ブリジット・ジョーンズの日記 [文庫]

   本書には、ブリジットの夢や希望だけでなく、5277本もタバコを吸い、「およそ3457単位の脂肪（どう考えてもぞっとする）」を摂取したこと、はたまたあきれるほど体重が増減したことまで、1年の生活が細かに記録されている。365日の間に体重はなんと33キロも増え、しかも32キロ減った！ それに年の始めにひそかに決意したこと。それは、自分にふさわしい男性を見つけることだったのに、セクシーな不良上司と関係をもってから、ブリジットは深刻な「こんなはずじゃなかった」という状況に陥っていく。

   ヘレン・フィールディングの2作目となるこのとびきり愉快な小説は、出版社に勤務する自意識過剰の30代女性が、休暇後、ストレスで悩んでいるところから始まる。彼女はなんとか内面の平和を確立し、落ち着きを取り戻そうと決心する。たとえば「朝目が覚めたら、すぐに起きる」つもりだし、母親のたくらみで行くハメになったつまらないパーティーを乗りきることさえできれば、よいスタートを切れたはずだったのだ。「気取った既婚者」が大勢集まって、ブリジットや仲間の「シングルトン」の心配をしているふりをするようなパーティー。彼女に言わせれば、「私たちは、やつらを取り囲んで、『結婚生活はどう？ まだセックスしてる？』などとわめき立てたりはしない」のである。

   このパーティーはほんの始まりだった。その年、実行能力不足にさいなまれ（これは仕事や遊びのときの話で、ベッドの中ではまあまあ）、他人の「情緒的あほう状態」にあらがって生きるうちに、ブリジットは恥ずかしいことをごまんと経験することになる。たとえば、ニットのアンサンブルを着る平凡な女だった母親が、突然テレビのトークショーの司会になり、あっけらかんと不倫をしているとか。一方、彼女自身は、1年の半分はシャルドネを飲みすぎて「悲惨なアル中」になった気分だ。

   本書は、もともとロンドンのインデペンデント紙に連載され、性別、年齢を問わず読者の心の琴線を震わせたコラム。ヘレン・フィールディングの率直で繊細な筆致は、絶望や自己不信や被害妄想を明るく軽妙に描き、自己啓発本（しらふのブリジットには、酔っ払っているときの半分も実用的と思えない本）から「コスモポリタン式の風水」に至るまで、あらゆるものを手きびしく風刺している。フィールディングは1990年代のナンシー・ミットフォード（1900年代前半に活躍した女流作家）であり、魅力あふれるヒロイン、ブリジットには誰もがエールを送らずにはいられない。そしてまた誰もが、ブリジットがまたヘマをすることを期待し、その体験を続編でまた報告してほしいと願っていることも事実である。 --このテキストは、 ペーパーバック 版に関連付けられています。

*A new edition of the brilliant bestseller for release alongside the star-studded movie* A dazzling urban satire of modern human relations? An ironic, tragic insight into the demise of the nuclear family? Or the confused ramblings of a pissed thirty-something? Bridget Jones is everyone's favourite Londoner. This is your chance to reacquaint yourself with the funniest, most heart-warming young lady ever to grace the pages of a Picador book. --このテキストは、 ペーパーバック 版に関連付けられています。

ベストセラー小説、待望の文庫化！
この1年間にブリジットの体重は、のべ33.1キロ減少し32.6キロ 増加、まして禁酒や禁煙なんてできるわけがない。それでも彼女の楽観主義は変わらない。落ち込むことがあっても、すぐに元気を取り戻し、明日になればまったく違った人生が開けて、カロリー計算とも、アルコールともつまらない男とも完全に無縁な日々が訪れる、と自分にいいきかせる。世界中の女性が読んでいるベストセラー。


--このテキストは、絶版本またはこのタイトルには設定されていない版型に関連付けられています。

この1年間にブリジットの体重は、のべ33.1キロ減少し32.6キロ増加―ダイエットすらできないのに、禁酒や禁煙なんてできるわけがない。それでも彼女の楽観主義は変わらない。落ち込むことがあっても、すぐに元気を取り戻し、明日になればまったく違った人生が開けて、カロリー計算とも、アルコールともつまらない男とも完全に無縁な日々が訪れる、と自分にいいきかせる。世界中の女性が読んでいるベストセラー小説。

この1年間にブリジットの体重は、33.1キロ減少し32.6キロ増加。ダイエットすらできないのに禁酒禁煙なんてできるわけがない。それでも楽観主義は変わらない。世界中が読んでいるベストセラー小説。98年刊の再刊。

Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, an unabashed riff on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, actually has more in common with Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. Where Bridget keeps us apprised of her flawed but persistent attempts at self-improvement in a year's worth of diary entries, the morally upright Clarissa wrestles with her love for the devious Lovelace in very private letters to friends and family. With both heroines, we feel like the favored confidante of someone more interesting than we are.

Tennyson referred to Clarissa as a "large still book," and indeed, there's a stillness about most novels structured around letters and journals, no matter how lively the drama they expose. This may be why the audiocassette version of Bridget Jones's Diary sometimes seems shrill instead of earnest, petty instead of poignantly honest. As actress Tracie Bennett (Shirley Valentine) lifts Bridget Jones from the sanctity of the printed page, we find the cast of characters scratching at each other with the noisy exaggeration of a French farce.

To her credit, Bennett infuses the dailiness of Bridget's life with admirable energy, shifting from Bridget's raspiness to Perpetua's cackle to Sharon's screech to Daniel's sneer with the ease of a stand-up comic. And here's one cassette that doesn't suffer from abridgment. What went flying by in written form--the shorthand minutia, the inventory of calories, the fluctuating cigarette consumption--would have collapsed under the tedium of a faithful reading. Although it's a shame that the abridgment favors boyfriend frustrations over the restorative nights out with the girls, it mercifully gives short shrift to Bridget's relentlessly irritating mother. Even with this reshaping, the everywoman resonance of Bridget's ordinary life comes through intact--all the way through to its happy ending. (Running time: three hours, two cassettes) --Ann Senechal
--このテキストは、絶版本またはこのタイトルには設定されていない版型に関連付けられています。

In the course of the year recorded in Bridget Jones's Diary, Bridget confides her hopes, her dreams, and her monstrously fluctuating poundage, not to mention her consumption of 5277 cigarettes and "Fat units 3457 (approx.) (hideous in every way)." In 365 days, she gains 74 pounds. On the other hand, she loses 72! There is also the unspoken New Year's resolution--the quest for the right man. Alas, here Bridget goes severely off course when she has an affair with her charming cad of a boss. But who would be without their e-mail flirtation focused on a short black skirt? The boss even contends that it is so short as to be nonexistent.

At the beginning of Helen Fielding's exceptionally funny second novel, the thirtyish publishing puffette is suffering from postholiday stress syndrome but determined to find Inner Peace and poise. Bridget will, for instance, "get up straight away when wake up in mornings." Now if only she can survive the party her mother has tricked her into--a suburban fest full of "Smug Marrieds" professing concern for her and her fellow "Singletons"--she'll have made a good start. As far as she's concerned, "We wouldn't rush up to them and roar, 'How's your marriage going? Still having sex?'"

This is only the first of many disgraces Bridget will suffer in her year of performance anxiety (at work and at play, though less often in bed) and living through other people's "emotional fuckwittage." Her twin-set-wearing suburban mother, for instance, suddenly becomes a chat-show hostess and unrepentant adulteress, while our heroine herself spends half the time overdosing on Chardonnay and feeling like "a tragic freak." Bridget Jones's Diary began as a column in the London Independent and struck a chord with readers of all sexes and sizes. In strokes simultaneously broad and subtle, Helen Fielding reveals the lighter side of despair, self-doubt, and obsession, and also satirizes everything from self-help books (they don't sound half as sensible to Bridget when she's sober) to feng shui, Cosmopolitan-style. She is the Nancy Mitford of the 1990s, and it's impossible not to root for her endearing heroine. On the other hand, one can only hope that Bridget will continue to screw up and tell us all about it for years and books to come. --Kerry Fried --このテキストは、 ペーパーバック 版に関連付けられています。

A huge success in England, this marvelously funny debut novel had its genesis in a column Fielding writes for a London newspaper. It's the purported diary, complete with daily entries of calories consumed, cigarettes smoked, "alcohol units" imbibed and other unsuitable obsessions, of a year in the life of a bright London 30-something who deplores male "fuckwittage" while pining for a steady boyfriend. As dogged at making resolutions for self-improvement as she is irrepressibly irreverent, Bridget also would like to have someone to show the folks back home and their friends, who make "tick-tock" noises at her to evoke the motion of the biological clock. Bridget is knowing, obviously attractive but never too convinced of the fact, and prone ever to fear the worst. In the case of her mother, who becomes involved with a shady Portuguese real estate operator and is about to be arrested for fraud, she's probably quite right. In the case of her boss, Daniel, who sends sexy e-mail messages but really plans to marry someone else, she's a tad blind. And in the case of glamorous lawyer Mark Darcy, whom her parents want her to marry, she turns out to be way off the mark. ("It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting 'Cathy!' and banging your head against a tree.") It's hard to say how the English frame of reference will travel. But, since Bridget reads Susan Faludi and thinks of Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon as role models, it just might. In any case, it's hard to imagine a funnier book appearing anywhere this year. Major ad/promo; first serial to Vogue; BOMC and QPB main selections; simultaneous Random House audio; author tour. (July) FYI: A movie is in the works from Working Title, the team that produced Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --このテキストは、 ハードカバー 版に関連付けられています。

Bridget Jones's Diary is the devastatingly self-aware, laugh-out-loud account of a year in the life of a thirty-something Singleton on a permanent doomed quest for self-improvement. Caught between the joys of Singleton fun, and the fear of dying alone and being found three weeks later half eaten by an Alsatian; tortured by Smug Married friends asking, "How's your love life" with lascivious, yet patronizing leers, Bridget resolves to reduce the circumference of each thigh by 1.5 inches, visit the gym three times a week not just to buy a sandwich, form a functional relationship with a responsible adult and learn to program the VCR. With a blend of flighty charm, existential gloom, and endearing self-deprecation, the diary has touched a raw nerve with millions of readers the world round. Read it, laugh and crash your head onto the table before you cry, "Bridget Jones is me!"

"Screamingly funny." --USA Today

"Bridget Jones is channeling something so universal and (horrifyingly) familiar that readers will giggle and sigh with collective delight." --Elle

"Hilarious but poignant." --The Washington Post

"This juicy diary tells the truth with a verve as appealing to men on Mars as it is to Venusian women. A." --Entertainment Weekly

"An unforgettably droll character." --Newsweek

"Bridget's voice is dead-on . . . will cause readers to drop the book, grope frantically for the phone and read it out loud to their best girlfriends." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Fielding. . .has rummaged all too knowingly through the bedrooms, closets, hearts and minds of women everywhere." --Glamour

"Good-bye Rules Girls, hello Singletons...Endearingly engaging." --The New York Times Book Review
--このテキストは、絶版本またはこのタイトルには設定されていない版型に関連付けられています。

"'A brilliant evocation of life as a single girl in a certain time...reads like Anita Loos out of Jane Austen, and any woman who has ever had a job, a relationship or indeed a mother will read it and roar' The Times 'I cannot recommend a book more joyfully...Hilariously funny, miraculously observed, endlessly touching' Daily Telegraph"

"A brilliant comic creation."
--Salman Rushdie
--このテキストは、絶版本またはこのタイトルには設定されていない版型に関連付けられています。

Helen Fielding has written two other novels, Cause Celeb and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Her Bridget Jones books have been phenomenally successful around the world. She currently lives in L.A.

フィールディング,ヘレン
ジャーナリスト、作家。ヨークシャー生まれ。ロンドンを拠点にロサンゼルスなどで活躍中。オックスフォード大学で文学を専攻した後、BBCで番組制作にたずさわる

亀井 よし子
英米文学翻訳家(本データはこの書籍が刊行された当時に掲載されていたものです)