Chapter 2 Translator's Preface

American best-selling author Dan Brown has created a whirlwind of cultural suspense novels with his novels.Compared with the popular books all over the world, the three novels written by Dan Brown before and this time are not to be outdone. They can be said to be a blockbuster, and all of them entered the top ten of the 2004 annual US book sales list.In just two years, the Chinese translations of three of Brown's novels appeared in the Chinese book market one after another, triggering the "Dan Brown" craze in China and the creation of suspense novels in China. Now Dan Brown seems to have unlimited scenery, but the process of his success is full of setbacks.In 1996, Dan Brown's debut novel met readers.The novel caught up with the fashion of the electronic age, but it was a little ahead of it, and John Grisham and Stephen King were still in the limelight at the time, so it failed to attract readers and critics. focus on.However, Dan Brown's unique narrative style and plot mode have taken shape in his debut novel.In what follows, Dan Brown adopts the uncertain central meaning of the text in postmodernist novels, dissolving one by one the central concepts of humanity and divinity, good and evil, science and religion, which are in binary opposition in the traditional value system .From the perspective of reading depth, this is a qualitative leap in the novel.Dan Brown's third novel, published in 2001, spans multiple disciplines and elements of a best-selling novel, but unfortunately, it was born at an ill time.According to the point of view in "The Man Behind The Da Vinci Code--A Biography of Dan Brown" written by American biographer Lisa Roegke, this book deals with the corruption of government agencies and the president, which is in After the "September 11 incident" aroused the incomparably passionate patriotism of the Americans, it seemed inappropriate.After publication, Dan Brown began to conceive it, and it was launched in early 2003.This novel immediately attracted attention, and Luoyang paper was expensive for a while.People look back at Dan Brown's previous works and find that they are all very readable. Every book can't be put down after picking it up, and they can't get tired of reading it several times.Many people think that reading his books can not only make them happy, but also open their minds and increase their knowledge.

It was published in hardcover by Atria Books in November 2001 and in paperback by Pocket Books in December 2002. The "Washington Post" commented: "This is a masterpiece of tension and suspense, which is unbearable." The St. Petersburg Times commented: "It is a political thriller not to be missed. It shows you An astonishing scientific discovery, a brilliant deception, and a series of American political shady scenes." Like several other novels, it also begins with a mysterious murder case.In the inaccessible Arctic Circle, American geologist Charlie Brophy was thrown into a crevasse of a glacier by two burly men... The US presidential election is imminent, and Republican presidential candidate Senator Sedgwick Sykes Dayton slammed the incumbent president's aerospace policy and won the support of most American voters. The situation is extremely unfavorable for the incumbent president's re-election.At this critical moment, NASA reported an amazing scientific discovery to the President.The president sent Rachel Sexton, the daughter of the president's campaign opponent, to the North Pole to conduct field investigations with cool brother Michael Tolan and several outstanding scientists from different fields.Rachel and Michael accidentally uncover a shocking scientific hoax.At the same time, the killer is approaching them step by step.Rachel and Michael Tolan fought desperately against powerful killers and harsh environments in the Arctic Circle. The motivation for their survival was to find out the culprit who planned this series of conspiracies and the mutual love between the two...

The beginning of the novel takes readers to the glacier-covered and harsh Arctic Circle. "In this desolate and lonely place, it is possible for a person to die anyway." The first sentence of the opening exaggerates the atmosphere of the whole story, sets the tense tone, and grabs the readers.Readers have been wondering, anxious, expecting, and deciphering, but the author has calmly delayed the suspense of murder until Chapter 90.Readers don't realize it until the end of the story, which creates a sense of relief.Almost every chapter of this novel has suspense and mystery, and all the secrets are not revealed until the end.In the narrative mode, Brown unfolds the story through two clues and multiple scenes.On the one hand, in the icy and snowy North Pole, the heroine Rachel and her partner Tolan embark on a thrilling escape journey in order to escape the pursuit of the special forces; on the other hand, in Washington, the center of political turmoil, the US presidential election is in full swing. Go on, the politicians are plotting political conspiracies one after another.The Delta Force in the novel is also always a mystery.Who is in control of this Special Forces?Why do these people hunt down these scientists?Who will be the winner in this contest?These suspenses run through the whole novel and whet the reader's appetite.

The success of the novel also lies in the fact that it involves knowledge in multiple fields.Readers who have read Dan Brown's other works are all impressed by the author's extensive knowledge.No exception.The novel involves expertise in the fields of oceanography, glaciology, paleontology, astronomy, geology, astrophysics, meteorology, aerospace science, and military science. It also involves NASA, the National Reconnaissance Office, Delta Special Forces and other U.S. government secret agencies.Clearly, Brown had done a lot of careful research and investigation before composing it.

Of course, there is another reason for the success of Dan Brown's novels, that is, while abandoning binary opposition, his novels also focus on thinking about ethics and morality, and express this thinking through a blend of elegance and vulgarity.There is no ethical and aesthetic system based on the principles of good and bad, true and false, beauty and ugliness, justice and evil in his works. Many plots are often unfolded between righteous and non-evil characters. Instead, we can see even more the author's humanistic anxiety in the face of the real world.He paid full attention to this kind of human anxiety and even the ethics of science and technology, and his other novels also conveyed people's current concerns.It mainly discusses the relationship between science and religion that people have been hard to explain for thousands of years.At the same time, the author also raises a question that people are facing, that is where is science going.In the book, readers can also feel the author's deep concern for the science, politics and national security of the current society.Taking the U.S. presidential election as the background, it focuses on the contradictions between political ethics, national security, and secret high technology. Active reflection on many issues of daily and political life.

Dan Brown's novels have achieved great success all over the world. Naturally, there are many reasons for this, but the deep-seated reasons mainly lie in the subversive interpretation of traditional culture in his text, and his understanding of the relationship between religion and science. Reorganizing, conveying the image of people's inner anxiety and the aesthetic construction that integrates elegance into vulgarity, these elements meet the aesthetic demands of readers at different levels, arouse the emotional resonance deep in people's hearts, and arouse people's Re-understanding and re-examination of the established history, the long-inherited classic culture, and the religion and science that have been worshiped for many years.To a large extent, Dan Brown's works not only cater to people's desire to reconstruct culture, but also conform to the trend of confluence of refined and popular literature in the commercial society.We can say that Dan Brown's works make people look at the novel, which has been depressed for a long time, and make the novel consolidate its place in the frenzy of mixing, squeezing and even subverting various new literary and artistic styles and media means .Zhu Zhenwu

2005 Winter Solstice Night at Shanghai Apartment