Today's review list, The Signature of All Things, comes from American writer Elizabeth Gilbert.
Life is nothing more than two things: having love and having love. "The Signature of All Things" is a seven-year work of Time magazine's top 100 influential people in the world and the author of "Food Prayer and Love", a delicate and majestic female botanist legend.
We welcome you to stay tuned to the Jury, and we will continue to bring you the freshest reading experience. Book Reviewer looks forward to providing everyone with quality reviews of reading under this new column, and also growing together with new excellent "book reviewers".
Bibliography of this issue
The Signature of Everything
By Elizabeth Gilbert
Translator: He Peihua
Edition: CITIC Publishing Group July 2022
About the author:
Elizabeth Gilbert. Author of "Food, Prayer and Love". One of Time magazine's "100 People Who Influence the World." He has worked as a reporter for well-known magazines such as GQ and The New York Times, and has twice won the National Magazine Award. In 2006, the autobiography "Food, Prayer, Love" was published, which topped the New York Times best-seller list for more than 200 weeks, and was later adapted into a popular movie of the same name; The novel "The Signature of All Things" published in 2013 was named Book of the Year by well-known media such as The New Yorker and the Washington Post; In 2019, she published the women's novel "City of Girls".
Assessor 001 Su Hanling
Moss love
A woman, a folk female botanist, a woman who dedicated her life to the study and exploration of the mysteries of the natural world. She has a rich spiritual world and colorful life experience, and is a representative of "free man" in the sense of Marx, a typical "this one".
The Signature of All Things is a new book by Elizabeth Gilbert, which is not just a woman's epic, but also a chronicle of the earth. More than 400,000 words are sprinkled on the magnificent social portraits of the nineteenth century: from the Royal Park in Richmond to the Hotus Botanical Garden in Amsterdam, from the gentlemen and hooligans on the royal sea ships, to the priests and children on the island of Tahiti, from unforgettable love to angry sexless marriage, it is this pseudo-biographical narrative that attracts readers to pursue it all the way.
The image of the heroine Alma is full, vivid and vivid, and the story line unfolds from her birth, through the legendary life of this botanist, slowly opening up the hidden world of women and the ultimate mystery of nature.
About Alma's love, Gilbert shows a harsh truth. She explores the important factors that generate love between men and women, not wealth or wisdom. First of all, Alma has an amazing fortune. Her family fortune is unheard of. Her father, the botanist Henry, made him extremely wealthy on the Cinchona plantation on Java, known as the "Prince of Peru" and owned lavish estates and private docks in Philadelphia. Her mother, Beatrix, was a descendant of a European family who knew five living languages and two extinct languages, and was as specialized in plants as any man. Alma herself, born in the palatial White Mu Manor, inherited all the property of her parents. She is intelligent, optimistic, energetic and has a strong spirit of exploration. At the age of 16, he began to publish papers in the monthly journal "Flora of America" and is a well-known botanist. She spent twenty-six years observing the evolution and retreat of mosses to arrive at the great discovery of the "theory of competitive transformation," and wrote a paper in 1854 that shared the same view as Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
This peerless brain, this rich and hostile property, still can't bring love to Alma, why? Yes, she is not pretty, even ugly. Freckled, tall, strong, large skeleton, thick joints, broad shoulders and hips, thick chest, looks like a man. Therefore, no man ever proposed to her.
As an expert in the field of moss, what does ordinary, monotonous, plain, primitive moss tell Alma?
Moss has no love, but it has infinite power. Moss has no roots, does not bear fruit, cannot transport water in the body, has no male and female organs, cannot pollinate, and humans cannot figure out how it reproduces. But moss is amazingly strong, and if given enough time, it can devour boulders, turning rocks to gravel and gravel to dust. Like all living things on Earth, moss is constantly adjusting itself to reduce its dependence on direct sunlight and develop the ability to repair itself after years of drought to adapt to climate change.
Alma discovered that the hidden mechanism behind the evolution of mosses is the struggle for survival. The greater the crisis, the faster the evolution. All the driving force for change is in despair and urgency. The earth does not have enough resources for everything to survive, only natural selection, survival of the fittest. At the time, Alma's major discovery was as shocking as Nietzsche's "God is dead." But she was reluctant to publish it because she couldn't explain a loophole in the theory: human self-sacrifice.
She can't explain the evolutionary advantage of sacrificing oneself to save people and self-sacrifice. If the rule of the game in nature is competition, why would some people sacrifice their lives for another person they don't even know? She's stuck here. A few years later, when she read Darwin's On the Origin of Species, she found that both Darwin had stumbled upon the same treasure chest, and she inferred the same conclusion from moss and he from finches. However, Darwin also failed to address the self-sacrifice of human beings, which was contrary to the laws of nature, and was not even mentioned in his later book The Origin of Man.
At Darwin's funeral, a third person appeared, Alfred Russell Wallace, the coffin bearer designated by Darwin. His Geographical Distribution of Animals was hailed as the most decisive zoogeographical text ever written, and he developed the theory of natural selection almost simultaneously, so Alma kept an eye on him and eventually met with him to talk about the evolutionary loopholes of human altruism and self-sacrifice.
Wallace believed that although the theory of evolution explained almost everything in nature, it could not explain the human mind, that thought had no practical utility, and that science, art, poetry, morality, dignity, and sacrifice should not be the product of natural selection. He believes that there is a supreme intelligent being in the universe that wants to awaken and communicate with humanity. That is, there are still unknown realms for human beings outside the material world.
Reading this, I am reminded of a similar statement that Gilbert mentioned in his TED Talk. All artists encounter the anxiety of entering a bottleneck period of creation, how to find a way out of this anxiety? She found that in ancient Greece and Rome, it was believed that creativity came from the patron saint, and that it was the gods who helped artists to create. The creative process is not all rational, she said, and poets, writers and musicians often encounter incredible inspirations, like aliens. In order to reduce the pressure of creation, artists do not need to torture themselves by giving creative inspiration to themselves, but see inspiration as a partnership between themselves and the patron saint. Those moments of creation that have been thought about for thousands of years and seen thousands of miles are just works that God has created through artists to be passed down to the world. She said that the writer is responsible for writing, and the rest is left to God. Indeed, in the process of reading her wonderful words and narratives, there is always a divine admiration.
"The Signature of All Things" gives the illusion that it is not a novel but a biography, as if Alma is a real experienced botanist, her love is fruitless, her marriage is sexless, and her life's research, although it is a major discovery in human history, has missed the opportunity to become famous because it has not been proposed. She is full of vigorous vitality like moss, and like moss, she has to adjust herself to this cruelly competitive world because she has no flowers and fruits, and finally, she grows, expands, and shrinks lonely like moss, offering her wonderful experience as a unique individual to this world.
After reading the novel, I have three feelings to sum up: one is to write about women, or whether female writers write more thoroughly; Second, the author can very skillfully integrate historical materials and imagination to shape characters, creating a masterpiece that perfectly integrates milk and coffee; Third, the writer always pays attention to the painful body of women and describes it objectively and calmly.
Reading Rating: 8 out of 10
Assessor 002 The wilderness crossed the wind
Life is so vast,
Love yourself and love all things
"Life is nothing more than two things, have love, have love" -
"Love" and "Love" are the summary of the life of the protagonist Alma, who is loved, pursues love, explores love.
The author of this book, Elizabeth Gilbert, is listed by Time magazine as one of the "100 people who have influenced the world" and is also regarded by countless American women as spiritual teachers and life benchmarks. This book will make you feel good to read and your heart will flow! After walking through Alma's life, her wisdom, bravery, self-search and exploration of plants, you will feel lush vitality.
Affection: confident, strong, all-encompassing
Alma's father is brave and rich, her mother is smart and decent, Alma explores plants in her father's 100-acre estate, classifies and reads books in the library, and her mother tells her that no smart girl who eats well and has a good physique dies of too much learning, and she grows up to be an independent-minded, thoughtful, and expressive girl in such a family environment!
Friendship: Understanding the sacrifices and sufferings of others
In the process of growing up, Alma met the outstanding appearance of the adopted daughter Prudence, she is not humble, calm and cautious, seemingly indifferent but loves everyone in the family, after marriage and her husband on the difficult road to abolish slavery, she can sacrifice herself for love and justice; The innocent and somewhat absurd Rita seems to be a funny wild child by nature, and she makes Alma feel relaxed and happy; Alma explores the mysteries of the body in the binding room, longs for the ecstasy of the body, and she feels that she is in love with the elegant Hawkes... The presence of each person seems to teach Alma something, and the mood of the moment makes her confused and embarrassed, she threw herself into her passion, "plants", and discovered "moss".
Love: Believe in love and tolerance
Ambrose's appearance makes Alma think that she has met true love, and they are so in tune that they relieve each other's loneliness. Their conversation seems to be a collision of idealism and realism, Ambrose is like the wind, freedom is pure but floating in the air without logic and no foothold, Alma is like holding a magnifying glass to observe life, trying to find all the details and truths of life, full of reason.
Alma and her beloved boy have almost perfect psychological communication and soul fit, but after marriage, Alma did not wait for the intercourse of spirit and flesh, but waited for Ambrose's "white marriage", she once again fell into doubt and confusion, if I was young and beautiful, would I not have to endure such humiliation?
There is no right or wrong in this relationship, we need to accept that we can never understand everything about each other and enter into marriage, they understand each other, but they misunderstand each other, and their desires are so reasonable and pure.
Alma is like the moss of the plant world, without a beautiful appearance, not at all inconspicuous, but with strong vitality, constantly enriching herself and expanding her own world. Alma knows so much about the growth laws of plants, showing ordering, but it is difficult to see through the subtle friction and changes between people, she seems to be born with plants, and botanists are her destiny. Alma is in awe of nature and loves all life, her world is big, she does not pursue fame and fortune too much, she just wants to know the truth of the world.
"The Signature of All Things" is not only a botanist's study of plants, but also a woman's study of love, growth, love, love, discovering herself, illuminating herself, with an inclusive heart, gaining a rich understanding of the world in differences, life is so broad and vast, observing yourself and observing the world.
Reading Rating: 9 out of 10
Consolidated opinions
Based on the opinions of the judges, "The Signature of All Things" received an 8.5 out of 10 rating. The title "The Signature of All Things" derives from a mystical theory that God has carved the imprint of information about its use in the shape and morphology of every plant. The author uses this metaphor not only to tell the legendary story of a botanist, but also to a female novel about women rediscovering love, the world and themselves. As one judge said, life is so wide and vast, with an inclusive heart, illuminate yourself, love yourself and love all things.
What do you think of this book? What do you think of the jury's opinion? Welcome to leave your encouragement and criticism in the message area!
Authors/Reviewers
Editor/Li Yongbo Wang Qing
Proofreader/Liu Baoqing