Blackouts

　　2023美國國家圖書獎小說首獎
 
　　一位年輕人從昏迷中醒來，發現自己的廚房鬧水災，他決定開車駛進荒野裡，打算借宿在某處被稱為『宮殿』的地方，這是他一位朋友的家。這個朋友他認識並不久，餘生卻受其影響極深的人－Juan。
 
　　Juan幽默健談，手上有一份『傳家之寶』，作為借宿的交換條件，年輕人必須代管那份『傳家之寶』，將其繼續傳承下去。那是一份40年代發表的論文報告，名稱為《Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns》，官方發表者為心理學家George W. Henry，論文中內容將同性戀定義為一種心理疾病。然而原研究者實際上是Jan Gay，一位女酷兒，同時是人類學學者，然而她不僅研究被冒名，連內容都被扭曲。透過Juan手上擁有的影本，依稀可見被噤聲的那些酷兒之話語的力量和寓意，一大片刻意被塗黑的文字背後，更凸顯出了原研究者真正想表達的如詩歌般意念。
 
　　在Juan生命即將走到盡頭的時刻，他和主角一起回憶生命中的重要人物和情史，透過故事的轉述抵抗歲月的洪流。作者Justin Torres利用小說檢視歷史與敘事的創造力，使人不得不正視我們所繼承的過往及塑造的世界—一個充滿虛幻黑影、真相如電光石火的世界。《Blackout》發掘這些隱藏的故事，使它們重見天日。(文／博客來外文館)

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction
Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction

A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Washington Post, Time, BookPage, The New York Public Library, Powell’s

A Must-Read: Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, Boston Herald, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, The Bay Area Reporter, Datebook, Electric Literature, The Stacks, Them, Publishers Weekly

＂Sweeping, ingenious . . . A kiss to build a dream on.＂ --Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories--personal and collective.

Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay. Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a book--Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns--and its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text, which, in Juan’s tattered volumes, has been redacted with black marker on nearly every page. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion; they resurrect loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. In telling their own stories and the story of the book, they resist the ravages of memory and time. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?

A book about storytelling--its legacies, dangers, delights, and potential for change--and a bold exploration of form, art, and love, Justin Torres’s Blackouts uses fiction to see through the inventions of history and narrative. A marvel of creative imagination, it draws on testimony, photographs, illustrations, and a range of influences as it insists that we look long and steadily at what we have inherited and what we have made--a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth. A reclamation of ransacked history, a celebration of defiance, and a transformative encounter, Blackouts mines the stories that have been kept from us and brings them into the light.

Justin Torres is the author of We the Animals, which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, was translated into fifteen languages, and was adapted into a feature film. He was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35, a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, Tin House, and The Washington Post. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UCLA.