Author Joy Heller is a well-known London columnist. The translation of the novel said that this is an overly clever novel, from beginning to end, it is so clever that it makes people breathless.
"Scandal Notes" should be praised as a work sketched by a cold and humorous ukiyo-e. Any character or event written by the author is cold and objective irony, which is the most ironic and sharp stroke of the columnist. However, the final theme of the novel is still in the extraordinary warm friendship between two women from different generations.
The themes of the stories are relatively indiscriminate, similar to the readings in the carriages of the subways in big cities. Perhaps the author only conceived of this exquisite novel, with its hilarious humour, narrow wit, and sharp point of view, from a general news story that resembles a newspaper headline. The narrative structure of the novel is developed through the writing style of old lady Barbara's diary. The events are very absurd, but the characters and details are detailed and true, and the credibility is high. In addition, the author has a particularly talented humorous satire. Lai Lai is both cold and edgy, sensual and delicate, witty and attractive, and the plot structure is very delicate.
The beautiful and simple female teacher Shiba is frank and honest, naive and susceptible. At the age of forty, he left home to teach pottery at a high school in north London. Sheba's appearance and personality, in the common people's middle school in North London (the center of a storm full of hormones in the narrator's writing), it is easy to have a strange love with a fifteen-year-old student (Connelly). Although Shiba's family background belongs to the upper class, her father is a famous economist. I interrupted my studies at the age of 20 and married my husband who was 15 years older. After marriage, she raised a pair of children, her daughter is seventeen years old, and she is very rebellious and rebellious. The twelve-year-old son is a mentally handicapped child. Therefore, it was not until the age of forty that Shiba was able to get rid of the boring family affairs and get the teaching position in front of her. As for Barbara, she is another old maid with a completely opposite personality to Sheba. The novel unfolds the story and provides insight into the plot through the form of Barbara's memoirs. In the writings of the senior teacher Barbara, although Shiba was born in a powerful family, she is honest and frank, and her mouth is clear. Barbara belongs to the lowly poor class, the opposite of Sheba. She is reserved, restrained, and cautious by nature. She is an extremely lonely, sensitive, yet highly literary woman. Sheba and Barbara gradually become boudoir close friends. Although the main line of the story is about the extremely immoral scandal between Sheba and the male student, the focus is more on Barbara's notebook notes that reveal the intimacy, mutual trust and love between two women of different generations and different personalities. relationship and friendship.
Shiba, the first time Barbara saw her, had fluffy hair and a transparent gauze skirt, and jumped off the bicycle with a soft posture. Immediately, I thought that this is a woman who likes to play tricks, and the skirt can easily catch the spokes of the bicycle.
Sheeba recounts to Barbara the details of her encounters with Connelly in her own way, and the notorious scandals are filtered through Sheeba into elegantly sensual details. The scandal between Sheba and Connelly has received extensive attention from the judiciary and the media. The public opinion and the official reaction to Sheba were very severe, alleging that she had committed a "despicable" crime. However, in Barbara's view, the public opinion community thought that she did not care whether the scandal had hurt Connelly's psychology or not, and she did not approve of any very emotional moral statements. The truth behind it is that Connelly must be quite resourceful when it comes to getting involved in this kind of entanglement. On the contrary, he has a formidable dominance over Shiba.
Shiba is controlled by a fifteen-year-old student, sunk in a strange love and unable to extricate herself. Barbara, who is extremely lonely and humble, is relatively strong in the real world. She handles the relationship between students and faculty members with ease, and has great business skills, but she has always loved Shiba very much. This love and infatuation seems to form another layer of subtle mastery. Sheba is a warm and wealthy family in the upper class. Sheba's warm friendship with Barbara makes Barbara extremely emotional, and Barbara gradually develops a strong and passionate attachment to him.
In adult circles, Shiba is beautiful and elegant. When it comes to the upper class of her kind, the friends around her are all scholar-type men. When they want to flirt, they always do it in a naughty way. If she resisted or hesitated a little, the other party would immediately turn his face into a mean and rude person, and told her that she had always suspected that she was the kind of "woman who would tease men". Only Connelly, young, dull, and daring, and Shiba's sympathy and sensibility caused by his lack of understanding of the commoner class, made this persevering and deliberate pursuit come to fruition. The stupid math teacher at school loves Sheba, but dates Barbara to intercede. The cat at home was sick, and Barbara was as sad as her lover had left her heart and was extremely lonely. Annoyed at his rudeness on a date with Bens, waiting for an opportunity to retaliate for the next time he accidentally revealed the secret relationship between Sheba and Connelly. In this way, the story of Sheba and Connelly took a sharp turn and faced the danger of being exposed. The author, however, says through Barbara's pen that chance is the key factor. Most of the good and evil are actually all about the environment. Sheba wouldn't have been betrayed like this if Barbara had finished her cigarettes early, if Barbara wasn't so mean-spirited by Bans. Evil exists, and it is only because the time has not come, that we can remain at peace.
After Sheba's scandal came to light, her husband Richard failed to stand on her side, and the ugly rhetoric of the press eventually pushed Richard to the opposite of Sheba. Richard, with his high-society vanity, could not tolerate his cheating wife. The ugly old lady Barbara, who lost her teaching position for Sheba, became the full spokesperson for her justice department's trial and the press response, and accompanied her to deal with her daughter Baoli's emotional disputes and her farce with her old widowed mother in London. Disputes, etc., including Barbara herself, who is narrated in the first person, the school's principal, colleagues, etc. The story is full of real scandals. Shiba's unrequited love is a scandal. But in the text of the novel, Connelly deliberately said something poetic to please Sheba. If this is sarcasm, are all courtships sarcasm? Connery's behavior is what everyone around him would do, setting up his booth deliberately to please customers.
At the end of the story, the fake hand Barbara destroys the "mother and son" statue that Sheba created to commemorate her relationship, and also destroys too much imagination that Sheba poured into the boy. From then on, the fragile and helpless Shiba was by Barbara's side, just like the old cat Bobo before Barbara. She already knew that she would not be too far from Barbara, and at the same time she became Barbara. Pull the most gentle control.
The story of the movie is much more condensed. The relationship between Sheba and Connelly is not revealed gradually after the friendship between Sheba and Barbara in the novel, but Barbara's accidental discovery. After discovering the relationship, Barbara instructed Sheba to get rid of Connelly, but she was furious because Sheba failed to accompany her in the helplessness of Barbara's pet cat's death, which led to the disclosure of the relationship to Bans. Barbara wasn't just an ugly old lady anymore, she was a gay who had a crush on a woman as young as Sheba. After Sheba finally found out about her hidden scandal in the notebook behind the scandal and left, Barbara sat in the park where Sheba used to sit together, and went fishing for someone who was similar to Sheba. woman in.
The film does not see the sophistication and irony of the original book, nor does it see the complexity of human nature and the complexity of events. Where is not a scandal under the pen of a columnist? The extremely lonely old lady can only take out Austen's "Persuasion" during the holidays and review it again. At the banquet at Shiba's house, you can be so happy and solemn to have some embarrassing female rhapsodies. She says her body is not bad, it's pretty good and very functional, the problem is that the outside - a firm, slightly wrinkled, pouched body - doesn't show what's on the inside. This is how the author vilifies his spokesperson into such a role. However, in his pen, is it not a scandal that is always and everywhere in life? Shiba and Barbara have completely different personalities. Sheba's narration is under Barbara's sharp and mean eyes. The relationship between people is largely based on their own needs. In the promotion and maintenance of this relationship, there must be a controller and a controlled person. In this model, we constantly attach, control, get rid of, and occasionally depend on each other for life.
Connelly controls Sheba, Sheba controls Barbara…. However, in any case, although Sheba is the prominent perpetrator of the scandal, she can see her kindness everywhere in the stories and movies, and we can also see Barbara's ardent dedication to friendship. If it were me, I really wish there was such an ugly old lady as a lifelong friend, what does it matter if an old cat like her Bobo? That old cat is really the only character in the novel who has a clean life.
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