Top 10 Parties in Fiction
小说中的十大聚会
From Bridget Jones’s curry calamity to Vanity Fair’s historic ball, these social dramas have inspired many novelists. You are invited to enjoy 10 favourites.
从布里奇特·琼斯在咖喱火鸡自助宴上遭遇的倒霉事件，到《名利场》闻名历史的舞会，这些社会剧给很多小说家带来了灵感。接下来为您介绍十部我最喜爱的剧。
By Elizabeth Day
文/伊丽莎白·戴
I’ve always loved a good party. When I was a child, I started planning for my birthday party in July. By August, I’d sent out hand-drawn invitations. By September, I was impatiently dreaming of cake, balloons and pass-the-parcel. I was born in November.
我一向喜欢宴会。小时候，7月我就开始策划生日聚会；到了8月，我已经寄出了手写邀请函；9月的时候，我迫不及待地幻想蛋糕、气球和礼物，而我的生日11月才到。
I continue to find them alluring. At a good party, there’s a sense that normal behavioural constraints are relaxed; a feeling that anything goes and that anything could happen. It’s why they make such perfect backdrops for fiction: you see the constant tension between who someone is and who someone wants to be. In life, as in novels, they are the perfect place to people-watch.
我依然喜欢各种宴会。在美好的宴会上，平时被约束的各种行为都会得到释放，感觉人们什么都能做得出来，任何事都有可能发生。这也是人们以其为场景创作诸多小说的原因：你能看到一种持续不断的张力，存在于某人的本性以及他向往的姿态之间。与小说一样，现实生活中的宴会是观察人的最佳场所。
That’s why I chose to set my new novel at a party. The story takes place over one evening at a glamorous 40th birthday in a stately home in the English countryside, where two best friends are brought together and reveal dark truths about each other.
这是我把宴会作为我的新小说发生背景的原因。故事发生在英国乡村的一所豪宅，当晚某人正在举办一场美妙的40岁生日宴会。两个好朋友参加了这场宴会，并互揭对方的短。
A lot of my real-life experiences went into in the scene-setting (I used to be a newspaper diarist—essentially getting paid to party every night). But I was also influenced by great festivities in fiction. Here are 10 of my favourites.
我的很多现实生活经验被用作了小说场景（我曾做过报社的日记作者，几乎每晚都会参加派对）。但我也曾受小说中的重大宴会影响，以下是我最喜爱的十大宴会。
1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
1. 列夫·托尔斯泰的《安娜·卡列尼娜》
Oblonsky’s ball in Anna Karenina is perhaps not as famous as the scene in War and Peace when Andrei and Natasha waltz for the first time, but its impact is as quietly devastating. Kitty (the unwitting rival for Count Vronsky’s affections) has earlier urged Anna to wear a flashy lilac dress. But Tolstoy puts his heroine in a modest black velvet gown. Kitty notes sadly that Anna’s charm “consisted precisely in the fact that she always stood out from what she wore”. Vronsky notices it too and swiftly falls in love. The rest is (doomed) history.
虽然不如《战争与和平》里安德烈和娜塔莎的首支华尔兹舞那般著名，但《安娜·卡列尼娜》中奥布隆斯基举办的舞会却也令人印象极为深刻。起初，基蒂（因想博得渥伦斯基的爱意而无意中成了安娜的情敌）建议安娜穿华丽的淡紫色连衣裙。但托尔斯泰却让女主角穿上了一件简朴的黑色天鹅绒礼服。基蒂黯然发现，安娜的魅力“恰恰在于她无论身着何种服装都能引人注目”。渥伦斯基也注意到了这点，并迅速爱上了安娜。接下来的（悲剧）故事，就是众所周知的了。
2. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
2. F. 斯科特·菲茨杰拉德的《了不起的盖茨比》
All parties in fiction have a neo-Platonic ideal of the perfect occasion to which they aspire. In my case, it was Jay Gatsby’s parties during the long, hot summer of 1922. Gatsby’s gatherings epitomise the spirit of prohibition-era decadence: endless champagne, chorus girls, flappers and bootleggers. And Fitzgerald writes them like a dream.
小说中描写的舞会都渴望成为新柏拉图式理想中的完美之所。在我看来，达成此想的就是杰伊·盖茨比在1922 年那个漫长炎热的夏天举办的那些舞会。他的舞会是美国禁酒令时期颓废之态的缩影：数不尽的香槟、歌女、时髦女郎和私酒贩子。菲茨杰拉德把它们描写得如梦如幻。
3. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
3. 简·奥斯丁的《傲慢与偏见》
Austen’s books are liberally scattered with wonderfully observed balls and dances. But for my money, the most memorable is the one at Meryton where Mr Darcy refuses to dance with glorious Lizzy Bennet, dismissing her as “tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me”. He sees the error of his ways before long.
各种绝妙的舞会和宴会在奥斯丁的书中随处可见。但依我看，最令人印象深刻的是在麦里屯的那场舞会，达西先生拒绝与美丽的莉齐·班纳特跳舞，贬损她“长得还行，但不足以吸引到他”。但不久，他就意识到自己错了。
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7. Vanity Fair by William Thackeray
7. 威廉·萨克雷的《名利场》
Not strictly a fictional party, but a fictional rendering of a real-life event, namely the Duchess of Richmond’s Ball, held in 1815 as a celebration for the Duke of Wellington’s officers in Brussels. It was here that Wellington received word that Napoleon’s forces were on the march. As a result, the story goes, many of the guests ended up fighting in evening dress. Amelia Sedley’s husband, George Osborne (no relation to the former chancellor), is one of those called to battle: “Away went George, his nerves quivering with excitement…”
这不完全是虚拟的宴会，而是对真实事件的再创造。1815年，为威灵顿公爵效力的军官们驻扎在布鲁塞尔，为振奋军心，里士满公爵夫人举办了这场宴会。正是在这里，威灵顿收到拿破仑军队长驱直入的消息。故事的结局是，很多嘉宾身穿晚礼服去参战了。爱米丽亚·赛特笠的丈夫乔治·奥斯本（与当今的前财务大臣没有关系）也是参战的嘉宾之一：“乔治走了，他激动地颤抖着……”
8. Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
8. 海伦·菲尔丁的《BJ单身日记》
Another Darcy[1], but this time dressed in a horrible golfing jumper (“what seemed from the back like a harmless navy sweater was actually a V-neck diamond-patterned in shades of yellow and blue”) and a guest at Geoffrey and Una Alconbury’s horrific New Year turkey curry buffet. Poor old Bridget is hungover and late because she got lost on the motorway and can’t think of anything to say when Mark Darcy asks her what books she’s read lately.
又是“达西”，但这次却穿着难看的高尔夫套头衫（“虽然从后面看像一件普通的海军风格毛衣，其实是件黄蓝相间的菱形格子V 领毛衣”），前来参加杰弗里和尤娜夫妇举办的可怕的新年咖喱火鸡自助餐会。可怜的大龄女郎布里奇特经历了宿醉还迟到，因为她在高速公路上迷路了。当达西问她最近在看什么书的时候，她都不知道如何应答。
[1] 男主人公名叫马克·达西，与奥斯丁笔下的“达西先生”重名。这篇小说被誉为现代版的《傲慢与偏见》。
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［译者单位：中国矿业大学（北京）］