作者bucklee (alessio)
看板Peanuts
標題Re: 查理布朗與史努比作者 常被焦慮情緒糾纏
時間Sat Oct 13 12:56:33 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/12/books/12book.html?ref=books
Books of The Times
Charlie Brown Gets the Blues
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
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SCHULZ AND PEANUTS
By David Michaelis
Illustrated. 655 pages. HarperCollins. $34.95.
Charles M. Schulz drew “Peanuts” for nearly half a century, and the comic
strip became a touchstone for the baby boom generation: an epic meditation,
at once rueful and barbed, about the disappointments and existential
quandaries of life, a funny-sad-wistful portrait of a recognizable world in
which love goes unrequited, baseball games are always lost, and the Great
Pumpkin never shows up.
The ever hopeful, ever rejected Charlie Brown; his cynical, rage-filled
nemesis, Lucy Van Pelt; the philosophical and self-possessed Linus; the
fanatic pianist Schroeder; and Snoopy, that bumptious beagle with the
extraordinary fantasy life: these were characters who resonated with a
generation that came of age during that perplexing period of transition as
the country lurched from the somnolent ’50s into the psychedelic ’60s and ’
70s. And they were characters, as David Michaelis observes in his revealing
new biography, deeply rooted in their creator’s own life. It’s not just
that Charlie Brown embodied Schulz’s own melancholy temperament and
insecurities; it’s not just that Lucy represented his first wife’s bossy
impatience. It’s that all the characters represented aspects of the deeply
conflicted artist himself. As Mr. Michaelis writes, Schulz “gave his
wishy-washiness and determination to Charlie Brown,” his sarcasm to Lucy, “
his dignity and ‘weird little thoughts’” to Linus, his “perfectionism and
devotion to his art to Schroeder,” his sense of “being talented and
unappreciated to Snoopy.”
.......................................
By the late 1980s “Peanuts” had become a worldwide phenomenon, a
merchandising empire generating more than $1 billion a year and spreading “
tens of millions of plush Snoopys the world over from Argentina to Zimbabwe,
Congo to Togo, Norway to New Zealand, Cameroon to Canada.” One of the first
comic strips to deal with its characters’ inner lives, a strip built upon
its creator’s own anxieties and losses had become, Mr. Michaelis writes, the
“most widely syndicated cartoon on the planet, read by 5 percent of the world
’s literate population.”
In December 1999 Schulz addressed a letter to his hundreds of millions of
readers, announcing that he was going to retire; no one would succeed him in
drawing the strip. Two months later, on Feb. 13, 2000, “the Sunday paper
carrying his last cartoon arrived with the stunning news that Charles M.
Schulz had died in his sleep of complications of colon cancer,” Mr.
Michaelis writes. “Just hours later the final ‘Peanuts’ strip appeared in
newspapers around the world. To the very end, his life had entwined with his
art. As soon as he had ceased to be a cartoonist, he ceased to be.”
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