Every single page, every single word was worth it.
Майже півроку, щоб почати; і тільки три вечори захоплення - і то це вчетверо довше, ніж було б з перекладом. Як завжди, найкращі книжки найшвидше закінчуються. Як завжди, Марк Твен був сто разів правий.
Надцять років тому читана; успішно забута - окрім загального настрою і основних сюжетних моментів. Не перечитана, - прочитана заново.
Той нечастий випадок, коли емоційна, змістова кульмінація настає істотно після сюжетної. Буквально на останніх сторінках. Так що мої спроби ділитись враженням, і так зазвичай невдалі, тим більше виглядали б поки що марними, безбарвними і, хм, зайвими з погляду зсередини.
Втім, можна вдатись до авторської передмови. Зовсім чуть-чуть.
"In fact, I realized in retrospect that this may indeed be the part of the reason why it was so important to me, there on the lawn in front of the Salt Palace, to write a story in which gifted children are trained to fight in adult wars. Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along - the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires. And in writing Ender's Game, I forced the audience to experience the lives of these children from that perspective - the perspective in which their feelings and decisions are just as real and important as any adult's."
"Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves. And Ender's Game, seen in that context, might even be a sort of revolutionary tract.
Because the book does ring true with the children who read it."
"Why else do we read fiction, anyway? Not to be impressed by somebody's dazzling language - or at least I hope that's not our reason. I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we are hungry for another kind of truth: The mystic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about ourself."
Може, це й старі істини. Принаймні чужою мовою вони такими не виглядають.
І маленький літературний реверанс.
"What matters is we built the ansible. The official name is Philotic Parallacs Instantaneous Communicator, but someone dredged the name ansible out of an old book somewhere and it caught on."
Ня.