A Hatred for Tulips

商家名称	信用等级	购买信息	订购本书
		A Hatred for Tulips
		A Hatred for Tulips

基本信息·出版社：Thomas Dunne Books
·页码：192 页
·出版日期：2007年08月
·ISBN：0312349335
·International Standard Book Number：0312349335
·条形码：9780312349332
·EAN：9780312349332
·装帧：精装
·正文语种：英语

内容简介

 “People who don’t have secrets imagine them as dark and hidden. It’s just the opposite. Secrets are bright. They light you up. Like the bare lightbulb left on in a cell day and night, they give you no rest.”

            So thinks Joop, the narrator of this brief and bitter tale, whose secret is like no other. He has kept that secret for more than sixty years, but now his brother---whom he has not seen since the end of the war---has suddenly shown up at his door.

            Having grown up in North America with only the vaguest memories of World War II, Joop’s brother has returned to Amsterdam to find out what his childhood in Holland had been like. But what he discovers is much more than he bargained for---he is startled and dismayed to learn of his own role in the betrayal of Anne Frank.

            Transporting readers through the agonizing Nazi takeover of World War II, Joop recounts his role as a boy desiring to feed his starving family. He figures out a way to provide for them, but in doing so, he sets in motion a chain of events that will horrify the entire world.

            Just as he did in the internationally acclaimed The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin, here Richard Lourie takes us into not only a person’s mind, a time, and a place, but into the treacherous currents of history that sweep lives away. This gripping fictionalized account of the man who betrayed Anne Frank will not soon be forgotten.

作者简介 Richard Lourie is the critically acclaimed author of both fiction and nonfiction, including The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin and Sakharov: A Biography. He has translated forty books and has served as Mikhail Gorbachev’s translator for The New York Times. His articles and reviews have appeared in many influential publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the New Republic, and The Nation. He is currently a correspondent for The Moscow Times.
媒体推荐 Outstanding Praise for Richard Lourie 

“Lourie is located somewhere between James Bond and Heidegger . . . an excellent mixture of thrills and the exotic.”

- Saul Bellow on First Loyalty The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin “Dark and fascinating . . . Lourie's prose is spare and evocative, the plot compelling.”
- The Wall Street Journal
 
“Magnificently written! I couldn’t put it down.”
- Czeslaw Milosz
 
“Scintillating . . . ferociously absorbing.”
- Newsday
 
“A very, very fine writer . . . highly recommended.”
- Library Journal
 
“Enthralling . . . deeply thoughtful and hugely entertaining.”
- The Boston Globe
 
“Really fine fiction.”
- Time
专业书评 From Publishers Weekly

According to Lourie's fictional account, the informant who turned Anne Frank and her family in to the Nazis was a mere adolescent, motivated more by a desire to feed his dying father, who was subsisting on tulip bulbs, than by an obsessive hatred for Jews or by an unalloyed greed. When the brother he hasn't seen for 60 years visits from America, self-pitying Joop confesses his terrible boyhood secret, which he claims prevented him from marrying, cultivating friendships or leading a normal life, and relives the war years. Events include Joop's brief play at sabotage (discovered by a Dutch Nazi uncle and reported to Joop's father, who savagely beats him); Joop surviving diphtheria (he's blamed when a similarly infected sibling dies); and Joop's parents' unhappy marriage and casual anti-Semitism, which cast shadows over his ordinary activities. Lourie's rendering of Anne Frank's fictional betrayer as a callous, misguided youth is stark and deftly written. (Aug.)
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From Booklist

No one knows who betrayed Anne Frank and told the Nazis where to find her family in hiding. This fast, riveting novel is told from the viewpoint of Joop, an old man in Amsterdam today, haunted by his shameful secret of what he did as a teenager more than 60 years ago. Desperate for food for his dying father, Joop stumbled on the Frank family in the attic. He told the police and was paid. Now when he reads the Diary, he is furious that she became famous, and all he was left with was an ugly secret. Did she, the little snob, think he was one of the "slum kids" she described seeing in the street? Far better than the usual Anne Frank spin-offs, this story is driven by the details of daily life among desperate, ordinary people under the Nazi occupation. And Joop's plight?the fact that in any sense he can be a sympathetic character?raises the universal questions about humanity and guilt. As Joop wonders about Anne: "Would she have done the same thing to save her family?" Rochman, Hazel
文摘 Chapter One “I am your brother,” said the stranger at the door. At first I thought he was one of those evangelicals who go from house to house peddling salvation, but then I looked more closely at his face and saw my mother’s eyes looking back at me. “Come in,” I said. We didn’t fall into each other’s arms or even shake hands, one too much, the other too little. We hadn’t seen each other for sixty years. What did it mean that we were brothers? I held the door open for him and as I watched him walk past in profile, I thought: Willem must be sixty-five now. But he didn’t look it. A face that hadn’t seen much. A gray-haired boy. An American. “I don’t have much to offer you,” I said. “Beer. Some ham, cheese, bread.” “Sounds good.” “I live alone. I don’t keep much in the house.” “You never married?” he asked, sounding concerned. “No.” I didn’t ask him about himself. Didn’t have to. “I was lucky,” he said. “Found the right woman and found her early. Two kids. Five grandchildren. My oldest, Cindy—” “I’ll be back in a minute with the beer.” I didn’t want to hear their names, see their snapshots. Willem had gotten everything. When our mother left our father for a Canadian soldier at the end of the war, it was young Willem she took with her and so he’d gotten everything, her, a family, America. “Dutch beer is the best,” he said after a good swig. “You like a drink then?” “Since I first tried it.” “It’s in the blood then,&#
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