我常奇怪索尔·贝娄怎么会获得诺贝尔文学奖。他所写的小说所用的材料都是真人实事,小说中的角色往往是他所熟悉的朋友化身。一本虚构创作应依靠作者丰富的想象力。把真人实事化为小说出现,角色虽已改名换姓,细心的读者还是认得出来,文学评论家把这类小说视为犹如新闻的写实,充其量不过等于是回忆录或传记,不是真正艺术。贝娄新作名《拉维尔斯汀》(RANELSTEIN),刚由维京书局出版,正如评论家所料,这部小说的故事是根据他的 I often wonder how Sol Bellow won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The materials he wrote in his novels are all real and practical. The characters in his novels are often the embodiment of his familiar friend. A fictional creation should rely on the author’s rich imagination. The fact that the real person turns into a novel appears. Although the characters have changed their names and meticulous readers still recognize them, literary critics regard such novels as if they were news stories. At best, they are not mere memoirs or biographies. Bellow’s new work RANELSTEIN, just published by the Viking Publishing House, is, as the critics expected, the story of the novel based on his