mcglue

　　故事發生在一八五一年，在麻薩諸塞州的薩勒姆(Salem)，醉得不省人事男子，被指控殺了他最好的朋友。重度酒癮的馬克格魯(McGlue)，是名新英格蘭的水手，頭上有道疤，是先前從火車跌下來所造成的。他含糊不清的說詞，讓他被指控為殺害同船的水手強納森(Johnson)。回應這事件，他卻本能地持續裝瘋賣傻，不論是他的母親，或是周遭任何人。他只想用琴酒麻醉一切。

　　『他們說我做錯了，於是他們任由我在這受苦。他們見這樣我死氣沉沉，未來必定會像我求撓，拿著十字麵包塗抹著新鮮的奶油，求我原諒。整個世界一個接著一個，而我會向神父一般，溫柔地撫摸他們的頭。我會灌飽一桶又一桶的琴酒。』

　　但在監獄裡的日子，清醒的他，卻意外地塑造他另一面。他想起了孩提時的朋友，年少的輕狂，還有關於強納森的回憶與夢想。原來他反抗過，爭取過，但過往的不愉快，讓他不再堅持，反而放任世俗的眼光，任自己裝瘋度日。

　　究竟他們兩個之間有甚麼樣的過去?甚麼事情讓一切嘎然而止，只剩下酒精。到底誰殺了強納森，而他又怎麼死的?奧德賽的小說，在冷酷的現實下，有著寬容與溫暖。（文/博客來編譯）

　　The debut from one of contemporary fiction’s most exciting young voices, now in a new edition.

　　Salem, Massachusetts, 1851: McGlue is in the hold, still too drunk to be sure of name or situation or orientation—he may have killed a man. That man may have been his best friend. Intolerable memory accompanies sobriety. A-sail on the high seas of literary tradition, Ottessa Moshfegh gives us a nasty heartless blackguard on a knife-sharp voyage through the fogs of recollection.

　　They said I’ve done something wrong?…And they’ve just left me down here to starve. They’ll see this inanition and be so damned they’ll fall to my feet and pass up hot cross buns slathered in fresh butter and beg I forgive them. All of them…: the entire world one by one. Like a good priest I’ll pat their heads and nod. I’ll dunk my skull into a barrel of gin.

Review

　　“… a splashy new edition … Moshfegh's first book introduces the kind of character, in all his psychological wildness and vivid grotesquerie that her others are known for, and readers will be more than intrigued.” — Booklist

　　“Moshfegh’s fiction often fetishizes the repellent (vomit, blood, our capacity for callously using each other), but in time McGlue’s tale acquires tenderness of a sort. That’s partly thanks to Moshfegh’s lyricism . . . A potent, peculiar, and hallucinatory anti-romance.” — Kirkus Reviews

Author

　　Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. She is also the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and the short story collection Homesick for Another World. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Granta, and have earned her a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, the Plimpton Discovery Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her first book, McGlue, a novella, won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the Believer Book Award.