The Unabridged Book Club

The Elm Street Book Club had one rule everyone agreed on: summer meant something light. This year, however, Mireille had proposed the unabridged Russian novel, all fourteen hundred pages of it, and nobody had objected loudly enough, in the moment, to stop her.

榆树街读书会有一条大家都同意的规矩：夏天读轻松的。可今年，米雷耶提议读那部未删节的俄国小说，整整一千四百页，当时没有人反对得足够大声，没能拦住她。

Renata realized her mistake only in July, three hundred pages behind schedule, when Mireille sent the group a spreadsheet tracking everyone's declared reading pace against their actual one. Bea was eleven days behind. Faisal, worse still, had apparently stalled on page two hundred and never moved again.

雷娜塔直到七月才意识到自己犯了错，她落后进度三百页，这时米雷耶给大家发来一张表格，把每个人声明的阅读速度和实际速度做了对照。比娅落后了十一天。费萨尔更糟，似乎在第两百页就停住，再也没有往前走过。

"It's not a competition," Mireille wrote, in the exact tone of someone for whom it plainly was.

“这不是比赛，”米雷耶写道，那口气，分明是在说这件事对她来说显然就是比赛。

What nobody said aloud, though everyone was clearly thinking it, was that an abridged edition existed, sold openly in the very bookstore where they held their meetings. Renata bought a copy in secret on a Tuesday and read it in four days, feeling a guilt so specific that she assumed, incorrectly, she was the only member doing it.

没有人说出口，尽管每个人显然都在想：这本书有删节本，而且就在他们开会的那家书店里公开出售。雷娜塔周二偷偷买了一本，四天就读完了，心里的愧疚那么具体，以至于她错误地以为，会员里只有她一个人在这么做。

She was not. At the next meeting, Faisal was suspiciously fluent about a subplot involving a duel that the unabridged edition covered in exhaustive military detail across sixty pages. Bea, when pressed gently on a minor character's fate, answered with a confidence that suggested she, too, had taken the shortcut everyone was pretending not to know about.

不是的。下一次聚会上，费萨尔谈起一条关于决斗的支线，说得可疑地流利，而未删节本里，那一段用了整整六十页，以详尽的军事细节来写。比娅被人轻轻追问某个次要角色的结局时，回答得那么有把握，显得她也走了那条人人都假装不知道的捷径。

It was Mireille, unexpectedly, who broke first. Had anyone actually asked her directly whether she'd finished the unabridged edition, she would have had to admit something embarrassing. She'd switched to the abridged one around page nine hundred and simply never mentioned it.

出人意料的是，先崩溃的是米雷耶。要是有人直接问过她，有没有读完未删节本，她就得承认一件尴尬的事。她在大约第九百页的时候，换成了删节本，只是从来没有提过。

"I panicked," she admitted, when Renata finally asked. "I chose the book. I couldn't be the one who didn't finish it."

“我慌了，”雷娜塔终于问她时，她承认道，“书是我选的。我不能做那个没读完的人。”

What followed was not quite an argument and not quite a confession, but something close to both. Four adults, each convinced they alone had cheated, discovered that the entire club had quietly abandoned the very book it insisted on discussing in full.

接下来发生的，不太像争吵，也不太像坦白，却同时有两者的影子。四个成年人，每个人都以为只有自己作了弊，结果发现，整个读书会，都悄悄放弃了他们坚持要完整讨论的那本书。

Rarely had a group felt so relieved to admit collective failure. Bea laughed first, then Faisal, and finally Mireille, who put her head down on the café table and stayed there for a full minute, shaking with something between horror and delight.

很少有一群人，承认集体的失败时这样松了一口气。比娅先笑起来，然后是费萨尔，最后是米雷耶，她把头埋在咖啡馆的桌子上，整整一分钟没抬起来，浑身发抖，那是介于惊恐和欢喜之间的某种东西。

"So what," Renata asked, once the laughter settled, "do we actually talk about tonight?"

“那么，”笑声平息之后，雷娜塔问，“今晚我们到底聊什么？”

They ended up discussing, in surprising depth, a scene none of them had technically read in full: the duel, which each had pieced together from a different combination of chapters, summaries, and educated guessing. It was, everyone agreed afterward, probably the best conversation the club had ever had about a book none of them had properly finished.

最后，他们竟然相当深入地讨论了一个，严格说来没有一个人完整读过的场景：那场决斗，每个人都是靠不同的章节、梗概和有根据的猜测拼凑出来的。事后大家一致认为，这大概是读书会有史以来，关于一本没人真正读完的书，聊得最好的一次。

Next month, by unanimous and immediate vote, they were reading something under three hundred pages, and nobody pretended otherwise.

下个月，经一致且立刻的表决，他们读一本不到三百页的书，也没有人再假装别的。