FICTION
虚构
How Beautiful We Were
《我们曾经多么美丽》(How Beautiful We Were)
By Imbolo Mbue
因波罗·马布著
Following her 2016 debut, “Behold the Dreamers,” Mbue’s sweeping and quietly devastating second novel begins in 1980 in the fictional African village of Kosawa, where representatives from an American oil company have come to meet with the locals, whose children are dying because of the environmental havoc (fallow fields, poisoned water) wreaked by its drilling and pipelines. This decades-spanning fable of power and corruption turns out to be something much less clear-cut than the familiar David-and-Goliath tale of a sociopathic corporation and the lives it steamrolls. Through the eyes of Kosawa’s citizens young and old, Mbue constructs a nuanced exploration of self-interest, of what it means to want in the age of capitalism and colonialism — these machines of malicious, insatiable wanting.
继2016年的处女作《看啊,追梦者》(Behold the Dreamers)之后,马布气势磅礴而又令人隐隐悲伤的第二部小说始于1980年的虚构非洲村庄科萨瓦,一家美国石油公司的代表来到这里会见当地人,由于钻井和管道造成的环境破坏(休耕地、毒水),村里的孩子正在死去。这个关于权力与腐败的寓言故事跨度长达数十年,最终并不是我们熟悉的那种反社会大公司和被其掠夺的生命的大卫与歌利亚式故事。通过科萨瓦老少的眼睛,马布构建了一种细致入微的探索,关于利己主义,也关于在资本主义和殖民主义——这些恶毒的、无法满足的欲望机器——的时代,拥有渴望意味着什么。
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