《纽约时报》2021年度五大好书

其实是十本，我选了前五本。

无注释原文：

The 5 Best Books of 2021

How Beautiful We Were

By Imbolo Mbue

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.

Intimacies

By Katie Kitamura

In Kitamura’s fourth novel, an unnamed court translator in The Hague is tasked with intimately vanishing into the voices and stories of war criminals whom she alone can communicate with; falling meanwhile into a tumultuous entanglement with a man whose marriage may or may not be over for good. Kitamura’s sleek and spare prose elegantly breaks grammatical convention, mirroring the book’s concern with the bleeding lines between intimacies — especially between the sincere and the coercive. Like her previous novel, “A Separation,” “Intimacies” scrutinizes the knowability of those around us, not as an end in itself but as a lens on grand social issues from gentrification to colonialism to feminism. The path a life cuts through the world, this book seems to say, has its greatest significance in the effect it has on others.

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

By Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

“The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois,” the first novel by Jeffers, a celebrated poet, is many things at once: a moving coming-of-age saga, an examination of race and an excavation of American history. It cuts back and forth between the tale of Ailey Pearl Garfield, a Black girl growing up at the end of the 20th century, and the “songs” of her ancestors, Native Americans and enslaved African Americans who lived through the formation of the United States. As their stories converge, “Love Songs” creates an unforgettable portrait of Black life that reveals how the past still reverberates today.

No One Is Talking About This

By Patricia Lockwood

Lockwood first found acclaim as a poet on the internet, with gloriously inventive and ribald verse — sexts elevated to virtuosity. In “Priestdaddy,” her indelible 2017 memoir about growing up in rectories across the Midwest presided over by her gun-loving, guitar-playing father, a Catholic priest, she called tweeting “an art form, like sculpture, or honking the national anthem under your armpit.” Here, in her first novel, she distills the pleasures and deprivations of life split between online and flesh-and-blood interactions, transfiguring the dissonance into art. The result is a book that reads like a prose poem, at once sublime, profane, intimate, philosophical, hilarious and, eventually, deeply moving.

When We Cease to Understand the World

By Benjamín Labatut. Translated by Adrian Nathan West.

Labatut expertly stitches together the stories of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers to explore both the ecstasy and agony of scientific breakthroughs: their immense gains for society as well as their steep human costs. His journey to the outermost edges of knowledge — guided by the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, the physicist Werner Heisenberg and the chemist Fritz Haber, among others — offers glimpses of a universe with limitless potential underlying the observable world, a “dark nucleus at the heart of things” that some of its witnesses decide is better left alone. This extraordinary hybrid of fiction and nonfiction also provokes the frisson of an extended true-or-false test: The further we read, the blurrier the line gets between fact and fabulism.

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注：中文文本为纽约时报官方译文，仅供参考

含注释全文：

《纽约时报》2021年度五大好书

The 5 Best Books of 2021

How Beautiful We Were

《我们曾经多么美丽》

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。

debut

debut /ˈdeɪbjuː/ 表示“（演员、运动员等的）首次登台，初次亮相；新事物的问世”，英文解释为“The debut of a performer or sports player is their first public performance, appearance, or recording.”举个🌰：

She made her debut in a 1937 production of "Hamlet."

她在1937年《哈姆雷特》的演出中首次登台。

sweeping

作形容词，1）表示“影响广泛的；大范围的；根本性的；意义深远的”，英文解释为“having an important effect on a large part of sth”如：sweeping changes 彻底变化，举个🌰：

They were given sweeping powers to search homes.

他们授予入户搜查的极大权力。

🎬电影《沉默》（Silence）中的台词提到：He wrote those words during the most sweeping persecution of all. 他写下这些话时 正经历着最为残酷的迫害。

2）sweeping statement/generalization 表示“泛泛之谈；一概而论的说法；过于笼统的概括”，英文解释为“something that you say or write that is too general and that has not been carefully thought about”举个🌰：

Sweeping generalizations about this complex and difficult situation are not helpful.

对这种复杂困难的情形作泛泛之谈是没有用的。

📍sweep作动词，可以表示“风行，风靡，迅速蔓延，迅速传播；席卷；横扫”，英文解释为“to quickly spread through and influence an area”举个🌰：

A flu epidemic is sweeping through Moscow.

一场流感正在莫斯科迅速传播。

📺电视剧《王冠》（The Crown）中的台词提到：Independence is sweeping across the continent. ~席卷这片大陆。

📺动画片《辛普森一家》（The Simpsons）中的台词提到：A plague is sweeping through Springfield. 一场瘟疫正席卷斯普林菲尔德。

wreak havoc

wreak havoc 肆虐，造成严重破坏，wreak /riːk/ 表示“造成（混乱或严重破坏）”，英文解释为“Something or someone that wreaks havoc or destruction causes a great amount of disorder or damage.”举个🌰：

The recent storms have wreaked havoc on crops.

最近的暴风雨给农作物造成了巨大的灾害。

She was determined to wreak revenge/vengeance on both him and his family.

她决心要报复他和他的家人。

📍havoc /ˈhævək/ 作名词，表示“破坏，毁坏；混乱”，英文解释为“confusion and lack of order, especially causing damage or trouble”

🎬电影《歪小子斯科特》（Scott Pilgrim vs. the World）中提到：你知道吗，在你再去糟蹋别的女孩之前，你真该去照照镜子。You know what, maybe it's high.... time you took a look in a mirror before you wreak havoc on another girl.

fable

表示“寓言；寓言故事”，英文解释为“a short story that tells a general truth or is only partly based on fact, or literature of this type”。

nuanced

nuanced 这里是形容词，是由它的名词nuance /njuːˈɑːns/派生而来，表示“（在外表、意义、感觉、声音等上）有细微差別的”举个🌰：

Opinion polls tell a more nuanced story.

民意调查中可以发现更微妙的结果。

insatiable

insatiable /ɪnˈseɪʃəbəl, -ʃɪə-/ 表示“（尤指欲望或需求）无法满足的，贪得无厌的”，英文解释为“(especially of a desire or need) too great to be satisfied”举个🌰：

Like so many politicians, he had an insatiable appetite/desire/hunger for power.

同许多政客一样，他对权力贪得无厌。

Intimacies

《亲密》

By Katie Kitamura

凯蒂·北村（音）著

In Kitamura’s fourth novel, an unnamed court translator in The Hague is tasked with intimately vanishing into the voices and stories of war criminals whom she alone can communicate with; falling meanwhile into a tumultuous entanglement with a man whose marriage may or may not be over for good. Kitamura’s sleek and spare prose elegantly breaks grammatical convention, mirroring the book’s concern with the bleeding lines between intimacies — especially between the sincere and the coercive. Like her previous novel, “A Separation,” “Intimacies” scrutinizes the knowability of those around us, not as an end in itself but as a lens on grand social issues from gentrification to colonialism to feminism. The path a life cuts through the world, this book seems to say, has its greatest significance in the effect it has on others.

在北村的第四部小说中，主角是一位未透露姓名的海牙法庭翻译，她的任务是密切关注战犯的声音和故事，只有她才能与他们交流；与此同时，她陷入了与一个男人的动荡纠葛之中，他的婚姻可能彻底结束，也可能不会结束。北村流畅、简洁的散文优雅地打破了语法惯例，反映了这本书对亲密关系之间痛苦边界的关注——尤其是真诚与强迫之间的边界。与她的上一部小说《分离》(A Separation)一样，《亲密》审视了身边人的可知性，这本身并不是目的，而是作为一个镜头，去观察从中产阶级化到殖民主义到女权主义等重大社会问题。这本书似乎在说，一个人的生命穿过这个世界的道路，其最大的意义在于对他人的影响。

tumultuous

tumultuous /tjuːˈmʌltjʊəs/ 1）表示“动荡的；狂暴的”，英文解释为“involving a lot of change and confusion and/or violence”，如：the tumultuous years 动乱年代；

2）表示“嘈杂的；喧嚣的；热烈的；欢腾的”，英文解释为“very loud; involving strong feelings, especially feelings of approval”，如：tumultuous applause 热烈的欢呼声，a tumultuous reception/welcome 热情的接待/热烈的欢迎。

entanglement

表示“纠缠；纠葛；牵连”，英文解释为“a situation or relationship that you are involved in and that is difficult to escape from”。

intimacy

表示“亲密；密切；关系密切”，英文解释为“the state of having a close personal relationship with sb”。

coercive

coercive /ko'ɝsɪv/表示“强制的；胁迫的”，英文解释为“using threats or orders to make someone do something they do not want to do”，如：coercive measures to reduce absenteeism 减少旷工现象的高压措施。

scrutinize

表示“仔细察看，审查”，英文解释为“If you scrutinize something, you examine it very carefully, often to find out some information from it or about it.”举个🌰：

Her purpose was to scrutinize his features to see if he was an honest man. 

她的目的是仔细察看他的特征看他是不是个诚实的人。

gentrification

表示“（地区的）贵族化”，英文解释为“the process by which a place, especially part of a city, changes from being a poor area to a richer one, where people from a higher social class live”。

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

《W·E·B·杜·波依斯的情歌》

By Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

奥诺雷·法农·杰弗斯著

“The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois,” the first novel by Jeffers, a celebrated poet, is many things at once: a moving coming-of-age saga, an examination of race and an excavation of American history. It cuts back and forth between the tale of Ailey Pearl Garfield, a Black girl growing up at the end of the 20th century, and the “songs” of her ancestors, Native Americans and enslaved African Americans who lived through the formation of the United States. As their stories converge, “Love Songs” creates an unforgettable portrait of Black life that reveals how the past still reverberates today.

备受赞誉的诗人杰弗斯的第一部小说《W·E·B·杜·波依斯的情歌》(The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois)同时包含了许多内容：一个动人的成长传奇，对种族的审视，以及对美国历史的挖掘。它在20世纪末成长的黑人女孩艾莉·珀尔·加菲尔德的故事和她的祖先——生活在美国成型时期的原住民和被奴役的非裔美国人的“歌曲”之间来回切换。随着她们的故事交汇在一起，《情歌》(Love Songs)创造了一幅令人难忘的黑人生活画卷，揭示了过去的种种依然在今天回响。

excavation

表示“发掘，挖掘”，英文解释为“the activity of digging in the ground to look for old buildings or objects that have been buried for a long time”。

enslave

1）表示“使受控制；征服；制伏；使遭受；使无法摆脱”，英文解释为“to make sb/sth completely depend on sth so that they cannot manage without it”举个🌰：

People in this region were enslaved by poverty.

这一地区的人们备受贫困蹂躏。

2）表示“奴役；使成为奴隶”，英文解释为“to make a slave of someone”举个🌰：

The early settlers enslaved or killed much of the native population.

早期的殖民者奴役或杀害了很多原住民。

converge

表示“汇集；聚集；集中”，英文解释为“to move towards a place from different directions and meet”举个🌰：

The paths all converge at the main gate of the park.

这几条小路都在公园正门处交会。

reverberate

1）表示“回响，回荡”，英文解释为“If a loud, deep sound reverberates, it continues to be heard around an area, so that the area seems to shake.”举个🌰：

The narrow street reverberated with/to the sound of the workmen's drills.

狭窄的街道上回荡着工人施工的电钻声。

2）表示“震撼；产生广泛影响”，英文解释为“If an event or idea reverberates somewhere, it has an effect on everyone or everything in a place or group.”举个🌰：

News of the disaster reverberated around the organization.

灾难的噩耗传来，组织内所有人震惊不已。 

No One Is Talking About This

《没有人聊起这个》

By Patricia Lockwood

帕特丽夏·洛克伍德著

Lockwood first found acclaim as a poet on the internet, with gloriously inventive and ribald verse — sexts elevated to virtuosity. In “Priestdaddy,” her indelible 2017 memoir about growing up in rectories across the Midwest presided over by her gun-loving, guitar-playing father, a Catholic priest, she called tweeting “an art form, like sculpture, or honking the national anthem under your armpit.” Here, in her first novel, she distills the pleasures and deprivations of life split between online and flesh-and-blood interactions, transfiguring the dissonance into art. The result is a book that reads like a prose poem, at once sublime, profane, intimate, philosophical, hilarious and, eventually, deeply moving.

洛克伍德首次在互联网上获得赞誉是以诗人的身份，她的诗富于创造性且粗俗不堪——将色情短信提升到艺术品的程度。在2017年出版的回忆录《神父老爸》(Priestdaddy)中，她讲述了自己在中西部教区长大的故事。她的父亲是一名天主教牧师，热爱枪支，会弹吉他；她说发推是“一种艺术形式，就像雕塑一样，或者用胳肢窝发出的声音演奏国歌”。在她这本小说处女作中，她提炼了生活在网络和现实互动之间的乐趣和匮乏，将这种不协调转化为艺术。其结果是，这本书读起来就像一首散文诗，时而崇高，时而世俗，时而亲切，时而哲学，时而滑稽，最终又深深打动人心。

acclaim

表示“（公开的）称誉；赞赏；欢迎”，英文解释为“public approval and praise”举个🌰：

Despite the critical acclaim, the novel did not sell well.

虽然这部小说在评论界赢得一片叫好之声，但并不畅销。

ribald

表示“（指言语）粗俗诙谐的；猥亵逗笑的”，英文解释为“Ribald language refers to sex in a rude but humorous way.”

verse

1）表示“诗；诗歌；韵文”，英文解释为“writing that is arranged in short lines with a regular rhythm; poetry”，如：comic/light/satirical verse 打油/谐趣/讽刺诗。

2）表示“诗节；（歌曲的）节”，英文解释为“one of the parts that a poem or song is divided into ”，举个🌰：

Each verse was sung as a solo.

每一节都以独唱形式演唱。

preside over sth

表示“掌管；主持（尤指正式会议或审判）”，英文解释为“to be in charge of a situation or place”。

distil/distill

1）表示“蒸馏”，英文解释为“to make a liquid stronger or purer by heating it until it changes to a gas and then cooling it so that it changes back into a liquid”；

2）表示“提炼，浓缩”，英文解释为“to get or show only the most important part of something”举个🌰：

Over 80 hours of footage have been distilled into these 40 minutes.

80多个小时的片子被提炼压缩成了40分钟。

sublime

表示“极好的；极美的；令人极度愉悦的”，英文解释为“extremely good, beautiful, or enjoyable”如：sublime beauty 令人赞叹的美。

profane

profane /prəˈfeɪn/ 表示“亵渎的，渎神的”，英文解释为“showing no respect for a god or a religion, often through language”如：profane language 亵渎的语言。

When We Cease to Understand the World

《当我们不再理解世界》

By Benjamín Labatut. Translated by Adrian Nathan West. 本哈明·拉巴图特著。阿德里安·内森·韦斯特译。

Labatut expertly stitches together the stories of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers to explore both the ecstasy and agony of scientific breakthroughs: their immense gains for society as well as their steep human costs. His journey to the outermost edges of knowledge — guided by the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, the physicist Werner Heisenberg and the chemist Fritz Haber, among others — offers glimpses of a universe with limitless potential underlying the observable world, a “dark nucleus at the heart of things” that some of its witnesses decide is better left alone. This extraordinary hybrid of fiction and nonfiction also provokes the frisson of an extended true-or-false test: The further we read, the blurrier the line gets between fact and fabulism.

拉巴图特将20世纪最伟大的思想者的故事巧妙地拼接在一起，探索科学突破带来的狂喜和痛苦，它们给社会带来的巨大收益，以及它们给人类带来的惨重代价。他在数学家亚历山大·格伦迪克、物理学家维尔纳·海森堡和化学家弗里茨·哈伯等人的指引下，探索知识最外层的边缘，窥视在可观察到的世界背后那个潜力无限的宇宙，一个“位于事物中心的暗核”，它的一些见证者认为最好不要去管它。这种虚构与非虚构的非凡混合也引发了一种对延伸是非题的悸动：我们读得越深，事实与寓言之间的界限就越模糊。

stitch

表示“缝；缝合；缝补”，英文解释为“to sew two things together, or to repair something by sewing”举个🌰：

This button needs to be stitched back onto my shirt.

这粒纽扣得缝回到我的衬衫上。

ecstasy

表示“狂喜，欣喜若狂”，英文解释为“a state of extreme happiness, especially when feeling pleasure”

agony

agony /ˈæɡənɪ/ 表示“极大痛苦”，英文解释为“Agony is great physical or mental pain.”举个🌰：

A new machine may save thousands of animals from the agony of drug tests.

一种新机器可能使成千上万只动物免于药物试验的极大痛苦。

provoke

1）经常出现的含义，表示“激起，引起”，英文解释为“to cause a reaction or feeling, especially a sudden one”，如：provoke debate/discussion 激起辩论/讨论。

2）表示“激怒，挑衅”，英文解释为“to make or try to make a person or an animal angry”举个🌰：

It was a vicious-looking dog and I didn't want to provoke it.

那只狗看起来很凶，我可不想招惹它。

frisson

表示“（尤指想到某事要发生时的）兴奋感，震颤，恐惧感”，英文解释为“a sudden feeling of excitement or fear, especially when you think that something is about to happen”。

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