A Tale of Scottish Rural Life 一个关于苏格兰乡村生活的故事.pdf

综合类——A 级 A Tale of Scottish Rural Life 【一个关于苏格兰乡村生活的故事】 Lewis Grassic Gibbons Sunset Song (1932) was voted the best Scottish novel of all time by Scottishs reading public in 2005. Once considered shocking for its frank description of aspects of the lives of Scotlands poor rural farmers, it has been adapted for stage, film, TV and radio in recent decades. The novel is set on the fictional estate of Kinraddie, in the farming country of the Scottish northwest in the years up to and beyond World War I. At its heart is the story of Chris, who is both part of the community and a little outside it. Grassic Gibbon gives us the most detailed and intimate account of the life of his heroine. We watch her grow through a childhood dominated by her cruel but hard-working father; experience tragedy (her mothers suicide and murder of her twin children); and learn about her feelings as she grows into woman. We see her marry, lose her husband, then marry again. Chris has seemed so convincing a figure to some female readers that they cannot believe that she is the creation of a man. But it would be misleading to suggest that this book is just about Chris. It is truly a novel of a place and its people. Its opening section tells of Kinraddies long history, in a language that imitates the places changing patterns of speech and writing. The story itself is amazingly full of characters and incidents. It is told from Chris point of view but also from that of the gossiping community, a community where everybody knows everybody elses business and nothing is ever forgotten. Sunset Song has a social theme too. It is concerned with what Grassic Gibbon perceives as the destruction of traditional Scottish rural life first by modernization and then by World War I. Gibbon tried hard to show how certain characters resist the war. Despite this, the war takes the young men away, a number of them to their deaths. In particular,