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In “Normal People” especially, Ms Rooney (who is still only 30) combined simplicity with sparkle.
尤其是在《正常人》中，年仅30岁的鲁尼将简洁与智慧闪光点结合在一起。
But her new book pushes her devotion to ordinariness to its logical extreme.
但她的新书将她对平常的执着推向了逻辑的极致。
She favours bland adjectives, such as “little”, “clear” and “thin”.
她喜欢平淡的形容词，比如“小的”、“清澈的”和“瘦的”。
When Alice and Felix visit Rome, which may well contain the most impressive collection of objets d’art in the world, the reader is told peremptorily that “Felix spent the morning wandering around the city looking at things”.
当爱丽丝和菲利克斯参观罗马时，罗马可以说是收藏着世界上最令人印象深刻的艺术品，而读者被断然告知“菲利克斯整个上午都在城市里闲逛，随便看看”。
Intellectually as well as stylistically, the tone is flat.
无论是在内容上还是在文体上，基调都是平淡的。
Much of the book is given over to long, discursive email exchanges between Alice and Eileen, in which they observe that market capitalism is at odds with traditional conservatism, that plastic tat is ugly, and that the fall of the Soviet Union was momentous.
这本书的大部分篇幅都在写爱丽丝与艾琳之间冗长而杂乱无章的电子邮件往来，在这些邮件中她们聊到，市场资本主义与传统保守主义的格格不入，塑料纹身的丑陋，以及苏联解体的重大意义。
Ms Rooney, an avowed Marxist, has implied in interviews that these views reflect her own.
鲁尼是一名公开的马克思主义者，她在采访中暗示，这些观点反映了她自己的观点。
The problem is not that the ideas are right or wrong, but that they are predictable.
问题不在于这些想法是对是错，而在于它们是很老套乏味的。
The exchanges lack dialectical fizz as Alice and Eileen generally agree with one another.
这些交流缺乏辩证的火花，因为爱丽丝和艾琳通常都同意对方的观点。
That may be because both are projections of paths Ms Rooney herself has followed, or might have: Alice, a bestselling novelist who is struggling with the ambush of early, unexpected fame; Eileen, the thwarted writer too timorous to put pen to paper.
可能是因为这两个人物都是鲁尼自己所走过的路线的投映，或可能走过的：畅销小说家爱丽丝正在与早期意外成名带来的麻烦作斗争；受挫的作家艾琳过于胆怯，以至于无法动笔。
The novel’s most interesting feature is its handling of the church.
这部小说最有趣的地方是它对宗教的处理。
Typically, fiction uses the clash between religious belief and the secular world to torment its characters.
通常，小说利用宗教信仰和世俗世界之间的冲突来折磨书中人物。
Here Ms Rooney presents religion as a possible solution.
在这本书里，鲁尼将宗教作为一种可能的解决方案。
Simon sees no conflict between his Catholicism and his vigorous and varied sex life.
西蒙认为他的天主教信仰和他充满活力又多姿多彩的性生活之间没有冲突。
Alice and Eileen, non-believers both, are drawn to the consolations of Christianity.
爱丽丝和艾琳都不是信徒，却被基督教的安慰所吸引。
Remembering the first occasion she slept with Simon, Eileen thinks that “it would have been a nice life for me if he had done the Christian thing and asked me to marry him.”
回想起她第一次和西蒙上床的情景，艾琳认为“如果他做了一件基督徒会做的事，向我求婚，那我就会过上美好的生活。”
Alice admires the “consistency” of Catholic doctrine, in which “beauty, truth and goodness” inhere in God.
爱丽丝欣赏天主教教义的“一致性”，即上帝与生俱来的“真、善、美”。
More than in her previous books, in “Beautiful World, Where Are You” Ms Rooney’s political preoccupations have interfered with her craft.
相比之前的几部作品，在《美丽世界，你在哪里》这本书中，鲁尼对政治的关注对她的创作产生了更大的干扰。
But a religious instinct seems also to loom behind her restrained prose, her aversion to vividness, her tendency to blur feelings and perceptions with qualifiers (“vaguely” is one of her favourite words), and a marked new reluctance to enter her characters’ minds.
但在她克制的文字背后，似乎隐约浮现着一种宗教本能，她厌恶生动，她倾向于用限定词来模糊情感和认知（“模糊”是她最喜欢的词之一），还有一种明显的不愿进入她笔下人物思想的新态度。
The mix of asceticism and mysticism suggests an author who thinks the real action is happening in another realm.
苦行主义和神秘主义的混合表明，作者认为真正的行动发生在另一个领域。
Whether her devoted readers are happy to live with the consequences may be a matter of faith.
她的忠实读者们是否愿意承受这样的后果可能是一个信仰问题。
译文由可可原创，仅供学习交流使用，未经许可请勿转载。
