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在这部错综复杂的元小说中,一位近期丧偶的作家开始撰写她已故妻子的传记:她是一位神秘的艺术家、作家和音乐家,唯一被人所知的名号是X。随着作者深入研究X的生活和工作,凯瑟琳·莱西展现了一段令人震惊的反历史,那时美国刚刚重新统一,又在第二次世界大战后分裂成三个国家:一个自由主义国家、一个自由意志主义国家和一个神权政治国家。
自始至终,莱西都巧妙地将虚构故事与历史轶事融合在一起,例如将X与大卫·鲍伊和美国艺术家里查·塞拉编织到一起,从而在X脆弱的世界和我们自己的世界之间建立了令人不安的联系。
书名:Biography of X《X的传记》
作者:Catherine Lacey
简介:From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist.
When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.
A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows a grieving wife seeking to understand the woman who enthralled her. CM traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. And when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined.
Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey, one of our most acclaimed literary innovators, pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.