Goose Book

The Book of Goose

❈ Geese, if they have dreams, know never to let the world see them. ❈ An ambiguous fable oscillating between narrator and ghostwriter, girl and girl, obscurity and exposure. Winner of the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction ----------- ❈ Synopsis Fabienne is dead. The news of her death in a family letter pulls Agnès's heart from Pennsylvania, USA, back to the small French town of Saint-Rémy, where Agnès and Fabienne grew up together. In that war-torn corner, at thirteen years old, they used imagination and words to build a two-person world where they could cultivate happiness and converse with ghosts. It was the summer of 1953, Agnès's happiest time, when Fabienne disrupted everything with a decision: to co-write a book that would let the world know their feelings, but only under Agnès's name. With the help of Monsieur Devaux, the postmaster, the book succeeded, and Agnès was thrust into the outside world, from the countryside to Paris, from elite schools in London to backyards in Pennsylvania. Navigating an adventure intertwined with fame, fortune, and hidden meanings, the girls went their separate ways, until one's death brought the other freedom: Agnès decided to write another book, telling the true story of her and Fabienne. ------------ ❈ Media Reviews All fiction is akin to a hoax, for it weaves fictional illusions, using fictional characters and plots to evoke real emotions. *The Book of Goose* is Yiyun Li’s most entertaining work, an existential fable that reveals the intricate motivations behind our writing: to understand the truth of our own existence, to exact revenge for the truth, to let others experience what we feel, and to commemorate those who live eternally in the villages within us. — *The New York Times Book Review* This is not a victim’s story, not in any simple way. It is far more interesting and stranger than that. The people close to Agnès are not as dangerous as they claim to be; the manipulators in positions of privilege overestimate their power. All the crises in the novel stem from Fabienne and Agnès’s chosen estrangement, driven by their imagination and adventurous spirit, or from the unalterable predicaments of their birth and history. — *The Guardian*

2025-10-14

上海译文出版社

Archipelago Books

291

9787532799657