Reviews

• 面白いです。

  ここにもレビューが載っている渡辺由佳里氏がご自身のブログで2016のベストとしてあげておられたのをたまたま見て、英語での読書の練習に買って読んでいます。まだ半分ですが、ここまで主人公とBethanyとBishopのお話がとてもよいです。マンハッタンに行って見たくなりました。残り半分でどう展開していくのかとても楽しみです。

• love and hatred

  ６２０ページに及ぶ長編で、様々なエピソードを織り込み、重層的な構成になっているが、基本的にはアメリカにおける歴史的激動の時期に、もがき格闘しつつ生きている二つの人生、母と息子のそれぞれの生活と、お互いへの複雑な想い、究極には深い愛情を描いている。 １９６８年４月、マーティン・ルーサー・キングが暗殺された。その年の夏、Faye はアイオワの小さな町からシカゴの大学へ進み、ヴェトナム反戦運動の嵐のなかに巻き込まれる。 ２０１１年、リーマンショック後の不況と閉塞感の中で、書けない作家で大学教師である息子の Samuel は、訪ねたニューヨークの出版社のオフィスの窓から、ウォール街オキュパイ運動の抗議のうねりを目撃することになる。 母は息子が１１歳のとき、突然夫と息子を残して出奔したのだ。その真相を探ることになった Samuel は、しだいにすべてを知っていく。 ふたつの時代の、それぞれをとりまく人間関係が、さまざまな形で描かれている。道義的にも職業倫理的にも許されないと思うような人物との関わりあいがあったり、二人とも決して豊かな充実した日々を過ごしたとは言えず、意に反した攻撃にもさらされ、悔恨も多いが、それでも終章近くで、Samuel は幼友達で恋もした Bethany 相手に、 "I think I want to start over." と語り、Faye は自分の過ごしてきた道のりを振り返りつつ、”sometimes a crisis is not really a crisis at all -- just a new beginning." と思うところに、この長い物語の救いがあるように思われる。 タイトルの The Nix は、ノルウェイに古くから伝わるミステリアスな水の精、海辺で冒険好きの子どもを見つけると白い馬になって、子どもを乗せて駆け、子どもが得意絶頂の瞬間に崖から海に飛び込む～。Faye の父親は大戦下、ノルウェイに家族や恋人を残してアメリカに移り住み、折に触れ故郷を懐かしんで娘の Faye に思い出を語るのだ。the Nix の話をして父は娘に言う。"Don't trust things that are too good to be true." そして Faye は息子の Samuel に語り継ぎ、今は Nix は白馬ではなく、人間の姿になって現れると言う。"Usually it's someone you think you love." "People can be a Nix for each other." と。幼い Samuel には理解できなかった。しかし彼は大人になってからの日々のなかで時折この Nix のことを思い出すのだ。

• シニカルで不条理な人生を心優しく包みこむ2016年の大作

  The Nixは、それぞれがひとつの小説として成り立つほど濃いストーリーがいくつも絡んだとても野心的な小説だ。 主人公のSamuelと息子を置き去りにした母Fayeの関係。Samuelが子ども時代から憧れていた少女Bethanyとの関係、Bethanyの双子の兄との複雑な友情関係、宿題の論文の盗用をSamuelに指摘された女子大生の企み、Fayeの父親と娘の関係、大学に憧れていたガリ勉少女のFayeが大学を中退して故郷に戻ったミステリ、６０年代の過激派と警察の関係、ベトナム戦争反対のデモが過激化した１９６８年の民主党全国大会、Fayeを滅ぼそうとする判事の過去、Fayeの父がノルウエイに残した過去と伝説の生物Nix......。 これらをひとつの小説にまとめるというのは、野心的すぎると感じるだろう。 だが、奇跡的に、ちゃんとまとまっているのだ。しかも、「人生とはこういうものかもしれない」と、とてもリアルに感じさせてくれる。 この小説に最初に引き込まれたのは、Hillの観察眼と文章力だ。 それぞれの時代と、人々を、皮肉なユーモアたっぷりに描いている。その表現があまりにも的中しているものだから、ニヤニヤし、吹き出し、そして、胸が痛くなるほど悲しくなる。 この小説が何よりも素晴らしいのは、優れた文芸小説なのに、人間への優しさを忘れていないことが。 最初のうちは、主要人物のSamuelとFayeを含めて好感を抱ける登場人物は皆無だ。みんな、どこかが壊れているし、自己中心的だ。 そのために、この小説そのものを諦めてしまう読者もいるかもしれない。 だが、そこで諦めず、読み続けて欲しい。なぜなら、そのうちに奇跡が起こるからだ。 これらの欠陥だらけの人々が、愛おしくなるのだ。 失敗だらけの人生でも、やりなおしができそうになる。そして、周囲のダメな人々を許してやりたくもなる。 この奇跡を、ぜひ体験してみてほしい。

• A story of broken relationships and how to mend them

  🍀Book Review. 🍀 The Nix by Nathan Hill. 🍀Genre : Literary fiction. . 🍀Storyline : Q. Did the story have a good beginning? A. It's so so interesting and entertaining since the first chapter. Q. Was there a lot of action? A. Yeah. Lots of it. Q. What do you think was the most important point or climax of the novel? A. Relationship. Q. Were you happy with the ending? A. Absolutely. Haven't ever thought of it to end like this but was so satisfying. . 🍀Setting : Q. When and where is your novel set? A. 1968 and 2011 U.S. Q. Were the descriptions good? A. There was humour, there was heartbreaking, there was every bit of emotions one can think of. . 🍀Characters: Q. Pick up the main character in the novel you studied. A. Samuel, Faye, Henry, Guy, Brown, Alice, Pwange, Laura. Q. Did you like them? Why and why not? A. I just loved them. The character building in this book intertwined with the plot was so mesmerizing. You just wanted to know more and more. . 🍀Theme: Q. If you had to say what the novel was about in one sentence how would you describe it? A. A series of events leading up to a bigger consequence. Q. At what points in the novel was the main issue obvious? A. The main issue was obvious from the prologue itself. . 🍀Language : Q. Did you feel this book easy to read? A. Yes but at times you need to have a better vocabulary. Q. Pick out your favorite description. A. The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst. . 🍀Conclusion : Q. Would you recommend this book and why? A. This is a total 5 starrer for me and will be in my list of all time favorite books. Read this if want to know how getting away from your loved ones not only hurt them, it won't help you either. No matter what going away from a problem solves nothing.

• 👍🏻

  Excelente literatura contemporánea

• Best book of 2016 for me

  This is my goodreads review: It's been awhile since I've been as affected by a book as I am by The Nix. Jason Sheehan reviewed the book for NPR, and captures some of my feelings: http://www.npr.org/2016/08/31/4901018... "After 10 pages of Nathan Hill's debut novel, The Nix, I flipped to the dust jacket. I wanted to see what the author looked like because I was thinking to myself, Jesus, this guy is gonna be famous. I wanna see what he looks like. At 50 pages in I smiled when my train was delayed — a few extra minutes to read about Samuel Andresen-Anderson, the assistant English professor and gone-nowhere writer who'd failed to live up to a tiny bit of early promise. At around 100 pages, Samuel is in 6th grade — lonely, panicky, a crier at the least little thing — and I know I'm going to miss anything like a reasonable bedtime. At 200, it is stories of Samuel's mother that keeps me turning pages: A teenager in 1968, driven, tightly wound. It is the sketched background of the woman who will abandon Samuel at 11 years old and wreck him in all the million ways that such a thing will wreck a delicate boy; the woman who will float back into his life years later on cable television — briefly notorious for throwing a handful of rocks at a conservative republican presidential candidate in a Chicago park....The Nix is 620 pages long. My last dog-ear is on page 613. It's nothing important. Just a funny story told by one character to another about the Northern Lights and the burden of expectation. It is lovely in precisely the same way that a thousand of Hill's other paragraphs are lovely — these looping, run-on, wildly digressive pages which, somehow, in their absolute refusal to cling together and act like a book, make the perfect book for our distracted age." This book fits our time like David Foster Wallace was able to do with Infinite Jest, and Nathan Hill has that same brilliant, challenging writing style, on top of a satirical eye that covers the range of our modern world's obsessions. I have so many sticky notes in the book that it's hard to choose, but here are some of the lines that will stay with me, as he skewers everything from politics and journalism to materialism and obsessions. Mainly, all I can say is READ THIS!! :-) He opens with one page of the old Buddhist tale of the blind men and the elephant--which is woven so creatively into the book. These characters--especially the mother, Faye, and her son, Samuel--are all "blind", in the way of humans to be limited in our perceptions of both life and ourselves. Faye says, on p. 565: "In the story of the blind men and the elephant, what's usually ignored is the fact that each man's description was correct. What Faye won't understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. Yes, she is the meek and shy and industrious student. Yes, she is the panicky and frightened child. Yes, she is the bold and impulsive seductress. Yes, she is the wife and mother. And many other things as well. Her belief that only one of these is true obscures the larger truth, which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn't that they were blind--it's that they stopped too quickly, and so never knew there was a larger truth to grasp." Parts of the book make my heart ache--for the abused boy Bishop, for the stinging descriptions of what went on at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, for my favorite character Pwnage--lost in a video game since real life has become unbearable. But also, at times I was laughing out loud and saying, "Right on!" when Hill uses satire as viciously as Vonnegut and Twain ever did. Here, on p. 65, he nails road rage as Samuel explains why he hates to drive in Chicago: "The closer he gets to the city, the more the highway feels malicious and warlike--wild zigzagging drivers cutting people off, tailgating, honking horns, flashing their lights, all their private traumas now publicly enlarged. On p. 107, he captures all the inane, ludicrous qualities of a shopping mall, beginning with a long list of meaningless merchandise: "With its hundreds of stores and booths, the mall seemed to make a simple promise: that here you would find everything you needed....the mall's overwhelmingness was meant to replace your imagination. Forget trying to dream of your desires; the mall had already dreamed them up for you." On p. 530, he captures the despair of Walter Cronkite, trying to make sense of what is happening in Chicago in 1968. Even though Hill says he wrote the political sections a few years ago, the chilling timeliness of these lines is disturbing: "It's a chilling thought, that politicians have learned to manipulate the television medium better than the television professionals themselves. When old Cronkite first realized this was happening he imagined the kinds of people who would become politicians in the future. And he shuddered with fear." I could go on and on--but I want to get at the reason for the unusual title. At the beginning of chapter 5, Faye explains the old myth of the Nix from her Norwegian heritage--a beautiful white horse that allows a child to ride it, and then the child wants to show off to others--and "when they most wanted to be celebrated for it and thus felt the most vanity and arrogance and pride" the horse jumps off a cliff and are drowned. Then she tells Samuel: " 'The Nix used to appear as a horse,' she said, 'but that was in the old days.' 'What does it look like now?' 'It's different for everyone. But it usually appears as a person. Usually it's someone you think you love.' Samuel still did not understand. 'People love each other for many reasons, not all of them good,' she said. 'They love each other because it's easy. Or because they're used to it. Or because they've given up. Or because they're scared. People can be a Nix for each other.' " I must tie this up, but need to mention two conventions of the book that worked so well, imho. Samuel loves "Choose Your Own Adventure" books as a child, and one entire chapter is titled "You Can Get the Girl" and is written in the format of those books. The other is the chapter about Pwnage, which is 11 pages of one sentence, and it works powerfully. Because I'm a grandma who plays Wizard 101, Pwnage's escape into a video game held special poignancy for me (in gaming, "Pwn" means you "own", or have beaten, an opponent. (And if it seems strange that a 76 year old would know that tidbit, it is! :-) This whole chapter is his attempt to break free of the addiction. Just read it straight through to get the total effect. I'll conclude with some of the blurbs from Amazon: "A mother-son psychodrama with ghosts and politics, but it’s also a tragicomedy about anger and sanctimony in America. . . . Nathan Hill is a maestro.” —John Irving “A fantastic novel about love, betrayal, politics and pop culture—as good as the best Michael Chabon or Jonathan Franzen.” —People “It broke my heart, this book. Time after time. It made me laugh just as often. I loved it on the first page as powerfully as I did on the last.” —Jason Sheehan, NPR.org “Hill has so much talent to burn that he can pull of just about any style, imagine himself into any person and convincingly portray any place or time. The Nix is hugely entertaining and unfailingly smart, and the author seems incapable of writing a pedestrian sentence or spinning a boring story. . . . [A] supersize and audacious novel of American misadventure.” —Teddy Wayne, The New York Times Book Review “Irresistible. . . . A major new comic novelist . . . . Hill is a sharp social observer, hyper-alert to the absurdities of modern life. . . . his enormous book arrives as one of the stars of the fall season. . . . readers will find this novel. And they’ll be dazzled.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

• Novela ambiciosa

  Una novela ambiciosa, que alterna momentos estupendos con otros en los que da la sensación de que el autor intenta impresionar al lector con una avalancha de anécdotas que a veces me han sobrado. Por lo demás, una lectura interesante.

• Great novel about changing Zeitgeist

  This books gives a good insight the changing Zeitgeist from the seventies to today. The story itself is also great to read. I loved it!

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