麥卡錫新書『旅客』已出版

New Cormac McCarthy Book, ‘The Passenger,’ Unveiled (1) -麥卡錫新書『旅客』已出版

Cormac McCarthy has won the Pulitzer Prize and has received a MacArthur "Genius Grant." He has written 10 novels, several of which have been adapted, and has made forays into writing for the theater and film. BABAK DOWLATSHAHI

After incubating for some 30 years, Cormac McCarthy’s next novel just made a dramatic first entrance onto the public stage. Passages from the much-anticipated book, called The Passenger, were read as part of a multimedia event staged by the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The reading is the first public confirmation of the novel and its title, long the subject of rumors in the literary world.

The occasion marks nearly 50 years since the publication of McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper, which won the PEN/Faulkner prize for best debut novel in 1966.

While academics and critics have long praised his work, the legendary author keeps a low profile, spending most of his time at a science and mathematics think tank in New Mexico, the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), where he is a trustee. Organizers at SFI confirmed to Newsweek that the novel will be released in 2016, though McCarthy's agent and publishers declined to comment on the status of the book.

Prior to the Lannan Foundation event on August 5, details about the book’s eventual publication were hard to come by. Now, The Passenger appears to be approaching.

That alone is enough to excite McCarthy’s substantial following. Steven Frye, president of the Cormac McCarthy Society, is more than a little biased when it comes to ranking authors. But there are plenty who share his opinion when he says: “I would rate him No. 1” among contemporary authors. “It’s bold to say that we’ll be reading him in 500 years, the way we read Shakespeare.... But if we’re still reading novels, then I think it will be the case.”

Given the author’s history when it comes to public appearances, it was a surprise to members of the Society (which has no affiliation with the author) when the event was announced on the Santa Fe Institute’s website.

The August 5 presentation was not your average coffee shop book reading. Held at a performing arts center in Santa Fe, the event was anchored by a discussion between SFI President David Krakauer, an evolutionary biologist and complex systems scientist, and the visual artist James Drake.

Krakauer saw an “unbelievable resemblance” between Drake's drawings and the themes of McCarthy’s recent work—such as madness, genius and mathematical truth. SFI, a network of researchers studying complexity through science and mathematics, was the perfect vehicle to present the works of both artists in a single setting. With the author’s blessing, Krakauer read over a manuscript of The Passenger and selected excerpts.

Onstage, Krakauer recited dialogue from the novel alongside a local actress, Caitlin McShea, who played the part of the book’s female protagonist. The readings from the book—interspersed amid a slideshow and discussion ofDrake's art—covered esoteric topics ranging from the aesthetics of mathematical equations to the nature of knowledge.

There was also an original soundtrack for the event composed by McCarthy's son, 17-year-old John Francis. But the biggest surprise of all was a digital recording of McCarthy introducing the characters—the only publicized instance in which he has participated in a large public reading.

The math connections might strike book readers as odd, but anyone familiar with McCarthy’s best prose will recognize the prevalence of themes from science. Suttree, a sprawling account of 1950s Knoxville that is considered one of his defining works, opens with a passage describing a dirty river that is so infused with detail and complex terminology that it turns the refuse of a city into a stirringly beautiful linguistic riff. His other masterpiece, Blood Meridian, is a cowboy novel that includes meditations on technology and self-replicating machines:

Cormac McCarthy thanks the crowd following an August 5 reading from his new book, "The Passenger." Caitlin McShea (second from the left), who read dialogue as the book's female protagonist, is alongside participants David Krakauer and James Drake (far right). DON USNER/SANTA FE INSTITUTE

“You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”

-Blood Meridian First Vintage International, page 17 

Other previous novels have subtly woven in science, but according to KrakauerThe Passenger will place science in the foreground. “It's everywhere,” he says. Just as the author went through an “Appalachian phase” and a “Southwest phase”—the terms used by scholars to describe his early and middle works—Krakauer says the new book is going to be “full-blown Cormac 3.0—a mathematical [and] analytical novel.”

“I’m extremely amused by imaging what book sellers are going to do with the next novel,” he says. (Whether it gets dubbed “science fiction” or something else, it will most likely be displayed near a window or an entrance.)

O8/21/2015

Justin Lai 選材

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