《纽约时报》2024年度十大好书
2024年10本最佳书籍
- 7 min read
《纽约时报》2024年度十大好书
The 10 Best Books of 2024
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOKS STAFF Karan Singh
Here they are — the 10 Best Books of 2024.
以下是2024年10本最佳书籍。
At the Book Review, we spend all year getting ready for this moment. We begin debating our annual best-of list in the spring, going to the mat for what we love. By fall, we’re preparing for rhetorical slugfests.
我们书评版面整整一年都在为这一刻做准备。我们从春天就已经开始讨论我们的年度最佳书单，为我们喜欢的书不遗余力。到了秋天，我们又开始准备激烈的争执。
Ultimately, we aim to pick the books that made lasting impressions: the stories that imprinted on our hearts and psyches, the examining of lives that deepened what we thought we already knew.
最终，我们的目标是选出那些给我们留下深刻印象的书：它们讲述的故事在我们心中留下深深烙印，它们对生活的审视令我们更深刻地认识了那些我们自以为了解的事物。
We delve into each of these books on a special edition of the Book Review podcast, and we break down three picks in a handy video. For even more great books, take a spin through all 100 Notable Books of 2024, or even this list, which features every book we’ve anointed the best since 2000.
我们将在书评播客特别版中深入探讨每本书，并在每个视频中详细介绍三本精选书籍。想要了解更多好书，可以浏览“2024年的100本值得关注的书”，乃至这份名单，其中包括了自2000年以来我们评选出的最佳图书。
Fiction
虚构类
《All Fours》（暂译为《狗趴》）
By Miranda July
米兰达·朱利 著
July’s second novel, which follows a married mother and artist who derails a solo cross-country road trip by checking into a motel close to home and starting an affair with a younger rental-car worker, was the year’s literary conversation piece, dubbed “the talk of every group text — at least every group text composed of women over 40” and “the first great perimenopause novel” in just two of many articles that wrestled with its themes. Sexually frank and laced with the novelist’s loopy humor, the book ends up posing that most universal question: What would you risk to change your life?
这是朱利的第二部小说，讲述了一位已婚母亲兼艺术家的故事，她住进离家很近的一家汽车旅馆，与一位年轻的租车店员工发生了婚外情，令她的单人越野公路旅行泡汤。这部小说成了本年度的文学话题，被誉为“每个群聊里的话题——至少是每个40岁以上女性群聊里的话题”，是“第一部伟大的更年期小说”，这还只是众多讨论本书主题的文章中的两篇。这本书在性方面非常坦率，充满作者不拘一格的幽默，最后提出了一个所有人都关心的问题：为了改变生活，你愿意冒什么风险？
《Good Material》（《好素材》）
By Dolly Alderton
多莉·奥尔德顿 著
In Alderton’s brisk, witty novel, a 35-year-old struggling comedian in London tries to make sense of a recent breakup at the same moment when the majority of his friends seem to be pairing off for life. Cue snappy dialogue, awkward first dates and a memorable quest for a new home; toss clichéd gender roles, the traditional marriage plot and a ho-hum happily ever after. Not only does Alderton cement herself as a latter-day Nora Ephron, she also puts her own mark on the classic romantic comedy form. There are no second fiddles in “Good Material”; every character sings. And there is a deeper message, revealed in a surprise twist, having to do with independence, adventure and charting your own course.
在奥尔德顿这部轻快诙谐的小说中，一位35岁、事业不顺的伦敦喜剧演员试图从最近的分手中吸取教训，而与此同时，他的大多数朋友似乎都有稳定的恋情。小说中有激烈的对话、尴尬的初次约会和令人难忘的寻找新家过程；抛弃了老套的性别角色，传统的婚姻情节和平淡无奇的幸福生活。奥尔德顿不仅把自己塑造成了现代版的诺拉·艾芙隆，还在经典的浪漫喜剧形式上留下了自己的印记。《好素材》里没有次要角色；每个角色都大放异彩。一个意外的情节转折揭示了更深层次的信息，关乎独立、冒险和规划自己的人生道路。
《James》（《詹姆斯》）
By Percival Everett
帕西瓦尔·埃弗雷特 著
It takes a lot of ambition, skill and vision to reinvent one of the most iconic books in American letters, but Everett demonstrates he possesses those virtues in droves in “James.” The novel is a radical reworking of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” telling the story not from Huck’s perspective, but from the point of view of the enslaved man who accompanies Huck down the Mississippi River: Jim (or, as he clarifies, James). From James’s eyes, we see he is no mere sidekick but rather a thinker and a writer who is code-switching as illiterate and fighting desperately for freedom. Everett’s novel is a literary hat trick — a book that highlights the horrors in American history and complicates an American classic, all while also emerging as a work of exquisite originality in its own right.
要重塑美国文学史上最具代表性的著作之一，需要很大的雄心、技巧和远见，但埃弗雷特在《詹姆斯》一书中证明了他拥有这些品质。本书是对马克·吐温的《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》的彻底再创作，不是从哈克的角度讲故事，而是从陪伴哈克沿密西西比河漂流的那个奴隶的角度讲述故事：这个人就是吉姆（或者，按照他本人的澄清，是詹姆斯）。从詹姆斯的眼中，我们看到他不仅仅是一个跟班，他是一个要在人前装作大字不识的思想者和写作者，在为自由奋力抗争。埃弗雷特的小说堪称一箭三雕——它凸显了美国历史中的恐怖，把一部美国经典著作变得更复杂丰富，同时它本身也是一部极具原创性的精彩作品。
《Martyr!》（《殉道者！》）
By Kaveh Akbar
卡韦赫·阿克巴尔 著
Cyrus Shams, an Iranian American aspiring poet and recovering drug addict, wallows in a post-college malaise in a fictional Midwestern town. He’s working dead-end jobs and halfheartedly attending A.A., while grieving his parents’ deaths and, increasingly, fantasizing about his own. Cyrus is lost and sad, but this captivating first novel, by an author who is himself a poet, is anything but. As Akbar nudges Cyrus closer to uncovering a secret in his family’s past, he turns his protagonist’s quest for meaning — involving a road trip to New York and a revelatory encounter in the Brooklyn Museum — into an indelible affirmation of life, rife with inventive beauty, vivid characters and surprising twists of plot.
赛勒斯·沙姆斯是个有志于成为诗人的伊朗裔美国人，正在戒毒的瘾君子，在一个虚构的中西部小镇生活，沉溺于大学毕业后的颓废之中。他做着没有前途的工作，了无兴致地参加匿名戒酒会，哀悼死去的父母，同时越来越频繁地幻想着自己的死亡。赛勒斯迷茫而又悲伤，但这本出自诗人之手的小说处女作本身却并非如此。随着阿克巴尔推动赛勒斯揭开家族过去的秘密，他把主人公对意义的追求——包括前往纽约的公路旅行和在布鲁克林博物馆的一次充满启发的邂逅——变成了对生命不可磨灭的肯定，全书充满创造性的美感，生动的人物和令人惊讶的情节转折。
《You Dreamed of Empires》（《梦见了帝国》）
By Álvaro Enrigue; translated by Natasha Wimmer
阿尔瓦罗·恩里格 著；娜塔莎·维默 译
History has long been Enrigue’s playground, and his latest novel takes readers to 16th-century Tenochtitlan, or what is now Mexico City. Hernán Cortés and his men have arrived at Moctezuma’s palace for a diplomatic — if tense and comically imbalanced — meeting of cultures and empires. In this telling, it’s Moctezuma’s people who have the upper hand, though the emperor himself is inconveniently prone to hallucinogenic reveries and domestic threats. The carnage here is devilishly brazen, the humor ample and bone-dry.
历史一直是恩里格的游乐场，他的最新小说把读者带到了16世纪的特诺奇蒂特兰，也就是现在的墨西哥城。埃尔南·科尔特斯和他的手下来到蒙特祖玛的宫殿，参加两种文化、两个帝国之间的一场外交会晤——这是场紧张的会面，双方的强弱差距之大令人感到滑稽。在这个故事中，虽然皇帝本人对幻觉臆想和国内威胁的执着导致了些麻烦，但蒙特祖玛的人还是占据着上风。书中有恶魔般肆无忌惮的屠杀，也有大量冷幽默。
Nonfiction
非虚构类
《Cold Crematorium》（《冰冷的火葬场》）
By József Debreczeni; translated by Paul Olchváry
约瑟夫·德布赖采尼 著；保罗·欧尔奇瓦里 译
Debreczeni, 39 when he was deported from his native Hungary to what he calls “the Land of Auschwitz,” would later memorialize the experience in a book that defies easy classification. First published in 1950, “Cold Crematorium” is a masterpiece of clinical, mordant observation. In a cattle car he watches a fellow deportee whose hand retains the gestures of a chain-smoker; newly arrived at Auschwitz, he encounters the lousy barroom piano player he avoided back home. This is more than gallows humor; it’s a stubborn fight to stay human and place the unimaginable in the context of the known. Look elsewhere for platitudes — Debreczeni witnessed, and reported, the best and worst of mankind and showed it to us to use as we will.
德布赖采尼在39岁那年被他的祖国匈牙利驱逐到他所谓的“奥斯维辛之地”，他后来在一本难以归类的书中回忆了这段经历。1950年首版的《冰冷的火葬场》是一部客观敏锐的杰作。在一辆运牛车里，他看到一个被驱逐出境的同伴，他的手保持着不断在抽烟的姿势；刚到奥斯维辛，他就遇到了他在家乡避之唯恐不及的蹩脚酒吧钢琴师。这不仅仅是绞刑架下的幽默；更是一场顽强的战斗，要保持人性，把难以想象的事物置于已知的背景下。看看在其他地方说滥了的赞美吧——德布赖采尼见证并报道了人类最好和最坏的一面，他把这些展示出来供我们自己去使用。
《Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here》（《走了的人都在这里》）
By Jonathan Blitzer
乔纳森·布利策 著
Blitzer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, presents a timely analysis of the situation at America’s southern border, placing the blame for today’s screaming headlines, detainee camps and unaccompanied minors firmly on post-Cold War U.S. policy. His kaleidoscopic narrative moves between the Central American insurgencies that flooded this country with refugees, and the shifting and frequently incoherent policies that worsened the fallout. We meet morally pragmatic domestic politicians, a tireless activist who’s moved from El Salvador to Chicago, Los Angeles teenagers ensnared in gang pipelines. None of it is simple; all of it has a terrible cost. Blitzer handles his vast topic with assurance and grace, never losing sight of the human element behind the global crisis.
《纽约客》专职撰稿人布利策对美国南部边境的局势做了及时的分析，把今天令人震惊的新闻、拘留营和无人陪伴的未成年人的责任归咎于冷战后的美国政策。他的叙事千变万化，在导致难民涌入美国的中美洲叛乱和导致难民问题恶化的政策之间穿梭，这些政策往往不断变化且经常前后不一。我们在书中见到一些道德上采取务实态度的国内政治人士，一位从萨尔瓦多搬到芝加哥的勤奋活动人士，难以摆脱成为帮派分子的宿命的洛杉矶青少年。这一切都不简单；都要付出可怕的代价。布利策以自信和优雅的态度处理了这个宏大的话题，从未忽视全球危机背后的人性因素。
《I Heard Her Call My Name》（《我听到她叫我的名字》）
By Lucy Sante
露西·桑特 著
When the veteran literary and cultural critic came out as transgender in 2021 at the age of 66, she described in an email to her loved ones the devastating realization that her “parallel life” — the one presented to her by a “gender-swapping” app that showed her how she would have looked as a girl and then a woman at various junctures in her life — had passed her by. “Fifty years were under water, and I’d never get them back.” As she reflects on her upbringing as the “only child of isolated immigrants,” her early adulthood in 1970s New York and her career of seeking truths through writing while hiding an important truth about herself, Sante fearlessly documents a transformation both internal and external, one that is also a kind of homecoming.
这名资深的文学和文化评论家2021年公开自己的跨性别身份时已66岁，她在写给亲人的电子邮件中描述了她当时令人心碎的领悟：她的“并行生活”已和她擦肩而过，那是一款“性别转换”应用程序展示给她的生活，让她看到了自己如何以女孩和女人的样子出现在人生的各个阶段。“50年时光隐藏在水下，我再也找不回它们。”桑特在书中回顾了自己作为“独生子女在与社会隔绝的移民家庭”长大，成年后不久在20世纪70年的纽约生活，以及她如何通过写作寻求真理的同时，隐瞒了一个关于自己的重要真相的职业生涯。桑特大胆地记录了这个既是内心，也是外在的转变，而这也是一种回归。
《Reagan》（《里根》）
By Max Boot/ 马克斯·布特 著
This elegant biography of the 40th president stands out for its deep authority and nimble style. Boot, a historian and foreign policy analyst, grew up idolizing Ronald Reagan, but after a decade of interviews and research, he finds himself asking whether his onetime hero paved the way for Donald Trump, the man whose ascent to power led Boot to abandon the right. The book is a landmark work that shows how Reagan emerged from his New Deal roots to become a practiced Red baiter and racist dog whistler before settling into the role of the optimistic all-American elder statesman. “It is no exaggeration,” Boot writes, “to say that you cannot fully comprehend what happened to America in the 20th century without first understanding what happened to Ronald Reagan.”
这是一部关于第40任总统的文笔优雅的传记，尤为突出的是其知识渊博的权威性和灵活的风格。历史学家、外交政策分析师布特在成长过程中一直崇拜罗纳德·里根，但经过10年的采访和研究，他发现自己开始思考一个问题：他曾经的英雄是否为特朗普上台创造了条件，特朗普的掌权导致布特抛弃右派。这部里程碑式的著作展示了里根如何从他的新政起源初露头角，成为一名用反共言论激发民众、玩弄种族主义“狗哨政治”的内行，最后成了一名乐观的、具有典型美国人特点的政治元老。“毫不夸张地说，”布特写道，“如果不首先了解罗纳德·里根的生平，就无法全面了解美国在20世纪发生的事情。”
《The Wide Wide Sea》（《大海无边无涯》）
By Hampton Sides
汉普顿·赛德斯 著
In this masterly history, Sides tracks the 18th-century English naval officer James Cook’s third and final voyage across the globe, painting a vivid and propulsive portrait that blends generations of scholarship with the firsthand accounts of European seafarers as well as the oral traditions of Indigenous Pacific islanders. The story begins in Britain as the last embers of the Enlightenment are going out, a time when curiosity and empathy gave way to imperial ambition and moral zeal. Between tales of adventure on the open ocean, complex depictions of Polynesian culture and colorful scenes of a subarctic frost littered with animal life, Sides expertly probes the causes of Cook’s growing anger and violence as the journey wears on and the explorer reckons with the fallout of what he and others had wrought in expanding the map of Europe’s power.
在这部精湛的历史著作中，赛德斯追踪了18世纪英国海军军官詹姆斯·库克的第三次、也是最后一次环球航行，将几代学者的学术成果与欧洲水手的一手材料，以及太平洋岛屿原住民的口头传统结合起来，描绘了一幅生动的、引人入胜的画面。故事从英国开始，随着启蒙运动的最后余光即将熄灭，人们对外界的好奇心和同理心被帝国野心和道德热情取代。穿插在外海冒险故事之中的是对波利尼西亚文化的复杂描述，以及亚严寒环境里丰富多彩的动物生活。赛德斯用精湛的笔法探讨了随着航行时间渐长，库克变得越来越愤怒和暴力的原因，以及这名探险家如何面对自己和其他人为扩大欧洲权力版图给世界带来的后果。
翻译：晋其角、Cindy Hao