作者：郁金         时间：2008-09-020

        这本书的主人公，克里斯托佛•布恩，是一个十五岁的少年。一天，他发现邻居家的狗，被人用叉子叉死了，决定象福尔摩斯那样，把杀手查出来，同时记录调查过程，完成一本侦探小说。克里斯托佛患有阿斯泊尔格症(Asperger's syndrome)，具有超凡的数理逻辑能力，但是对人际情感有理解障碍，因此他观察世界的视角非常独特。跟随着他的视线，我们和他一起，探索我们的世界，不得不追问一个最为基本的问题：什么是爱？

        这是一个感人至深的故事，一出版，就受到批评界的交口称赞。马克•哈顿，致力于为少年儿童写作，先后有十五本书得到出版，并多次获奖。《与午夜的狗有关的奇异事件》，是他2003年的作品，荣获维特布莱德年度最佳图书奖，《卫报》少年儿童小说奖，和南岸节目图书奖。下面是一些书评的摘要，小说的前六章，和小说全文的链接。

Mark Haddon：The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

      Winner of
      the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award
      the Guardian children's Fiction Prize
      the South Bank Show Book Award

      'Outstanding...a stunningly good read, '   Independant

      'By some distance the oddest and most original narrator to
      appear in years...dazzling.'   Independant

      'Wondrous... Brilliantly inventive, full of dazzling set pieces... unbearablly sad, yet also skilfully dodges any encounters with sentimentality... Not simply the most original novel I've read in years, it is also one of the best, '  The Times

'A delightgul and brilliant book. Mark Haddon shows great insight into the autistic mind... I found it all very moving very plausible and very funny, ' Oliver Sacks

'It's subtle, it's beautifully written, it's a story so riveting that I couldn't wait to turn each page, ' Anne Tyler

'Brilliantly empatheitic... Believe the hype: a briliant, heart warming book, ' Scotsman

'I have never read anything quite like Mark Haddon's funny and agonisingly honest book, or encountered a narrator more vivid and memorble.  I advise you to buy two copies; you won't want to lend yours out, ' Arthur Golden

'A beautifully written book... Haddon is to be congratulated for imagining a new king of hero, for the humbling instruction this warm and often funny novel offers, and for showing that the best lives are lived where difference is cherished. '  Daily Telegraph

'Whether you like dogs, prime numbers, Swindon, or indeed none of the above, this is the book for you, ' Observer

'This angle on life seen through the eyes of a boy with Asperger's syndrome excited more than admiration in me. I envied the author, wishing I had written it, ' Ruth Randel

'Mark Haddon's portrayal of an emotionally dissociated mind is a superb achievement... Wise and bleakly funny... ' Ian McEwan

'A remarkable book... An impressive achievement and a rewarding read. ' Time Out

'Exceptional by any standards... ' Sunday Telepgraph

'Superbly realised... A funny as well as a sad book... Brilliant, ' Guardian

小说的前六章

2

It was 7 minutes after midnight.  The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears' house.  Its eyes were closed.  It looked as if it was running on its sided, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream.  But the dog was not running or asleep.  The dog was dead.  There was a darden fork sticking out of the dog.  The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog and into the ground because the fork had not fallen over.  I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a gerden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer, for example, or a road accident.  But I could not be certain about this.
        I went through Mrs. Shears' gate, closing it behind me.  I walked onto her lawn and knelt beside the dog.  I put my hand on the muzzle of the dog.  It was still warm.
        The dog was called Wellington.  It beloned to Mrs. Shears, who was our friend.  She lived on the opposite of the road, two houses to the left.
        Wellington was a poodle.  Not one of the small poodles that have hairstyles but a big poodle.  It had curly black fur, but when you got close you could see that the skin underneath the fur was a very pale yellow, like chichen.
        I stroked Wellington and wondered who had killed him, and why.

3

My name is Christopher John Francis Boone.  I know all the countries of the world and their capital cities and every prime number up to 7,057.
        Eight yaers ago when I first met Siobhan, she showed me this picture   and I knew that it meant 'sad', which is what I felt when I found the dead dog.
        Then she showed me this picture  and I knew that it meant 'happy', like when I'm reading about the Apollo space missions, or when I am still awake at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. in the morning and I can walk up and down the street and pretend that I am the only person in the whole world.
       Then she drew some other pictures  but I was unable to say what these meant.
        I got Siobhan to draw lots of these faces and then write down next to them exactly what they meant.  I kept the piece of paper in my pocket and took it out when I didn't understand what someone was saying.  But it was very difficult to decide which of the diagrams was most like the face they were making because people's faces move very quickly.
        When I told Siobhan that I was doing this, she got out a pencil and another piece of paper and said it probably made people feel very  and then she laughed.  So I tore the original piece of paper up and threw it away.  And Siobhan apologized.  And now if I don't know what someone is saying, I ask them what they mean or I walk away.

5

I pulled the fork out of the dog and lifted him into my arms and hugged him.  He was leaking blood from the fork holes.
        I like dogs.  You always know what a dog is thinking.  It has four moods.  Happy, sad, cross, and concentrating.  Also, dogs are faithful and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk.
        I had been hugging the dog for 4 minutes when I heard screaming.  I looked up and saw Mrs. Shears running towards me from the patio.  She was wearing pajamas and a housecoat.  Her toenails were painted bright pink and she had no shoes on.
        She was shouting, 'What in fuck's name have you done to my dog?'
        I do not like people shouting at me.  It make me scared that they are going to hit me or touch me and I do not know what is going to happen.
        'Let go of the dog,' she shouted.  'Let go of the fucking dog for Christ's sake.'
        I put the dog down on the lawn and moved back 2 metres.
        She bent down.  I thought she was going to pick the dog up herself, but she didn't.  Perhaps she noticed how much blood there was and didn't want to get dirty.  Instead she started screaming again.
        I put my hands over my ears and closed my eyes and rolled forward till I was hunched up with my forehead pressed onto the grass.  The grass was wet and cold.  It was nice.

7

This is a murder mystery novel.
        Siobhan said that I should write something I would want to read myself.  Mostly I read books about science and maths.  I do not like proper novels.  In proper novels people say things like, 'I am veined with iron, with silver and with streaks of common mud.  I cannot contract into the firm fist which those clench who do not depend on stimulus.'  What does this mean?  I do not know.  Nor does Father.  Noe does Siobhan or Mr. Jeeavons.  I have asked them.
        Siobhan has long blond hair and wear glasses which are made of green plastic.  And Mr. Jeavons smells of soap and wears brown shoes that have approximately 60 tiny circular holes in each of them.
        But I do like murder mystery novels.  So I am writing a murder mystery novel.
        In a murder mystery novel someone has to work out who the murderer is and then catch them.  It is a puzzle.  If it is a good puzzle you can sometimes work out the answer before the end of the book.
        Siobhan said that the book should begin with something to grab people's attention.  That is why I started with the dog.  I also started with the dog because it happened to me and I find it hard to imagine things which did not happen to me.
       Siobhan read the first page and said that it was different.  She put this word into inverted commas by making the wiggly quatation sign with her first and second fingers.  She said that it was usually people who were killed in murder mystery novels.  I said that two dogs were killed in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the hound itself and James Mortimer's spaniel, but Siobhan said they weren't the victims of the murder, Sir Charles Baskerville was.  She said that this was because readers cared more about people than dogs, so if a person was killed in a book, readers would want to carry on reading.

        I said that I want to write about something real and I knew people who had died but I did not know any people who had been killed, except Mr. Paulson, Edward's father from school, and that was a gliding accident, not murder, and I didn't really know him.  I also said that I care about dogs because they were faithful and honest, and some dogs were cleverer and more interesting than some people.  Steve, for example, who comes to the school on Thursdays, needs help to eat his food and could not even fetch a stick.  Siobhan asked me not to say this to Steve's mother.

11

Then the police arrived.  I like the police.  They have uniforms and bumbers and you know what they are meant to be doing.  There was a policewoman and a policeman.  The policewoman had a little hole in her tights on her left ankle and a red scratch in the middle of the hole.  The policeman had a big orange leaf stuck to the bottom of his shoe which was poking out from one side.

        The policewoman put her arms round Mrs. Sears and led her back towards the house.
       I lifted my head off the grass.
       The policeman squatted down beside me and said, 'Would you like to tell me what's going on here, young man?'
       I sat up and said, 'The dog is dead.'
       'I'd got that far,' he said.
       I said, 'I think someone killed the dog.'
       'How old are you?' he asked.
       I replied, 'I am 15 years and 3 months and 2days.'
       'And what, precisely, were you doing in the garden?' he asked.
       'I was holding the dog, ' I replied.
       'And why were you holding the dog?' he asked.
       This was a difficult question. It was something I wanted to do. I like dogs. It made me sad to see that the dog was dead.
       I like policemen, too, and I wanted to answer the question properly, but the policeman did not give me enough time to work out the correct answer.
       'Why were you holding the dog?' he asked again.
       'I like dogs,' I said.
       'Did you kill the dog?' he asked.
       I said, 'I did not kill the dog.'
       'Is this your fork? he asked.
       I said, 'No.'
       'You seem very upset about this,' he said.

        He was asking too many questions and he was asking them too quickly.  They were stacking up in my head like loaves in the factory where Uncle Terry works.  The factory is a bakery and he operates the slicing machines.  And sometimes a slicer is not working fast enough but the bread keeps coming and there is a blockage.  I sometimes think of my mind as a machine, but not always as a bread-slicing machine.  It makes it easier to explain to other people what is going on inside.

        The policeman said, 'I am going to ask you once again...'

        I rolled back onto the lawn and pressed my forehead to the ground again and made the noise that Father calls groaning.  I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside world.  It is like when you are upset and you hold the radio against your ear and you tune it halfway between two stations so that all you get is white noise and then you turn the volume right up so that this is all you can hear and then you know you are safe because you cannot hear anything else.

        The policenman took hold of my arm and lifted me onto my feet.
       I didn't like him touching me like this.
       And this is when I hit him.

13

This will not be a funny book.  I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them.  Here is a joke, as an example.  It is one of Father's.

His face was drawn but the curtains were real.

        I know why this is meant to be funny.  I asked.  It is because drawn has three meanings, and they are (1) drawn with a pencil, (2) exhausted, and (3) pulled across a window, and meaning 1 refers to both the face and curtains, meaning 2 refers only to the face, and meaning 3 refers only to the curtains.

        If I try to say the joke myself, making the word mean the three different things at the same time, it is like hearing three different pieces of music at the same time, which is uncomfortable and confusing and not nice like white noise.  It is like three people trying to talk to you at the same time about different things.

        And that is why there are no jokes in this book. 

小说全文

本文其它篇章的链接：

培养语感      跟随大师      使用单解辞典     积累辞汇     从诗歌到流行曲