| 27 Oct 2009 | Viking Canada|
지난 몇 주간의 관련 기사 중에서 특색있는 것 4가지를 골라보았다. 이 기사가 내용과 배경을 가장 상세하게 다루고 있다.
천하의 루시 모드 몽고메리의 마지막 작품임에도 그 내용 때문에 르페브르씨가 출판사를 찾는게 쉽지 않았나 보다. 5년 반이나 걸렸다는데 그래도 역시 펭귄 카나다에서 책이 나왔다. 개인적으로는 35% 할인 메일이 와서 아무 생각없이 주문을 했더니 amazon.ca 가 아니고 amazon.com. 아마 내년이나 되어야 책을 받을 것 같다. T T
르페브르씨에게도 루시모드 몽고메리의 이 작품의 발굴은 하나의 전환의 계기가 된 모양이다. 원래는 세익스피어를 전공을 지망했었기 때문이다. 이 책을 통해 모두에게 단순히 'Happy romance' 로만 인식되어 있던 이전 이야기들 속에 숨어 있던 다른 면모들을 발견하게 되었을 것이고 정말 흥미진진하고 가슴설렜을 것이 틀림없다. 이런 면들이 숨어 있었던 것은 전적으로 그의 책들이 아이들과 청소년을 위한 소설로 여겨지고 읽혀졌기 때문일 것이다. 아이들은 행간에 숨은 이런 면모들을 찾아낼 경험이 부족하기 때문이다. 나의 경우도 앤을 새롭게 보기 시작한 것은 어느정도 머리가 굵어진 후였다.
세월을 거치면서 비릿한 중년의 아주머니가 되고 고단하고 때론 비참한 현실 속에 놓이게 되는 앤의 이야기는 어린 시절의 낭만과 꿈을 깨뜨려 버리는 것이 아니라 다시금 새롭게 이야기와 인생을 생각해 볼 수 있게 하는 마지막이 아닌 새로운 앤 이야기 조망의 시작이 될 것이다. 내가 이 작품을 기대하고 기다리고 있는 이유이다.
Waterloo-based academic finds L.M. Montgomery’s last “darker” work
October 24, 2009
By Barbara Aggerholm, Record staff
A rediscovered work of fiction by L.M. Montgomery — handed to the publisher on the same day she died in 1942 — could change the way Canadians think about the famous author of Anne of Green Gables and her writing.
Set for release on Tuesday, The Blythes Are Quoted reveals an author who no longer had the energy to sustain the romantic plots for which she was known, literary scholar Benjamin Lefebvre says.
Lefebvre, 32, is a gutsy(대담한) academic from Waterloo who found and edited the volume, Montgomery’s final book.
Its dark tone and content made it a challenge for him to find a publisher, but the volume, a collection of short stories, poems and dialogue was eventually accepted by Penguin Canada.
The Blythes Are Quoted is the last book in a series that began with Anne of Green Gables, set in Prince Edward Island and first published in 1908. It takes the story of Anne and Gilbert Blythe, and their six children and housekeeper Susan Baker, 20 years beyond anything previously published “and some of its subject matter is darker than we might expect,” the publisher says.
The intriguing(호기심을 자극하는) book, which hasn’t before now been published in its entirety, is divided into two sections, one set before the First World War and one after.
It’s full of surprises.
Adultery(불륜), illegitimacy(사생), despair(자포자기), misogyny(여성혐오), murder, revenge, bitterness(비통함), hatred(증오), aging and death(늙고 죽음): these are the recurring themes Lefebvre found in the volume.
“These aren’t usually the first terms associated with L.M. Montgomery,” Penguin says in a press release. “But in The Blythes Are Quoted, completed shortly before her death, Montgomery brought these topics to the forefront in what she intended to be the ninth volume in her bestselling series featuring her beloved heroine Anne.”
Lefebvre, whose home base is Waterloo, is an expert on L.M. Montgomery.
He is a visiting scholar at the L.M. Montgomery Institute at the University of Prince Edward Island and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Alberta where he studied and wrote about the “cultural capital” of Montgomery. He received his master’s degree in English at University of Guelph and PhD at McMaster University in Hamilton. He was a visiting scholar at Wilfrid Laurier University from August 2007 until two months ago.
He’s currently a visiting fellow at the University of Worcester in England, but next June will co-chair a Montgomery conference in Prince Edward Island.
Lefebvre said he became curious about the contents of The Blythes Are Quoted when he learned from a colleague that a previously published version, The Road To Yesterday in 1974, didn’t contain the whole work submitted by Montgomery.
He discovered “buried treasure” when he pored over three typescripts stored in the University of Guelph’s archives. U of G is home to the largest collection of Montgomery memorabilia in Canada, including her handwritten journals, scrapbooks and original typescripts of some of her works.
Previously, the book had been published only in abridged(요약된, 생략된) form. For various reasons, earlier editors cut out substantial portions of the text and changed the book’s shape.
For one thing, it’s a rather “weird” book, Lefebvre said in a telephone interview from England. With its mixture of poetry, prose and dialogue, “it’s very experimental. . . . She’s still taking chances. It’s kind of avant-garde.”
It’s also possible that publishers in wartime 1942 didn’t want to publish a work that criticized war, as this one does, Montgomery scholar Elizabeth Rollins Epperly writes in the foreword to The Blythes are Quoted.
The anti-war sentiment is especially evident in a gripping poem and dialogue at the end of the book in which Anne and her son, Jem, are remembering Walter Blythe, son, brother and the family poet. The book’s second half tells the reader that Walter was killed at Courcelette during the First World War.
Lefebvre was so intrigued by the discovery of the book that he switched schools in 1999, leaving Concordia University in Montreal where he was leaning toward a study of Shakespeare for his master’s degree.
Instead, he came to University of Guelph, where his academic supervisor was Mary Rubio, author of the 2008 biography, Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings, and co-editor of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery.
Lefebvre re-read Montgomery’s earlier books – works that he’d first read as a teen, along with The Hardy Boys.
Even then, he’d felt he was missing something when he didn’t see the romance that appealed to the female audience. “I’ve never been sucked into the romance. I don’t find it believable.
“That’s why I went to grad school . . . to figure out L.M. Montgomery.”
At U of G, Lefebvre found Montgomery gave the “happy story,” but would undercut it.
“For me, it (The Blythes Are Quoted) really opened my eyes to what was there in the earlier books.”
According to Lefebvre, Montgomery’s romance plots, with which the author had always been ambivalent(상반된), were showing cracks long before The Blythes Are Quoted. There are happy endings, but there’s a “twist.”
“She’s been building up to this,” Lefebvre said. “From my perspective . . . she’s not able to keep the energy going that’s necessary for the romance plots.
“She’s trying very hard to maintain the familiar and it’s not working anymore. . . .The cracks are more visible.”
Montgomery was better at writing humour, he said.
Some of the stories in the final volume, like one called Retribution(앙갚음) in which a woman with a long-simmering(감정이 폭발할듯한) hatred sets out to avenge her sister, do not match what some readers would expect from the author of Anne of Green Gables, Lefebvre said.
That’s part of the reason it took him about five and a half years to find a publisher, he said.
Part of the challenge is that many people regard Montgomery as solely a children’s writer, a view that has been reinforced by the way her books have been marketed.
In fact, her work is for a general audience, including children, Lefebvre said, though “a child may not have the life knowledge to read between the lines.”
The Blythes Are Quoted, he said, will appeal more to adults who read Montgomery as a child than it will to today’s children.
He said he hopes the book will make readers look back at Montgomery’s earlier books in the series with a new perspective.
“I hope this book will show there’s more to Montgomery than we think. This book doesn’t match our perception of Montgomery. Most of her work doesn’t match that perception. Our perception is too narrow.
“I hope people will reconsider the way they put Montgomery in this little box and then re-read her.”
While writing The Blythes are Quoted, Montgomery stayed within the patterns to which she and her readers were accustomed(여느때와 다름없는) — themes such as orphans yearning for healthy homes — but the outcomes no longer fit, Lefebvre writes in his afterword to the volume.
There are stories focused on characters whose actions are driven by decades of bitterness, only to have the tables turned on them. There are elaborate deathbed scenes and there are plots that explore the ways in which the death of an adult can manipulate the lives of younger people, Lefebvre writes.
There are romantic prospects and responsible guardians, he notes, but there are also characters who are brutish, controlling, selfish and abusive.
It has been evident for many years now that Montgomery was not a happy person. Her own journals revealed her misery.
Her marriage was a “disaster” and she suffered from bouts of depression and despair throughout her adult life, Lefebvre said.
“Her journals helped more people go back to the books and see there is more.” Readers of her fiction could see “shades of the cracks.”
In September 2008, a granddaughter of Montgomery made public her belief that the author’s death on April 24, 1942 was the result of a drug overdose that may have been deliberate.
Montgomery’s newspaper obituary “offers a tantalizing hint about the new book’s relationship to the end of her life,” Lefebvre said.
It says that Montgomery had compiled a collection of magazine stories written years ago and that they had been placed in the hands of a publisher on the day she died, Lefebvre said.
That supports the theory that her death was suicide, Lefebvre said, adding that anyone who’d read Montgomery’s journals was not likely shocked by the notion that the author killed herself. However, “we’ll never know for sure,” he added.
Lefebvre said he is curious to know how readers will react to The Blythes Are Quoted. He said he encourages his own students to “dig deeper” when it comes to Montgomery’s books. Even so, he said, he has been accused “of ruining people’s childhoods” by making them re-read her books.
“Reading something critically is not about ruining it.” It’s about appreciating it in more detail and understanding what the book is doing, he said.
“My hope is that whatever their reaction, they’ll re-read Montgomery. She is, I find, the most compelling case study in Canadian literature.”
baggerholm@therecord.com
October 24, 2009
By Barbara Aggerholm, Record staff
A rediscovered work of fiction by L.M. Montgomery — handed to the publisher on the same day she died in 1942 — could change the way Canadians think about the famous author of Anne of Green Gables and her writing.
Set for release on Tuesday, The Blythes Are Quoted reveals an author who no longer had the energy to sustain the romantic plots for which she was known, literary scholar Benjamin Lefebvre says.
Lefebvre, 32, is a gutsy(대담한) academic from Waterloo who found and edited the volume, Montgomery’s final book.
Its dark tone and content made it a challenge for him to find a publisher, but the volume, a collection of short stories, poems and dialogue was eventually accepted by Penguin Canada.
The Blythes Are Quoted is the last book in a series that began with Anne of Green Gables, set in Prince Edward Island and first published in 1908. It takes the story of Anne and Gilbert Blythe, and their six children and housekeeper Susan Baker, 20 years beyond anything previously published “and some of its subject matter is darker than we might expect,” the publisher says.
The intriguing(호기심을 자극하는) book, which hasn’t before now been published in its entirety, is divided into two sections, one set before the First World War and one after.
It’s full of surprises.
Adultery(불륜), illegitimacy(사생), despair(자포자기), misogyny(여성혐오), murder, revenge, bitterness(비통함), hatred(증오), aging and death(늙고 죽음): these are the recurring themes Lefebvre found in the volume.
“These aren’t usually the first terms associated with L.M. Montgomery,” Penguin says in a press release. “But in The Blythes Are Quoted, completed shortly before her death, Montgomery brought these topics to the forefront in what she intended to be the ninth volume in her bestselling series featuring her beloved heroine Anne.”
Lefebvre, whose home base is Waterloo, is an expert on L.M. Montgomery.
He is a visiting scholar at the L.M. Montgomery Institute at the University of Prince Edward Island and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Alberta where he studied and wrote about the “cultural capital” of Montgomery. He received his master’s degree in English at University of Guelph and PhD at McMaster University in Hamilton. He was a visiting scholar at Wilfrid Laurier University from August 2007 until two months ago.
He’s currently a visiting fellow at the University of Worcester in England, but next June will co-chair a Montgomery conference in Prince Edward Island.
Lefebvre said he became curious about the contents of The Blythes Are Quoted when he learned from a colleague that a previously published version, The Road To Yesterday in 1974, didn’t contain the whole work submitted by Montgomery.
He discovered “buried treasure” when he pored over three typescripts stored in the University of Guelph’s archives. U of G is home to the largest collection of Montgomery memorabilia in Canada, including her handwritten journals, scrapbooks and original typescripts of some of her works.
Previously, the book had been published only in abridged(요약된, 생략된) form. For various reasons, earlier editors cut out substantial portions of the text and changed the book’s shape.
For one thing, it’s a rather “weird” book, Lefebvre said in a telephone interview from England. With its mixture of poetry, prose and dialogue, “it’s very experimental. . . . She’s still taking chances. It’s kind of avant-garde.”
It’s also possible that publishers in wartime 1942 didn’t want to publish a work that criticized war, as this one does, Montgomery scholar Elizabeth Rollins Epperly writes in the foreword to The Blythes are Quoted.
The anti-war sentiment is especially evident in a gripping poem and dialogue at the end of the book in which Anne and her son, Jem, are remembering Walter Blythe, son, brother and the family poet. The book’s second half tells the reader that Walter was killed at Courcelette during the First World War.
Lefebvre was so intrigued by the discovery of the book that he switched schools in 1999, leaving Concordia University in Montreal where he was leaning toward a study of Shakespeare for his master’s degree.
Instead, he came to University of Guelph, where his academic supervisor was Mary Rubio, author of the 2008 biography, Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings, and co-editor of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery.
Lefebvre re-read Montgomery’s earlier books – works that he’d first read as a teen, along with The Hardy Boys.
Even then, he’d felt he was missing something when he didn’t see the romance that appealed to the female audience. “I’ve never been sucked into the romance. I don’t find it believable.
“That’s why I went to grad school . . . to figure out L.M. Montgomery.”
At U of G, Lefebvre found Montgomery gave the “happy story,” but would undercut it.
“For me, it (The Blythes Are Quoted) really opened my eyes to what was there in the earlier books.”
According to Lefebvre, Montgomery’s romance plots, with which the author had always been ambivalent(상반된), were showing cracks long before The Blythes Are Quoted. There are happy endings, but there’s a “twist.”
“She’s been building up to this,” Lefebvre said. “From my perspective . . . she’s not able to keep the energy going that’s necessary for the romance plots.
“She’s trying very hard to maintain the familiar and it’s not working anymore. . . .The cracks are more visible.”
Montgomery was better at writing humour, he said.
Some of the stories in the final volume, like one called Retribution(앙갚음) in which a woman with a long-simmering(감정이 폭발할듯한) hatred sets out to avenge her sister, do not match what some readers would expect from the author of Anne of Green Gables, Lefebvre said.
That’s part of the reason it took him about five and a half years to find a publisher, he said.
Part of the challenge is that many people regard Montgomery as solely a children’s writer, a view that has been reinforced by the way her books have been marketed.
In fact, her work is for a general audience, including children, Lefebvre said, though “a child may not have the life knowledge to read between the lines.”
The Blythes Are Quoted, he said, will appeal more to adults who read Montgomery as a child than it will to today’s children.
He said he hopes the book will make readers look back at Montgomery’s earlier books in the series with a new perspective.
“I hope this book will show there’s more to Montgomery than we think. This book doesn’t match our perception of Montgomery. Most of her work doesn’t match that perception. Our perception is too narrow.
“I hope people will reconsider the way they put Montgomery in this little box and then re-read her.”
While writing The Blythes are Quoted, Montgomery stayed within the patterns to which she and her readers were accustomed(여느때와 다름없는) — themes such as orphans yearning for healthy homes — but the outcomes no longer fit, Lefebvre writes in his afterword to the volume.
There are stories focused on characters whose actions are driven by decades of bitterness, only to have the tables turned on them. There are elaborate deathbed scenes and there are plots that explore the ways in which the death of an adult can manipulate the lives of younger people, Lefebvre writes.
There are romantic prospects and responsible guardians, he notes, but there are also characters who are brutish, controlling, selfish and abusive.
It has been evident for many years now that Montgomery was not a happy person. Her own journals revealed her misery.
Her marriage was a “disaster” and she suffered from bouts of depression and despair throughout her adult life, Lefebvre said.
“Her journals helped more people go back to the books and see there is more.” Readers of her fiction could see “shades of the cracks.”
In September 2008, a granddaughter of Montgomery made public her belief that the author’s death on April 24, 1942 was the result of a drug overdose that may have been deliberate.
Montgomery’s newspaper obituary “offers a tantalizing hint about the new book’s relationship to the end of her life,” Lefebvre said.
It says that Montgomery had compiled a collection of magazine stories written years ago and that they had been placed in the hands of a publisher on the day she died, Lefebvre said.
That supports the theory that her death was suicide, Lefebvre said, adding that anyone who’d read Montgomery’s journals was not likely shocked by the notion that the author killed herself. However, “we’ll never know for sure,” he added.
Lefebvre said he is curious to know how readers will react to The Blythes Are Quoted. He said he encourages his own students to “dig deeper” when it comes to Montgomery’s books. Even so, he said, he has been accused “of ruining people’s childhoods” by making them re-read her books.
“Reading something critically is not about ruining it.” It’s about appreciating it in more detail and understanding what the book is doing, he said.
“My hope is that whatever their reaction, they’ll re-read Montgomery. She is, I find, the most compelling case study in Canadian literature.”
baggerholm@therecord.com
태그 : 앤의중년이야기, BlythesAreQuoted
덧글
나오게 할 겁니다. 2018년을 기대해 주세요. ㅋㅋㅋ 너무 먼듯... ^_^;;