The Lovely Bones （be continued...............）
本帖最后由 小爱不爱 于 2009-10-11 03:11 编辑《可爱的骨头》这一部不可能拍成电影的小说已经成功的拍摄完成，本来在3月份就可以看首映，但是基于一些原因，所以此片将会在12底发布，一部很不错的小说。 因为老师要我看一本英文书，我选择这部小说来当我的书评，所以介绍给大家。
此小说主要是通过一个14岁女孩被强奸及毁尸之后在天堂俯瞰人间的家人怎么悲痛，又怎么走出人生。
因为文章有20多节，所以每次上传1节
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a
red and white striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me
into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over,
letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The two
of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was
alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father
this, he said, "Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped in
a perfect world."
ONE
My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was
fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. In newspaper photos of
missing girls from the seventies, most looked like me: white girls with
mousy brown hair. This was before kids of all races and genders started
appearing on milk cartons or in the daily mail. It was still back when
people believed things like that didn't happen.
In my junior high yearbook I had a quote from a Spanish poet my sister
had turned me on to, Juan Ramon Jimenez. It went like this: "If they
give you ruled paper, write the other way." I chose it both because it
expressed my contempt for my structured surroundings a la the classroom
and because, not being some dopey quote from a rock group, I thought it
marked me as literary. I was a member of the Chess Club and Chem Club
and burned everything I tried to make in Mrs. Delminico's home ec class.
My favorite teacher was Mr. Botte, who taught biology and liked to
animate the frogs and crawfish we had to dissect by making them dance in
their waxed pans.
I wasn't killed by Mr. Botte, by the way. Don't think every person
you're going to meet in here is suspect. That's the problem. You never
know. Mr. Botte came to my memorial (fas?), may I add, as did almost the
entire junior high school (I was never so popular) and cried quite a
bit. He had a sick kid. We all knew this, so when he laughed at his own
jokes, which were rusty way before I had him, we laughed too, forcing it
sometimes just to make him happy. His daughter died a year and a half
after I did. She had leukemia, but I never saw her in my heaven.
My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his
border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer. My
murderer believed in old-fashioned things like eggshells and coffee
grounds, which he said his own mother had used. My father came home
smiling, making jokes about how the man's garden might be beautiful but
it would stink to high heaven once a heat wave hit.
But on December 6, 1973, it was snowing, and I took a shortcut through
the cornfield back from the junior high. It was dark out because the
days were shorter in winter, and I remember how the broken cornstalks
made my walk more difficult. The snow was falling lightly, like a flurry
of small hands, and I was breathing through my nose until it was running
so much that I had to open my mouth. Six feet from where Mr. Harvey
stood, I stuck my tongue out to taste a snowflake.
"Don't let me startle you," Mr. Harvey said.
Of course, in a cornfield, in the dark, I was startled. After I was
dead I thought about how there had been the light scent of cologne in
the air but that I had not been paying attention, or thought it was
coming from one of the houses up ahead
"Mr. Harvey, "I said.
"You're the older Salmon girl, right?"
"Yes."
"How are your folks?"
Although the eldest in my family and good at acing a science quiz, I
had never felt comfortable with adults.
"Fine," I said. I was cold, but the natural authority of his age, and
the added fact that he was a neighbor and had talked to my father about
fertilizer, rooted me to the spot.
"I've built something back here," he said. "Would you like to see?”
"I'm sort of cold, Mr. Harvey," I said, "and my mom likes me
home before dark."
"Its after dark, Susie," he said.
I wish now that I had known this was weird. I had never told him my
name. I guess I thought my father had told him one of the embarrassing
anecdotes he saw merely as loving testaments to his children. My father
was the kind of dad who kept a nude photo of you when you were three in
the downstairs bathroom, the one that guests would use. He did this to
my little sister, Lindsey, thank God. At least I was spared that
indignity. But he liked to tell a story about how, once Lindsey was
born, I was so jealous that one day while he was on the phone in the
other room, I moved down the couch - he could see me from where he stood
- and tried to pee on top of Lindsey in her carrier. This story
humiliated me every time he told it, to the pastor of our church, to our
neighbor Mrs. Stead, who was a therapist and whose take on it he wanted
to hear, and to everyone who ever said "Susie has a lot of spunk!"
"Spunk!" my father would say. "Let me tell you about spunk," and he
would launch immediately into his Susie-peed-on-Lindsey story.
But as it turned out, my father had not mentioned us to Mr. Harvey or
told him the Susie-peed-on-Lindsey story.
Mr. Harvey would later say these words to my mother when he ran into her
on the street: "I heard about the horrible, horrible tragedy. What was
your daughter's name, again?"
"Susie," my mother said, bracing up under the weight of it, a weight
that she naively hoped might lighten someday, not knowing that it would
only go on to hurt in new and varied ways for the rest of her life.
Mr. Harvey told her the usual: "I hope they get the bastard. I'm sorry
for your loss."
I was in my heaven by that time, fitting my limbs together, and
couldn't believe his audacity. "The man has no shame," I said to Franny,
my intake counselor. "Exactly," she said, and made her point as simply
as that. There wasn't a lot of bullshit in my heaven.
Mr. Harvey said it would only take a minute, so I followed him a
little farther into the cornfield, where fewer stalks were broken off
because no one used it as a shortcut to the junior high. My mom had told
my baby brother, Buckley, that the corn in the field was inedible when
he asked why no one from the neighborhood ate it. "The corn is for
horses, not humans," she said. "Not dogs?" Buckley asked. "No," my
mother answered. "Not dinosaurs?" Buckley asked. And it went like that.
"I've made a little hiding place," said Mr. Harvey.
He stopped and turned to me.
"I don't see anything," I said. I was aware that Mr. Harvey was
looking at me strangely. I'd had older men look at me that way since I'd
lost my baby fat, but they usually didn't lose their marbles over me
when I was wearing my royal blue parka and yellow elephant bell-bottoms.
His glasses were small and round with gold frames, and his eyes looked
out over them and at me.
"You should be more observant, Susie," he said.
I felt like observing my way out of there, but I didn't. Why didn't I?
Franny said these questions were fruitless: "You didn't and that's that.
Don't mull it over. It does no good. You're dead and you have to accept
it."
"Try again," Mr. Harvey said, and he squatted down and knocked against
the ground.
"What's that?” I asked.
My ears were freezing. I wouldn't wear the multicolored cap with the
pompom and jingle bells that my mother had made me one Christmas. I had
shoved it in the pocket of my parka instead.
I remember that I went over and stomped on the ground near him. It
felt harder even than frozen earth, which was pretty hard.
"It's wood," Mr. Harvey said. "It keeps the entrance from collapsing.
Other than that it's all made out of earth."
"What is it?" I asked. I was no longer cold or weirded out by the look
he had given me. I was like I was in science class: I was curious.
"Come and see,"
It was awkward to get into, that much he admitted once we were both
inside the hole. But I was so amazed by how he had made a chimney that
would draw smoke out if he ever chose to build a fire that the
awkwardness of getting in and out of the hole wasn't even on my mind.
You could add to that that escape wasn't a concept I had any real
experience with. The worst I'd had to escape was Artie, a strangelooking
kid at school whose father was a mortician. He liked to pretend
he was carrying a needle full of embalming fluid around with him. On his
notebooks he would draw needles spilling dark drips.
"This is neato!" I said to Mr. Harvey. He could have been the
hunchback of Notre Dame, whom we had read about in French class. I
didn't care. I completely reverted. I was my brother Buckley on our daytrip
to the Museum of Natural History in New York, where he'd fallen in
love with the huge skeletons on display. I hadn't used the word neato in
public since elementary school.
"Like taking candy from a baby," Franny said.
I can still see the hole like it was yesterday, and it was. Life is a
perpetual yesterday for us. It was the size of a small room, the mud
room in our house, say, where we kept our boots and slickers and where
Mom had managed to fit a washer and dryer, one on top of the other. I
could almost stand up in it, but Mr. Harvey had to stoop. He'd created a
bench along the sides of it by the way he'd dug it out. He immediately
sat down.
"Look around," he said.
I stared at it in amazement, the dug-out shelf above him where he had
placed matches, a row of batteries, and a battery-powered fluorescent
lamp that cast the only light in the room, an eerie light that would
make his features hard to see when he was on top of me.
There was a mirror on the shelf, and a razor and shaving cream. I
thought that was odd. Wouldn't he do that at home? But I guess I figured
that a man who had a perfectly good split-level and then built an
underground room only half a mile away had to be kind of loo-loo. My
father had a nice way of describing people like him: "The man's a
character, that's all."
So I guess I was thinking that Mr. Harvey was a character, and I liked
the room, and it was warm, and I wanted to know how he had built it,
what the mechanics of the thing were and where he'd learned to do
something like that.
But by the time the Gilberts' dog found my elbow three days later and
brought it home with a telling corn husk attached to it, Mr. Harvey had
closed it up. I was in transit during this. I didn't get to see him
sweat it out, remove the wood reinforcement, bag any evidence along with
my body parts, except that elbow. By the time I popped up with enough
wherewithal to look down at the goings-on on Earth, I was more concerned
with my family than anything else.
My mother sat on a hard chair by the front door with her mouth open.
Her pale face paler than I had ever seen it. Her blue eyes staring. My
father was driven into motion. He wanted to know details and to comb the
cornfield along with the cops. I still thank God for a small detective
named Len Fenerman. He assigned two uniforms to take my dad into town
and have him point out all the places I'd hung out with my friends. The
uniforms kept my dad busy in one mall for the whole first day. No one
had told Lindsey, who was thirteen and would have been old enough, or
Buckley, who was four and would, to be honest, never fully understand.
Mr. Harvey asked me if I would like a refreshment. That was how he put
it. I said I had to go home.
"Be polite and have a Coke," he said. I’m sure the other kids would."
"What other kids?"
"I built this for the kids in the neighborhood. I thought it could be
some sort of clubhouse."
I don't think I believed this even then. I thought he was lying but I
thought it was a pitiful lie. I imagined he was lonely. We had read
about men like him in health class. Men who never married and ate frozen
meals every night and were so afraid of rejection that they didn't even
own pets. I felt sorry for him.
"Okay," I said, "I'll have a Coke."
In a little while he said, "Aren't you warm, Susie? Why don't you take
off your parka,"
I did.
After this he said, "You're very pretty, Susie."
"Thanks," I said, even though he gave me what my friend Clarissa and I
had dubbed the skeevies.
"Do you have a boyfriend?"
"No, Mr. Harvey," I said. I swallowed the rest of my Coke, which was a
lot, and said, "I got to go, Mr. Harvey. This is a cool place, but I
have to go."
He stood up and did his hunchback number by the six dug-in steps that
led to the world. "I don't know why you think you're leaving."
I talked so that I would not have to take in this knowledge: Mr.
Harvey was no character. He made me feel skeevy and icky now that he was
blocking the door.
"Mr. Harvey, I really have to get home."
"Take off your clothes."
"What?"
"Take your clothes off," Mr. Harvey said. "I want to check that you're
still a virgin."
"I am, Mr. Harvey," T said.
"I want to make sure. Your parents will thank me."
"My parents?"
"They only want good girls," he said.
"Mr. Harvey," I said, "please let me leave."
"You aren't leaving, Susie. You're mine now."
Fitness was not a big thing back then; aerobics was barely a word.
Girls were supposed to be soft, and only the girls we suspected were
butch could climb the ropes at school.
I fought hard. I fought as hard as I could not to let Mr. Harvey hurt
me, but my hard-as-I-could was not hard enough, not even close, and I
was soon lying down on the ground, in the ground, with him on top of me
panting and sweating, having lost his glasses in the struggle.
I was so alive then. I thought it was the worst thing in the world to
be lying flat on my back with a sweating man on top of me. To be trapped
inside the earth and have no one know where I was.
I thought of my mother.
My mother would be checking the dial of the clock on her oven. It was
a new oven and she loved that it had a clock on it. "I can time things
to the minute," she told her own mother, a mother who couldn't care less
about ovens.
She would be worried, but more angry than worried, at my lateness. As my
father pulled into the garage, she would rush about, fixing him a
cocktail, a dry sherry, and put on an exasperated face: "You know junior
high," she would say. "Maybe it's Spring Fling." "Abigail," my father
would say, "how can it be Spring Fling when it's snowing?" Having failed
with this, my mother might rush Buckley into the room and say, "Play
with your father” while she ducked into the kitchen and took a nip of
sherry for herself.
Mr. Harvey started to press his lips against mine. They were blubbery
and wet and I wanted to scream but I was too afraid and too exhausted
from the fight. I had been kissed once by someone I liked. His name was
Ray and he was Indian. He had an accent and was dark. I wasn't supposed
to like him. Clarissa called his large eyes, with their half-closed
lids, "freak-a-delic," but he was nice and smart and helped me cheat on
my algebra exam while pretending he hadn't. He kissed me by my locker
the day before we turned in our photos for the yearbook. When the
yearbook came out at the end of the summer, I saw that under his picture
he had answered the standard "My heart belongs to" with "Susie Salmon."
I guess he had had plans. I remember that his lips were chapped.
"Don't, Mr. Harvey," I managed, and I kept saying that one word a lot.
Don't. And I said please a lot too. Franny told me that almost everyone
begged "please" before dying.
"I want you, Susie," he said.
"Please," I said. "Don't," I said. Sometimes I combined them. "Please
don't" or "Don't please." It was like insisting that a key works when it
doesn't or yelling "I've got it, I've got it, I've got it" as a softball
goes sailing over you into the stands.
"Please don't."
But he grew tired of hearing me plead. He reached into the pocket of
my parka and balled up the hat my mother had made me, smashing it into
my mouth. The only sound I made after that was the weak tinkling of
bells.
As he kissed his wet lips down my face and neck and then began to
shove his hands up under my shirt, I wept. I began to leave my body; I
began to inhabit the air and the silence. I wept and struggled so I
would not feel. He ripped open my pants, not having found the invisible
zipper my mother had artfully sewn into their side.
"Big white panties," he said.
I felt huge and bloated. I felt like a sea in which he stood and
pissed and shat. I felt the corners of my body were turning in on
themselves and out, like in cats cradle, which I played with Lindsey
just to make her happy. He started working himself over me.
"Susie! Susie!" I heard my mother calling. "Dinner is ready."
He was inside me. He was grunting.
"We're having string beans and lamb."
I was the mortar, he was the pestle.
"Your brother has a new finger painting, and I made apple crumb cake."
"Why don't you get up?" Mr. Harvey said as he rolled to the side and
then crouched over me,
His voice was gentle, encouraging, a lover's voice on a late morning.
A suggestion, not a command.
I could not move. I could not get up.
When I would not - was it only that, only that I would not follow his
suggestion?-he leaned to the side and felt, over his head, across the
ledge where his razor and shaving cream sat. He brought back a knife.
Unsheathed, it smiled at me, curving up in a grin.
He took the hat from my mouth.
"Tell me you love me," he said.
Gently, I did.
The end came anyway.
Mr. Harvey made me lie still underneath him and listen to the beating of
his heart and the beating of mine. How mine skipped like a rabbit, and
how his thudded, a hammer against cloth. We lay there with our bodies
touching, and, as I shook, a powerful knowledge took hold. He had done
this thing to me and I had lived. That was all. I was still breathing. I
heard his heart. I smelled his breath. The dark earth surrounding us
smelled like what it was, moist dirt where worms and animals lived their
daily lives. I could have yelled for hours.
I knew he was going to kill me. I did not realize then that I was an
animal already dying.
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