Samantha Harvey, "Orbital"

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Samantha Harvey, "Orbital" (2023)

 

올해 Booker Prize 수상작이란 걸 읽고서 우선 소재가 흥미를 당겨서 얼른 책을 사 왔었다. 같이 사온 Charles King의 (비소설) "Every Valley"를 먼저 다 읽고 나서 본문 207쪽의 이 얇은 책을 기대 속에 열었다. Orbit minus 1, Orbit 1 ~ Orbit 16의 17개 장으로 된 이 책을 처음에는 차례대로, 나중에는 아무렇게나 이 궤도 저 궤도 식으로 읽어보다가 이젠 다 읽기를 단념한다. 뉴욕 타임즈 서평은 "nearly free of plot"인 이 책이 "ravishingly beautiful"이라고 하는데 내게는, 내용도 대체로 좀 시시하고, 밋밋하게 읽혀서다. 책은 도서관에 기증할 거다.

 

 

본문에서:

 

[I]n this new day they'll circle the earth sixteen times. They'll see sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets, sixteen days and sixteen nights. (p. 4)

 

Or, is the subject art itself (which is a set of illusions and tricks and artifices within life), or life itself (which is a set of illusions and tricks and artifices within a consciousness that is trying to understand life through perceptions and dreams and art)? (p.9)

 

Sometimes they look at the earth and could be tempted to roll back all they know to be true, and to believe instead that it sits, this planet, at the center of everything. It seems so spectacular, so dignified and regal. (p. 40)

 

Could they know to work backwards from the abstract sounds and translate them once more into brainwaves, and could they know from these brainwaves the kinds of thoughts the woman was having [forty thousand years ago]? Could thay see into a human mind? Could they know she was a young woman in love? Could they tell from this dip and rise in the EEG's pattern that she was thinking simultaneously of earth and lover as if the two were continuous? (p. 132)

 

 

Samantha Harvey "Orbital"에서