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发表于 2009-3-14 11:19:08
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小岛曾表示MGS2受到日本小说《Kangaroo Notebook》的启迪，MGS2可看作是对该书的致敬。
我已托人订购该书，还未到手。
这里贴出ny times对该书的书评，如果你读过《版图之外》等文章，从这篇书评即可看出MGS2与该书的相似之处。
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/24/nnp/19469.html?_r=2
Weird and Weirder
Date: April 28, 1996, Late Edition - Final
Byline: By David R. Slavitt
Lead:
KANGAROO NOTEBOOK
By Kobo Abe.
Translated by Maryellen Toman Mori.
183 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $22.
In this novel, Kobo Abe ventures into a dream world just this side of utter madness, somewhere between Kafka's ''Metamorphosis'' and William Burroughs's ''Naked Lunch.'' As readers, most of us are tidy enough to look for ways to achieve coherence, and we hope somehow to find a way to make sense of the information we are processing. Out of habit, at least, we strive to figure out what is going on when the nameless protagonist who has discovered that there is a crop of cleft-leaf radishes growing out of his shins and who is being transported from one venue to another on a mobile hospital bed finds himself in a department store with a ''blanket wrapped around my waist, a bag of urine in my left hand and a metal pole with squid organs dangling from it in my right hand.'' He is worried that ''if I blunder I could incite a riot.''
Text:
Readers familiar with Abe's work can spot some of his characteristic tropes. His father was a physician, and he himself studied medicine (although he never practiced it). That must have something to do with the appearance in his work of doctors and nurses who are vividly peculiar. One nurse in this novel has been ''Miss Blood Collector'' for three years straight and is trying for the ''Dracula's Daughter Medal.'' Such urban settings as the Worldly Desires shop in the Daikoku Department Store are of a piece with his general view of the metropolis -- especially in an earlier book, ''The Ruined Map'' -- as a surrealistic and alienating environment. When some readers find similarities between Abe and Albert Camus, it is this part of his vision that they are talking about.
Still, ''Kangaroo Notebook'' (which has been translated by Maryellen Toman Mori) is essentially an account of a dream experience, and the trouble with nightmares as a mode of literature is that there is nothing much for a protagonist to do. As the poet Anne Carson asked in ''Glass, Irony and God,'' ''Who in a nightmare / can help himself?'' Abe's luckless fellow with his floribundant shins can have many odd things happen to him and he can encounter different degrees of hostility, friendliness, menace or surcease, but there is no way he can actively influence what is going on around him and befalling him except to describe it in words, which doesn't help. He can run interesting riffs like this one about marsupials: ''The longer you observe them the more you realize how pathetic they are. As I'm sure you know, marsupials and higher mammals have parallel evolutionary branches that mirror each other: cats and dasyures, hyenas and Tasmanian devils, wolves and Tasmanian wolves, bears and koalas, rabbits and bandicoots. . . . It would seem that marsupials are poor imitations of full-fledged mammals. Their inadequacy gives them a certain appeal; we're touched by it.'' True? Perhaps. Relevant? Who knows? In any event, one has to ask, relevant to what? This story is a series of bizarre disasters in which, bravely perhaps, people are making smart remarks like ''If you could commit suicide in hell, it wouldn't be hell.''
Kobo Abe was the pseudonym of Kimifusa Abe, who died in January 1993, just shy of his 70th year. Some nine million copies of his books had been sold, and his name, or anyway pseudonym, had been mentioned with some frequency as a plausible Nobel laureate. But he is most widely known because of the film Hiroshi Teshigahara made from his 1962 novel, ''The Woman in the Dunes.'' In that book, there was a bizarre premise that he explored in a perfectly logical and realistic way as a man and a woman in their shack at the bottom of a sand pit struggled to escape. Here, though, in his last novel, the development is every bit as arbitrary as the donnee of the protagonist's first assertion of the radishes growing on his legs. Weirdness just piles up on other weirdness, higher and higher, but there is never an end to it and we never arrive at a reasonable vista. What are we to make of the nurse's American tenant, named Mr. Hammer Killer, who is hairy all over except for his face and palms, is working on a documentary film, ''Fatal Accidents,'' runs the Japanese Euthanasia Club and has just bought a copy of ''The Narrow Gate,'' by Andre Gide, believing it to be ''a 'how to' book on seducing virgins''? Any one of those things could be funny or threatening or somehow interesting, but together, they turn into random bits and bytes that we keep wanting, nonetheless, to make coherent.
We keep failing, because the task is impossible and absurd -- like the endless shoveling of sand in ''The Woman in the Dunes.'' My guess -- and I admit at once that this is only a guess -- is that what Abe was playing with was the idea of the novel itself. The shape of the genre implies that there can be a shape to experience. Robert Frost used to talk about how a poem offered ''a momentary stay against confusion,'' and novels, too, usually offer an illusion of order and at least a glimpse of reasonableness. We may no longer be innocent enough to expect that good characters will be rewarded and that bad ones will be properly punished, but our expectations of rationality are hard to suppress entirely.
It is with these expectations that Abe was toying, expecting us to keep on turning the pages because there is funny stuff on many of them but also supposing that as we do so, we will feel ever greater levels of frustration. Our situation is as helpless and hopeless as that of the nameless man in this novel who is metamorphosing into a vegetable patch, worried that he will eventually ''turn into a giant plant, like an algae ball.'' It is up to us whether we close the book and give up, as I was tempted to do (even though I was being paid). What stopped me was the peculiar idea that had lodged in my head that this is just what Abe had planned, and that if I did what he had expected of me, I would be acknowledging, somehow, that he had won and he would be entitled to laugh at me. This is a strange relationship to have with the fiction of a dead pseudonymous Japanese writer, but then strange relationships were his specialty.
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