"Mars Club" writes a story about the dark side behind the glamour, full of electric energy and a rough beauty.
The book has been recognized as the top of Time Magazine's Novel of the Year list, the New York Times Book of the Year, and the Booker Award Shortlist.
The Mars Club
By Rachel Kushner
Translated by Wang Simin
Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
Wonderful selection
"You have a lot of self-control, and that's what I'm going to say about you." Gordon said this when he was a kid when his father picked him up at the Martinez Public Library.
The library was larger than the smaller library of the town near the Strait of Khagidz, where he had witnessed his growth. In the mind of his father, a metal assembler, a man who could sit down and stare at a pile of symbols on a piece of paper for a whole day would certainly be able to restrain any impulse he had.
But for Gordon, reading was his impulse. His world became more expansive as a result.
When he was in high school, he fell in love with Dostoevsky, whose literary style was in perfect harmony with his gloomy doubts about the world. Dostoevsky didn't believe anything, and in his eyes this greasy and mediocre world was full of wandering human beings.
Moreover, Dostoevsky was a Christian, and those who fought and wandered in his novels had lost their way, yet God did not.
Dostoevsky's pattern is very grand, the universe is as vast as the universe, which can be described as an orderly universe, but this order is not as rigid and full of man-made traces as the Greek order. It was a kingdom torn apart, with chaotic judgments everywhere. Whenever he read this, Gordon knew he was stepping into the realm of truth.
Now that his father is gone, Gordon ends up in a job that his father would surely approve of — a union and welfare package. Gordon never intended to work in prison, which was the result of layers of compromise.
He tried to stay in graduate school, passed the oral exam twice, and was halfway through the journey, with a Master of Arts degree in English just around the corner. However, he plans to write a paper on Thoreau—Thoreau's depiction of the seasons of spiritual transformation, the new humanity, and the American concept of Adam's fate. Gordon loved the idea because it carried a reckless arrogance, after all, who wouldn't want to change their lives? Who doesn't want to be born again without restraint and innocence?
The whole writing process was devastating and he felt stressed. He and his mentor are at odds with each other–the more he progresses under his mentor's guidance, the less he can find his passion for his discipline. Gordon felt trapped in an impossible task.
He was in debt, about to lose his scholarship and needed a job. He found a part-time job at a local university in Auckland, barely enough to cover his living needs, but left him without time to write his thesis. Maybe it would be good for him not to do it as he wished.
But the part-time teaching position was intermittent, penniless and desperate, so he applied for a teaching position issued by the California Correctional Services. He attended the interview. The other party wanted to hire him as a full-time teacher, and the pressure caused by money disappeared.
His friend Alex wrote a paper on Melville and became an expert on The United States in the job market.
People gave Alex a welcome reception, interviews, and the academic community threw him an olive branch. Alex was the same age as Gordon and the rest of his classmates, but everyone called him a "genius" because Alex looked only eighteen years old, but he knew how to behave properly in front of powerful people, how to handle irony and meet people just right.
There were people in the department who sheltered and mentored him, and those people never had a fondness for Gordon. Gordon struggled to keep friends with Alex. He said to himself: I am not jealous at all.
◎Book Introduction:
In 2003, Romy Hall, a dancer who had been active at the Mars Club, was sentenced to two life sentences plus six years in prison and deported to Stanville Women's Prison to serve his sentence. Outside the prison is a world that has been cut off from her, and inside the prison is the second half of her life that she cannot escape: prisoners tell true and false life stories while scrambling for the necessities of survival. "The Mars Club" opens up a neglected corner of America under a glamorous and glossy shell: the neglected and the covered scars in the context of the "prison industrialization."
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