2009年--人去楼空

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2009 – Man Gone Down
Author: Michael Thomas
Winner! – Watch Michael Thomas’ Acceptance Speech
2009 Shortlist    2009 Longlist
The Judges’ Citation
We never know his name. But the African-American protagonist of Michael Thomas’ masterful debut, Man Gone Down, will stay with readers for a long time. He lingers because this extraordinary novel comes to us from a writer of enthralling voice and startling insight. Tuned urgently to the way we live now, the winner of the International Dublin IMPAC Prize 2009 is a novel brilliant in its scope and energy, and deeply moving in its human warmth.
The first person narrator in Man Gone Down has not fallen, yet. But he stands at a precipice. A black man from Boston married to a white woman with whom he has three children. A once promising Harvard student now broke and working in construction in Brooklyn. When we meet the narrator, he’s had to leave his wife and children with his disapproving mother-in-law, and now has just four days to raise the money necessary to reunite the family and return the children to school.

“If you’ve ever been broke – really broke,” he observes, “there are two things you know about being so: the universe is constantly conspiring to keep you that way…”
So unfolds the richly textured four-day drama of individual survival set against the myth of an integrated and racially normalized America. “It’s strange to go through life as a social experiment,” muses the man who had been bused and tested as a youth, “groomed for leadership”, and who now remembers the great men – Ghandi, King, Jackie Robinson, Malcolm X – as posters on the wall of a childhood bedroom.

Thomas’ novel shows, in unsentimental clarity, the way the future can close mercilessly on those marginalized by race and social circumstance. “Not a train,” as he writes about the cadences of the blues, “but something coming down the track under its own unconscious locomotion.” At the same time, Man Gone Down is a superb illustration of how each moment of the present, for all of us, is braided with the past: slights and nosebleeds, lost parents and double rainbows over long-ago weddings. Memories haunt and drive the present, in this novel, even as the future presses. So on a late-night run through Brooklyn, the ash cloud of 9/11 advances in memory: “again and again, crossing the water, coming to us like a late-Cretaceous plume of postfire.”

In his four days of increasing desperation, Thomas’ narrator takes us to dark interior places, where love is questioned and life must be contemplated as an “an imploded star”. But there is always hope. In my end (as Eliot is invoked) is my beginning. And here the novel HITS its truest notes, revealing that second thing to be learned from the condition of being really broke: “that the universe is plotting your redemption as well: when all fortunes are reversed.”
To say how, or even if, this reversal is achieved would spoil the exhilarating climax of this magnificent book, a work that brings Bellow as much as Ellison to mind. At the novel’s close, we still do not know the narrator’s name, but we feel him. And having been at the deepest sites of his struggle, we are changed by him as well. Man Gone Down is a novel that will resonate long into the future, a work that devastates and rebuilds, but is attuned always to the human yearning that is the story’s beating heart.

Judges: Rachel Billington, Gabrielle Alioth, Vesna Goldsworthy, Timothy Taylor, James Ryan. Non-voting Chair, Judge Eugene R. Sullivan


About the Book
A beautifully written, insightful, and devastating first novel, Man Gone Down is about a young black father of three in a biracial marriage trying to claim a piece of the American Dream he has bargained on since youth.

On the eve of the unnamed narrator’s thirty-fifth birthday, he finds himself broke, estranged from his white Boston Brahmin wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend’s six-year-old child. He has four days to come up with the money to keep his family afloat, four days to try to make some sense of his life. He’s been getting by working construction jobs though he’s known on the streets as “the professor,” as he was expected to make something out of his life.

Alternating between his past-as a child in inner-city Boston, he was bussed to the suburbs as part of the doomed attempts at integration in the 1970s-and the present in New York City where he is trying mightily to keep his children in private schools, we learn of his mother’s abuses, his father’s abandonment, raging alcoholism, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America.

This is an extraordinary debut. It is a story of the American Dream gone awry, about what it’s like to feel preprogrammed to fail in life-and the urge to escape that sentence.

Michael Thomas’s writing recalls some of the great American masters, including Ralph Ellison, but his debut is wholly and distinctly an original. Man Gone Down is a dazzling addition to the literature of and about America today.

(From Publisher)

About the Author
Michael Thomas was born and raised in Boston. He received his B.A. from Hunter College and his M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College. He teaches at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children.

Librarian’s Comments
A vibrant, well written first novel, an exploration of identity, inter-racial relationships and societal values through the eye of a black male.





2009年--人去楼空
作者。迈克尔-托马斯
获奖者! - 观看迈克尔-托马斯的获奖感言
2009年入围名单 2009年长名单
评委们的赞誉
我们从不知道他的名字。但是，迈克尔-托马斯精湛的处女作《消失的人》中的非裔美国人主人公将在读者心中停留很长时间。他之所以留连忘返，是因为这部非凡的小说是由一位具有令人着迷的声音和惊人的洞察力的作家为我们写的。2009年都柏林国际IMPAC奖得主紧急调整了我们现在的生活方式，这部小说在范围和能量上都很出色，在人性的温暖上也令人深深感动。
人去楼空》中的第一人称叙述者还没有堕落。但他站在一个悬崖边上。一个来自波士顿的黑人男子与一个白人女子结婚，并与她有三个孩子。一个曾经很有前途的哈佛大学学生现在破产了，在布鲁克林从事建筑工作。当我们见到叙述者时，他不得不把他的妻子和孩子留给他不赞成的岳母，现在只有四天时间来筹集必要的资金，使家庭团聚并让孩子们重返学校。

他说："如果你曾经破产过--真正的破产，"他说，"关于破产，你知道两件事：宇宙在不断地密谋让你保持这种状态......"
于是，在美国一体化和种族正常化的神话背景下，展开了质地丰富的四天个人生存的戏剧。"作为一个社会实验来经历生活是很奇怪的，"这个人在青年时期就被安排在公交车上，接受测试，"被培养为领导"，现在他记得那些伟人--甘地、国王、杰基-罗宾逊、马尔科姆-X--是童年卧室墙上的海报。

托马斯的小说清楚地表明，未来可以无情地关闭那些被种族和社会环境边缘化的人。他写道："不是一列火车，"在蓝调的节奏下，"而是一些在其自身无意识的运动下走下轨道的东西。" 同时，《消失的人》是一个极好的说明，说明我们所有人的当下的每一个时刻是如何与过去编织在一起的：轻视和鼻血，失去的父母和很久以前的婚礼上的双彩虹。在这本小说中，记忆萦绕并驱动着现在，即使是在未来的压力下。因此，在布鲁克林的一个深夜里，9/11的灰云在记忆中不断推进。"一次又一次，越过水面，像晚白垩纪的火后烟云一样向我们走来。"

在他日益绝望的四天里，托马斯的叙述者把我们带到了黑暗的内部场所，在那里，爱情受到质疑，生活必须被视为 "一颗内爆的星星"。但希望总是存在的。在我的终点（正如艾略特所引用的）是我的起点。在这里，小说发出了它最真实的音符，揭示了从真正破产的状况中可以学到的第二件事。"宇宙也在策划对你的救赎：当所有的财富都被逆转的时候"。
说出这种逆转是如何实现的，甚至是否实现，会破坏这本宏伟的书的令人振奋的高潮，这部作品让人想起了贝娄和埃里森。在小说的结尾，我们仍然不知道叙述者的名字，但我们感觉到了他。在他斗争的最深处，我们也被他所改变。消失的人》是一部将在未来产生长久共鸣的小说，是一部破坏和重建的作品，但它始终与人类的渴望保持一致，这是故事跳动的心脏。

评审员。雷切尔-比林顿、加布里埃尔-阿利奥特、维斯纳-戈德斯沃西、蒂莫西-泰勒、詹姆斯-莱恩。无表决权的主席，尤金-R-沙利文法官


关于这本书
这是一部文笔优美、富有洞察力和破坏性的第一部小说，《人去楼空》讲述的是一位年轻的黑人父亲在两族婚姻中试图要求实现他从年轻时就开始讨价还价的美国梦。

在这位不愿透露姓名的叙述者的35岁生日前夕，他发现自己破产了，与他的波士顿白人婆罗门妻子和三个孩子疏远了，并住在一个朋友的六岁孩子的卧室里。他有四天时间拿出钱来维持家庭生计，有四天时间试图让自己的生活变得有意义。他一直在做建筑工作，虽然他在街上被称为 "教授"，因为人们期望他能在生活中有所作为。

在他的过去--作为波士顿市内的一个孩子，他被送到郊区，作为20世纪70年代注定要失败的一体化尝试的一部分--和现在的纽约市，他正在努力让他的孩子上私立学校，我们了解到他母亲的虐待，他父亲的遗弃，愤怒的酗酒，以及一个所谓的一体化美国最好和最坏的意图。

这是一部非凡的处女作。这是一个关于美国梦出错的故事，关于感觉到生活中预设的失败是什么样子--以及想要摆脱这种判决的冲动。

迈克尔-托马斯的写作让人想起一些伟大的美国大师，包括拉尔夫-埃里森，但他的处女作完全是一种原创。消失的人》是对当今美国文学和有关美国文学的一个令人眼花缭乱的补充。

(来自出版社)

关于作者
迈克尔-托马斯在波士顿出生和长大。他在亨特学院获得学士学位，在沃伦-威尔逊学院获得文学硕士学位。他在亨特学院任教，与他的妻子和三个孩子住在布鲁克林。

图书管理员的评论
这是一部充满活力、写得很好的第一部小说，通过一个黑人男性的眼睛探索身份、种族间关系和社会价值观。