영어로 읽는 고전 _ 토마스 하디의 고향으로의 귀환
토마스 하디의 『고향으로의 귀환』은 1878년에 출판된 소설이다. 이 작품은 1년이라는 시간 동안 거친 에그던 황야를 배경으로, 열정과 운명에 의해 얽혀드는 여러 인물들의 삶을 따라간다. 클림 요브라이트가 파리에서 고향으로 돌아오자, 아름답지만 불안한 영혼의 소유자인 유스타시아 바이는 그를 황량한 황야에서 탈출할 수 있는 기회로 본다. 그들의 결혼은 좌절된 욕망과 가족 간의 소원함, 그리고 운명적인 오해들로 이어지는 일련의 사건들을 촉발시키며, 모든 인물들의 충성심과 꿈을 시험에 들게 한다.
Classics Read in English _ The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
The Return of the Native is Thomas Hardy's most atmospheric novel — and Egdon Heath, the vast, brooding, ungovernable landscape at its center, is one of the great settings in all of English fiction. Hardy opens the novel with a description of the heath that runs to several pages and reads less like scene-setting than like an introduction to a character — ancient, indifferent, and far more permanent than any human life played out across its surface. Everything that follows takes place in its shadow.
Into this landscape returns Clym Yeobright — idealistic, earnest, and carrying the particular blindness of a man who has convinced himself that he knows what he wants. He has left the glittering world of Paris to come home and do good, to educate the people of the heath he loves. What he has not accounted for is Eustacia Vye.
Eustacia is one of Hardy's most electrifying creations — beautiful, passionate, and consumed by a longing for a larger life than the heath will ever offer her. When Clym arrives trailing the glamour of Paris, she sees in him not a man but an exit. Their marriage, entered into for reasons that have almost nothing to do with each other's actual selves, becomes a collision of incompatible dreams — his turning inward toward the heath, hers straining outward away from it.
What follows is a novel of thwarted desires, devastating misunderstandings, and the particular cruelty of circumstances that seem designed by fate rather than chance. Hardy constructs his tragedy with architectural precision, each misunderstanding building on the last until the weight becomes unbearable. Set against the eternal, indifferent heath — which was old before any of them were born and will remain long after all of them are gone — The Return of the Native is a meditation on the impossibility of escape and the high cost of dreaming in a world that has already decided what you are allowed to want.
Among the contents
A Face on Which Time Makes but Little Impression
A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.
The heaven being spread with this pallid screen and the earth with the darkest vegetation, their meeting-line at the horizon was clearly marked. In such contrast the heath wore the appearance of an instalment of night which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour was come: darkness had to a great extent arrived hereon, while day stood distinct in the sky. Looking upwards, a furze-cutter would have been inclined to continue work; looking down, he would have decided to finish his faggot and go home. The distant rims of the world and of the firmament seemed to be a division in time no less than a division in matter. The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.
