2016年--家庭生活

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2016 – Family Life
Author: Akhil Sharma
2016 Winner !
Watch Akhil Sharma’s Acceptance Speech
Press Release    Photographs
Winner Reading and Q & A, Pearse Street Library 10th June
2016 Longlist       2016 Shortlist     Judging Panel     Nominating Libraries

Judges’ Citation
A novel is a collection of facts that just happen to have been made up. As the reader reads they stream in to the reader’s imagination and form a virtual equivalent of what was in the writer’s head. The efficacy of this transaction is in direct ratio to the veracity of the author’s facts. The better they are, the sharper the world that takes shape in the reader’s psyche. As readers we know this. Mediocre texts generate fuzzy chimeras, while more authoritative narratives so convince we can talk about the characters in the story, for example, just as we talk about our friends because they are as real as our friends. But beyond these is an even higher kind of novel that does more than engage. This kind occupies you so absolutely that while you read and for a while after you finish, the specificities of your own life don’t exist because they have been supplanted by the specificities of the author’s invented world. This kind of usurpation is the greatest pleasure a reader can know and Family Life by Akhil Sharma is one of those rare novels that does this.

The narrative of Family Life is thus: the Mishra’s – mother, father and two sons, Birju and his younger brother Ajay (who tells the story and is the novel’s pivot) emigrate from India to the US in 1978. For Ajay’s older brother, Birju, the New World is initially a triumph until an accident in a swimming pool causes catastrophic brain damage, after which he needs twenty-four care. Initially he receives this in medical settings, but then he goes home and is cared for by his parents and his brother. The story of Birju’s care is the kernel of the novel, it’s living heart.

As a reading experience Family Life desolates and infuriates. It prompts questions too. Why should the suffering rich get better care than the suffering rest? Isn’t all human suffering equal? However, alongside its subtle interrogation of inequality (this isn’t a febrile work of social criticism) the novel also celebrates the Mishra family’s achievement. For all their imperfections, and they have plenty, (there are no paragons in this novel), somehow they cope and somehow they meet Birju’s needs, which is a kind of triumph and, for a reader, it is profoundly consoling that they manage this.

Suffering and the struggle to ameliorate suffering are not unknown in fiction but Family Life pulls off the extraordinary feat of showing them in their correct alignment. Closing the book, having known this mix of light and dark, you are left with the sense that while reading you were actually at the core of human experience and what it is to be alive. This is the highest form of achievement in literature. Few manage it. This novel does. Triumphantly. Luminously. Movingly. All hail Family Life by Akhil Sharma.

About the Book
We meet the Mishra family in Delhi in 1978, where eight-year-old Ajay and his older brother Birju play cricket in the streets, waiting for the day when their plane tickets will arrive and they and their mother can fly across the world and join their father in America. America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more: when automatic glass doors open before them, they feel that surely they must have been mistaken for somebody important. Pressing an elevator button and the elevator closing its doors and rising, they have a feeling of power at the fact that the elevator is obeying them. Life is extraordinary until tragedy strikes, leaving one brother severely brain-damaged and the other lost and virtually orphaned in a strange land. Ajay, the family’s younger son, prays to a God he envisions as Superman, longing to find his place amid the ruins of his family’s new life.

Heart-wrenching and darkly funny, Family Life is a universal story of a boy torn between duty and his own survival.

(from publisher)

About the Author
Akhil Sharma is the author of An Obedient Father, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry Award Stories. A native of Delhi, he lives in New York City and is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark.

Librarians’ Comments
Beautifully hypnotic, Sharma’s novel revolves around the ups and downs of a young boy, Ajay, who is practically orphaned when tragedy strikes his family. Alternating between gut wrenching emotion and a child’s selfish, dark humor, Ajay learns to navigate his family’s new normal, sharing his observations with a brutal honesty.

For the price of success that is a theme in all those other stories of the same author – demonstrated, in this novel in particular, by a sure and steady control of language in the face of disaster – is the loss of a self. Sharma’s plain style, its gaps and fissures and mighty sense of lack, is both proof of the inability of words to render grief and a demonstration that they can do exactly that. Family Life breaks all those rules to do with writing fiction: Sharma’s simple words tell in order that they might show. The novel has been named as a New York Times Top 10 of 2014.



ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Author       
Akhil Sharma

Country       
IN

Nominating Library       
India International Centre Library, New Delhi

Publisher       
USA, W. W. Norton

LIBRARIES IRELAND - FIND THIS BOOK
Categories: 2016, 2016, 2016 Shortlist, Previous Winners



2016年--家庭生活
作者。阿克希尔-夏尔马
2016年获奖者 !
观看Akhil Sharma的获奖感言
新闻发布照片
6月10日在Pearse Street图书馆举行的获奖者阅读和问答活动
2016年长名单 2016年入围名单 评审团提名的图书馆

评委们的感言
一部小说是一组恰好被编造的事实。当读者阅读时，它们流入读者的想象力，并形成作家头脑中的虚拟等同物。这种交易的效果与作者的事实的真实性成正比。事实越好，在读者心中形成的世界就越清晰。作为读者，我们知道这一点。平庸的文本会产生模糊的嵌合体，而更权威的叙事则让我们信服，例如，我们可以谈论故事中的人物，就像谈论我们的朋友一样，因为他们和我们的朋友一样真实。但在这些之外，还有一种更高层次的小说，它不仅能吸引人。这种小说绝对地占据了你，以至于在你阅读的时候，以及在你读完之后的一段时间里，你自己生活的特殊性并不存在，因为它们已经被作者发明的世界的特殊性所取代了。这种侵占是读者能体会到的最大乐趣，阿克希尔-夏尔马的《家庭生活》是少有的能做到这一点的小说之一。

家庭生活》的叙述是这样的：米什拉一家--母亲、父亲和两个儿子Birju及其弟弟Ajay（讲述故事，是小说的支点）于1978年从印度移民到美国。对Ajay的哥哥Birju来说，新世界最初是一个胜利，直到在游泳池发生的事故导致灾难性的脑损伤，之后他需要24小时的照顾。起初，他在医疗机构接受护理，但后来他回到家里，由他的父母和哥哥照看。比尔朱的护理故事是小说的核心，是小说的活生生的心脏。

作为一种阅读体验，《家庭生活》令人惆怅和愤怒。它也引发了一些问题。为什么受苦的富人要比其他受苦的人得到更好的照顾？人类的苦难不都是平等的吗？然而，在对不平等现象进行微妙质疑的同时（这不是一部热血沸腾的社会批评作品），小说也在赞美米什拉家族的成就。尽管他们有很多不完美的地方，（这本小说中没有典范），但他们以某种方式应对，以某种方式满足比尔朱的需求，这是一种胜利，对读者来说，他们能够做到这一点，是一种深刻的安慰。

小说中的苦难和改善苦难的斗争并不陌生，但《家庭生活》以其正确的排列方式展示了它们的非凡成就。合上这本书，在了解了这种光明与黑暗的混合体之后，你会感觉到，在阅读过程中，你实际上是在了解人类经验的核心，以及活着是为了什么。这是文学的最高形式的成就。很少有人能做到这一点。这部小说做到了。胜利地。明亮地。令人感动。向阿克希尔-夏尔马的《家庭生活》致敬。

关于这本书
1978年，我们在德里见到了米什拉一家，8岁的阿杰和他的哥哥比尔朱在街上打板球，等待着飞机票到达的那一天，他们和母亲可以飞越世界，到美国与父亲团聚。美国对于Mishras夫妇来说，确实是他们所能想象的一切，甚至更多：当自动玻璃门在他们面前打开时，他们觉得自己肯定被误认为是某个重要人物。按下电梯按钮，电梯关门上升，他们对电梯服从他们的事实有一种力量的感觉。生活是非同寻常的，直到悲剧发生，导致一个弟弟严重脑损伤，另一个弟弟在陌生的地方迷路，几乎成了孤儿。这个家庭的小儿子阿杰向他所设想的超人之神祈祷，渴望在他家庭新生活的废墟中找到自己的位置。

家庭生活》是一个普遍的故事，讲述了一个男孩在责任和自己的生存之间的纠结。

(来自出版商)

关于作者
阿克希尔-夏尔马是《顺从的父亲》的作者，该书获得了笔会/海明威奖，是《纽约时报》的年度名著。他的作品曾出现在《纽约客》、《大西洋》、《美国最佳短篇小说》和《欧-亨利奖故事》中。他是德里人，住在纽约市，是纽瓦克罗格斯大学的英语助理教授。

图书管理员的评论
夏尔马的小说具有很强的催眠性，围绕着一个小男孩阿杰的起伏，他的家庭发生了悲剧，他几乎成了孤儿。阿杰在令人揪心的情感和孩子的自私、黑色幽默之间交替出现，他学会了驾驭家庭的新常态，并以残酷的诚实分享他的观察。

因为成功的代价是同一作者的所有其他故事的主题--特别是在这部小说中，面对灾难时对语言的肯定和稳定的控制--是自我的丧失。夏尔马的朴素风格，它的差距和裂缝以及强大的缺乏感，既证明了语言无法呈现悲伤，也证明了它们恰恰可以做到这一点。家庭生活》打破了所有那些与写小说有关的规则。夏尔马用简单的文字讲述，以便它们可以展示。这部小说已被评为《纽约时报》2014年十大畅销书。



其他信息
作者       
阿克希尔-夏尔马

国家       
印度

提名图书馆       
印度国际中心图书馆，新德里

出版商       
美国，W.W.Norton

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分类：2016年, 2016年, 2016年入围名单, 历届获奖者