入圍2016年曼布克獎,小說界最亮眼新「聲」代Ottessa Moshfegh一鳴驚人代表作。
「那麼就開始吧。我的名字是艾琳.鄧露普,現在你認識我了。我24歲,在一家私人少年矯正機構當秘書,週薪57美元。不過我現在認為,那地方其實是男孩們的監獄。我稱呼那裡為穆爾黑德(Moorehead)。戴爾.穆爾黑德是我可怕的房東,所以我覺得用穆爾黑德稱呼那地方還滿適合的。
一週後,我就要離家出走再也不回來。這就是我如何消失的故事。」
主角艾琳活在一個黑暗世界裡。她那曾擔任警察的父親如今是個酒鬼,他倆痛恨彼此,艾琳甚至幻想過要殺了父親。事實上艾琳幾乎恨所有人,包括她自己,她的人生中也從未有稱得上朋友的夥伴。
有天,一個時髦的哈佛畢業生麗貝卡來到穆爾黑德擔任新輔導員,艾琳已經準備好討厭麗貝卡,但麗貝卡卻試著與艾琳當朋友,而這奇蹟般萌芽的友誼,最終改變了一切。
《Eileen》從老年艾琳的眼光,講述年輕艾琳所經歷過令人毛骨悚然、卻又充滿希區考克式轉折的故事。Ottessa Moshfegh譜寫出的《Eileen》,堪稱當代文壇最令人驚豔的原始新「聲」代。(文/博客來編譯)
A lonely young woman working in a boys’ prison outside Boston in the early 60s is pulled into a very strange crime, in a mordant, harrowing story of obsession and suspense, by one of the
brightest new voices in fiction. Longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize.
So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile
correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible
landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back.
This is the story of how I disappeared.
The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the
talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with
perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her
increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to
resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her
wildest imaginings.
Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older
narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the
most original new voices in contemporary literature.
Review
“The great power of this book, which won the PEN/Hemingway debut fiction award last month, is that Eileen is never simply a literary gargoyle; she is painfully alive and human, and Ottessa
Moshfegh writes her with a bravura wildness that allows flights of expressionistic fantasy to alternate with deadpan matter of factness…As an evocation of physical and psychological squalor,
Eileen is original, courageous and masterful.” —The Guardian
“If Jim Thompson had married Patricia Highsmith – imagine that household – they might have conspired together to dream up something like Eileen. It’s blacker than black and cold as an icicle.
It’s also brilliantly realised and horribly funny.” —John Banville
“[A] dark and unnerving debut.”—Publishers Weekly
“…It is in that gritty, claustrophobic atmosphere that Ms. Moshfegh’s talents are most apparent. This young writer already possesses a remarkably sighted view into the bleakest alleys of the
psyche.” —Wall Street Journal
“Wonderfully unsettling first novel . . . When the denouement comes, it’s as shocking as it is thrilling. Part of the pleasure of the book (besides the almost killing tension) is that
Eileen is mordantly funny . . . this tale belongs to both the past and future Eileen, a truly original character who is gloriously unlikable, dirty, startling — and as ferociously human as the
novel that bears her name.”—San Francisco Chronicle
"Rife with dark emotions and twisted fantasies, Moshfegh's psychological thriller is the sinister account of the reclusive Eileen, whose prospects for escape from her abysmal life take a turn
for the worse when a friendship with a coworker spirals into obsession."—Oprah.com
“Eileen swaddles the reader in its dark and sinister mood. Moshfegh's brilliant storytelling builds an almost sadistic level of suspense, so that you can't help but lean in and listen to the
narrator, however despicable and repulsive her confession becomes.”—Sarah Hollenbeck, co-owner of Women & Children First bookstore, Chicago
“Eileen is a singular read, dark and funny and full of oft-queasy truths, ones that may at first seem strange and disturbing, but then are not so far away from our own internal thoughts.
Eileen is quiet, awkward and lonely. As Christmas approaches, she is desperate to leave her alcoholic father, her dismal home life and her mind-numbing job at a boys’ correctional facility.
Enter her glamorous “new friend” Rebecca and suddenly Eileen is set on a path towards inevitable change, a suspenseful ride to the end. Atmospheric, cinematic, and deliciously uncomfortably
heartwarmingly pathetic in the best of ways.”—Melinda Powers, Bookshop Santa Cruz (also sent in to Indie Next)
“Eileen is unlike anything I've read since, maybe, Patricia Highsmith: a wholly captivating look at a character you're drawn towards in a strange, inexplicable alliance and from whom you
can't easily part. I find myself thinking about it still, months later, in the most unexpected ways. Mosfegh has a way with the kind of imagery that brings her world into terrible, precise
emotional focus, and the book builds like a slow avalanche. What a pleasure to read!”—Camden Avery, The Booksmith, San Francisco
Charmingly disturbing. Delightfully dour. Pleasingly perverse. These are some of the oxymorons that ran through my mind as I read Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh's intense, flavorful, remarkable new
novel. "Funny awful" might be another one. I marveled at myself for enjoying the scenes I was witnessing, and wondered what dark magic the author had employed to make me smile at them. –
NPR.ORG
“Tempting plot machinations aside, you should be reading Moshfegh because she writes incredible sentences, the kind that build and build to create a warped momentum you can’t brake. They
create a harsh, blackly humorous world, like Mary Gaitskill, but less grave and with more jokes.”- Gawker
“Like The Woman Upstairs and Notes on a Scandal, Eileen turns on the symbiotic relationship between love and hate, hope and delusion, and — for the reader — repulsion and absolute
absorption.”- New York Magazine
“The climax of "Eileen" is bizarre, creepy and oddly satisfying. This novel does not fit neatly into a single genre. Its protagonist is unlikable but fascinating, and ultimately sympathetic.
It is a masterly psychological drama that lingers, with a disquieting effect, in the reader's mind.” - Newsday
“The attention that is now greeting Moshfegh’s first novel is not undeserved. “Eileen” is a remarkable piece of writing, always dark and surprising, sometimes ugly and occasionally hilarious.
Its first-person narrator is one of the strangest, most messed-up, most pathetic — and yet, in her own inimitable way, endearing — misfits I’ve encountered in fiction. Trust me, you have never
read anything remotely like “Eileen.” -Washington Post
““Eileen is anything but generic. Eileen is as vivid and human as they come . . . Moshfegh, whose novella, “McGlue,” was published last year, writes beautiful sentences. One after the other
they unwind — playful, shocking, wise, morbid, witty, searingly sharp. The ¬beginning of this novel is so impressive, so controlled yet whimsical, fresh and thrilling, you feel she can do
anything . . . There is that wonderful tension between wanting to slow down and bathe in the language and imagery, and the impulse to race to see what happens, how it happens.” - The New York
Times Book Review
“Her best work yet . . . What makes Moshfegh an important writer — and I'd even say crucial — is that she is unlike any other author (male, female, Iranian, American, etc.). And this sui
generis quality is cemented by the singular savage suburban noir of "Eileen." She tries relentlessly to pull you away and out, not unlike her own self-destructive characters, who seem a bit
addicted to their own repulsiveness. Moshfegh's palettes are big and small, fictional realms that are often vague in a way that makes them allegorical almost, universal in their blurriness and
yet at the same time meticulously rendered with specific details. And she often does this with little attention to theme. Her fiction offers a sense that is of our world but also altogether
hostile to clear distillation of it. Here is art that manages to reject artifice and yet be something wholly new and itself in sheer artistry.” - The Los Angeles Times
“The young heroine—if you can call her that—of Ottessa Moshfegh’s chilling debut is exactly the kind of woman whom noir authors tended to summarily ignore. Think of her as a Flannery O’Connor
character wandering around a Raymond Chandler novel . . . Moshfegh uses that carefully constructed foundation to build a truly shocking ending, one you’ll never see coming. It’s hard to believe
she’s a first-time novelist, so skillfully has she grafted disparate genre elements onto one another: psychological suspense, horror, obsession, and madness. Eileen is as twisted, dark, and
unexpected as its title character.” - Entertainment Weekly
“excellent debut novel . . . How will Eileen get out of X-ville? Can she leave unscathed? Why does she keep talking about her father’s gun? Though readers will thoroughly delight in the way
the answers unfold, they will be left with one lingering question: What will Ottessa Moshfegh do next?” - Boston Globe
“In this masterful feat of suspense writing, she captures the distortions and complicities that poison families.”- BBC.com
“Eileen is a highbrow noir that introduces Ottessa Moshfegh as a talent to look out for.” - Bustle
“If Shirley Jackson and Mary Gaitskill had a literary daughter, it might be Ottessa Moshfegh, whose unnerving debut is sure to gar¬ner attention.” -Bookpage
“Enormously entertaining and funny . . . A beautiful novel that tells the truth.”- Bookforum
“Literary psychological suspense at its best.”- Booklist (starred review)
“A woman recalls her mysterious escape from home in this taut, controlled noir about broken families and their proximity to violence…. The narrative masterfully taunts…. The release, when it
comes, registers a genuine shock. And Moshfegh has such a fine command of language and her character that you can miss just how inside out Eileen's life becomes in the course of the novel, the
way the "loud, rabid inner circuitry of my mind" overtakes her. Is she inhumane or self-empowered? Deeply unreliable or justifiably jaded? Moshfegh keeps all options on the table…. A shadowy
and superbly told story of how inner turmoil morphs into outer chaos.”- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)