《囚徒》是美国著名“黑色幽默”作家库尔特·冯尼格去年问世的新作,这是一部以揭示美国垄断资本主义制度某些垂死及腐朽现象为主题的讽刺小说。小说的主人公斯塔巴克出身于一个波兰移民家庭,从小被父母非正式地过继给克利夫兰的一个百万富翁。他年轻时曾以温和的共产主义者自我标榜,后来又向往作一个政府忠实的官员。然而,政治动荡,人生坎坷,却使他三次锒铛入狱。作者通过主人公三次身为囚徒的经历,把虚实交错的材料穿插起来,并借小说中人物之口,以喜怒无常、荒诞不经的形式,发自己的议论,讲自已的哲理,使读者在冷漠、无奈的逗笑和自我嘲讽中,意会到美国政治生活的腐败和金钱万能的罪恶。这部作品反映社会的深度,比起同时代的其他“黑色幽默”作品,似乎更有自已的特色。本文根据美国《书刊文摘》(1979年11月)译出,少数地方有所删节。 Prisoners, the new work by Kurt Von Nieger, the famous black humor writer in the United States, came out last year. This is a satirical novel with the theme of dying and corrupting the U.S. monopoly capitalism. Starbucks, the protagonist of the novel, was born in a Polish immigrant family and was unofficially adopted by his parents as a millionaire in Cleveland. He was a self-proclaimed gentle communist when he was young, then longing for a loyal government official. However, political turmoil and frustrations in life caused him to jail three times. Through the experience of the protagonist three times as a prisoner, the author interspersed the material with the actuality and the actuality and borrowed the characters in the novel to make his own arguments and his own philosophies in the moody and unimaginable manner, Helpless laughter and self-ridicule, the United States intended to corrupt the political life and the omnipotence of money. This work reflects the depth of society and seems to have its own characteristics more than other “black humor” works of its generation. This article was translated in the United States by the “Digest of Books and Literature” (November 1979) and has been abridged in a few places.