法也...可能这本书更接近我对灵性的理解——更倾向于欣赏万物互联、相互依存与因果关联，尝试以超越人类寿命的时间维度思考问题。

No. I'm not. No. Definitely not in any kind of organized way. I suppose I could say spiritual, but even that is sort of maybe maybe the book gets closer to my idea of or my own experience of spirituality, which is probably more along the lines of appreciating a certain amount of interconnectedness, interdependency, consequence, and trying to think in lengths of time that are outside of a human lifespan.

约瑟芬·罗的这本小说涉及很多主题：关于哀恸，关于孤独。我想特别指出这也是部非常酷儿的小说。这是否是...

This novel, Josephine Wroe, is about a lot of things. You know, it's about grief. It's about loneliness. I wanted to mention that it's also a very queer novel. Was that a decision Thank you.

从一开始就设定的创作方向？

Was that a decision from the start?

谢谢你这么说。你算是少数几位在讨论中一开始就提到这一点的人之一。这确实是一本非常酷儿的书。我想它是一本低调的、是的，酷儿之书。

Thank you for saying that. You're sort of one of the few people that has has kind of mentioned that at the top in discussions I've had. It is it is a very queer book. I guess it's a quietly Yes. Queer book.

是的。前几天我和一位朋友讨论过这个，他是异性恋，但他觉得书中关系的本质在他看来并不显得另类，或者说它们的酷儿性并非关系的重点。我认为那只是相当自然的呈现。嗯。我并非刻意要写一本完全没有异性恋性行为描写的书，但结果就是如此。

Yes. I was having this discussion with a friend the other day, and he was heterosexual, but he he sort of the the nature of the relationships in it, he said, didn't strike him as being other or that their queerness wasn't the point of the relationship. I don't I think that was just pretty organic. Mhmm. I didn't I didn't set out necessarily to write a book in which there's no heterosexual sex on page, but that's that's kind of how it worked.

听着，我非常喜欢这本书。我觉得它完成得太美了。这本书叫《小世界》，由Black Inc.出版。约瑟芬·罗，谢谢你今天和我聊天。

Look, I've loved this book. I think it is so beautifully done. It's called Little World. It's published by Black Inc. Josephine Roe, thanks for chatting to me today.

非常感谢你，克莱尔。真的很感激。

Thank you so much, Claire. Really appreciate it.

听约瑟芬·罗讲述失眠症在《小世界》创作中的作用真是引人入胜。这让我想起上周与萨曼莎·哈维的对话。她也是在类似状态下完成了布克奖获奖小说《轨道》。你可以在ABC Listen应用上找到我与萨曼莎以及众多文学巨星的对话，全部往期内容都在那里。

And how fascinating to hear Josephine Roe talk about the part Insomnia had to play in the creation of Little World. It reminds me of my conversation with Samantha Harvey from last week. She wrote the booker winning novel Orbital in a very similar state. And you can find my conversation with Samantha and with a whole host of literary superstars on the ABC Listen app. The whole back catalog is there.

记得关注《读书秀》节目。感谢读书秀团队——莎拉·莱斯特兰奇和大卫·拉梅。我是克莱尔·尼科尔斯，我们在乌伦杰里和瓦朱克努加尔人的土地上制作这档节目。

Just make sure you're following the book show. Thank you to the book show team, Sarah Lestrange and David LaMae. My name is Claire Nichols, and we make this show on the lands of the Wurundjeri and Wajuk Noongar people.