商品簡介
The protagonist of Siri Hustvedt's astonishing second novel is a heroine of the old style: tough, beautiful, and brave. Standing at the threshold of adulthood, she finds herself tested by circumstance and poised before a new world of erotic adventure, profound but unexpected friendship, and inexplicable, frightening acts of madness. Lily's story is also the story of a small town - Webster, Minnesota - where people are brought together by a powerful sense of place - both geographical and spiritual. Here gossip, secrets, and storytelling are as essential to the bond among the people as are the borders that enclose the town.
At the heart of Webster, on Division Street, lies the shabby but hospitable Ideal Cafe, where Lily Dahl works as a waitress. This is where the mysterious Bodler twins come for breakfast, two old men who deal junk and never wash, men who are forever marked by the gruesome murder of their mother by their father. It is where Martin Peterson comes to look at Lily, and where his dogged obsession with her begins to take the form of a threat. It is where strange rumors about the body of an unknown girl who resembles Lily circulate and multiply. Nothing in Lily's life is far from the cafe - she lives above it, next door to the shrewd, garrulous, but strangely inscrutable Mabel Wasley, an old woman who coaches Lily for her role in the local production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Right across the street is the Stuart Hotel, where Edward Shapiro, a painter from New York, has taken up residence. Over the course of a summer Lily is changed by all these people, but she is also changed by the ghosts they carry with them and by her own ghosts - by the shaping memories of the dead that haunt the present.
Tightly plotted as well as sharply written, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl has the narrative urgency and drive of a mystery, but its complicated, moving characters defy conventional expectations. The real secret at the heart of the book is the one that lies between reality and appearances, between waking life and dreams, at the place where imagination draws on its transforming powers in the face of death.
