영어로 읽는 고전 _ 로버트 히첸스의 런던 사람들_하나의 부조리
로버트 히첸스의 《런던 사람들: 하나의 부조리》는 20세기 초에 쓰인 소설이다. 이야기는 런던 상류사회에 환멸을 느낀 베룰람 부인을 중심으로 전개된다. 그녀는 권태와 자신의 삶이 지닌 부조리함에 시달리면서도, 사교적 의무들과 다양한 인물들 사이를 헤쳐 나간다. 그 중에는 이혼이라는 파란만장한 과거를 안고 사교계에서 새로운 인정을 갈망하는 친구 밴 애덤 부인도 있다. 사회적 환경의 제약에 맞서는 인물들의 갈등은 정체성과 사회적 역할에 대한 풍부한 탐구를 만들어 낸다. 이야기의 서두에서 독자들은 런던의 숨 막히는 오후 열기 속에 응접실로 들어서는 베룰람 부인을 만난다. 그녀는 상류사회의 일상에 깊이 지쳐 있다. 그녀와 하녀 매리너 사이에 오가는 재치 있는 대화는 그들의 사교적 의무와 쌓여가는 초대장들의 부조리함을 선명하게 드러내며, 이는 그들이 속한 세계의 피상성을 상징한다. 베룰람 부인이 사회적 기대로부터 벗어나고픈 열망을 토로하는 가운데, 최근 이혼한 밴 애덤 부인의 등장은 두 여성 모두에게 새로운 갈등과 가능성을 가져다준다. 그들은 저마다 매력적이면서도 억압적인 사회 안에서 자신의 자리를 다시금 가늠해 보게 된다. 이것이 런던의 심장부에서 펼쳐지는 사회적 부조리의 탐구를 위한 무대가 된다.
Classics Read in English _ The Londoners : an absurdity by Robert Hichens
London in summer is oppressive in ways that have nothing to do with the heat.
Mrs. Verulam knows this intimately. She enters her drawing room on one such sweltering afternoon and surveys the evidence of her own social existence — the tower of invitation cards, the obligations stacked like debts she never agreed to incur, the relentless machinery of a life she did not so much choose as inherit. Her maid Marriner moves through it all with the practiced efficiency of someone who has long since made her peace with the absurd, and the exchange between them crackles with the particular dark comedy of two women who understand each other perfectly and are far too well-bred to say so directly.
Robert Hichens is at his most wickedly observant here. The Londoners wears the label of absurdity openly and earns it on every page, skewering the rituals of high society with the affectionate contempt of someone who has attended one too many of its dinners and found the food, like the conversation, reliably disappointing.
Into this precisely calibrated world of gilded ennui arrives Mrs. Van Adam — recently divorced, trailing the particular notoriety that London society simultaneously deplores and devours. Her presence unsettles everything and illuminates nothing so much as the quiet desperation already simmering beneath Mrs. Verulam's impeccably maintained composure. Two women, two cages, and between them a city that offers the illusion of freedom while tightening its grip with every engraved invitation.
This is a novel about the elaborate performance of belonging — and the exhausting, darkly funny business of maintaining it when you have long since stopped believing in the show.
Among the contents
Mrs. Verulam came into her drawing-room slowly and rather wearily. It was a sultry afternoon in May—indeed, the papers were quite in a ferment about the exceptional heat-wave that was passing over London; and a premature old General, anxious apparently to be up to time, had just died of tropical apoplexy in Park Lane. Possibly it was the weather that had painted the pallor on Mrs. Verulam's exceedingly pretty face. Beneath her mist of yellow hair her dark-grey eyes looked out pathetically, with the sort of pathos that means nothing in particular—the grace of an indefinite sorrow. She was clad in a pale-pink tea-gown, elaborately embroidered in dull green and gold, and she was followed by her maid, the faithful Marriner, whose hands were full of bright-coloured cushions. The windows of the drawing-room, which faced Park Lane, and commanded a distant view of the Parade on Sunday mornings, stood open, and striped awnings defied the sunbeams above them. London hummed gently in the heat; and an Admiral in the next house but one might almost be heard ordering his valet, with many terrible expressions of the sea, to get out his ducks, and be quick about it.
