The Paper's reporter Gao Dan and Wang Yi
On the afternoon of October 28, the 4th Blancpain Ideal Country Literature Award was announced in Beijing, and writer Chen Chuncheng won the first prize with his novel collection "Submarine at Night".
The five authors shortlisted for the final selection list are Chen Chuncheng, Sun Pin, Zhang Ji, Zhou Kai and Zheng Zhi. Following the first edition of "No Regrets, Less Work", the second edition of "Passion for Writing to Reconstruct the World Picture", and the third edition of "Becoming a Contemporary", the theme of the fourth and 2021 awards will be "May your road be long". This year's jury consists of five writers and musicians, Ah Lai, Ge Fei, Li Zongsheng, Liang Hong and Ma Jiahui.
The works of the five shortlisted writers have their own characteristics.
Awards ceremony
"Submarine at Night" is the first novel written by Chen Chuncheng, and it is a veritable "little work". "Submarine at Night" contains a total of nine short stories, the first of which has the same name as the collection, also called "Submarine at Night". The little boy in the story is always troubled by the exuberant imagination, unable to concentrate on reality, and even intertextual with Borges's distant story, full of magical colors, and everywhere responds to the real situation. "Submarine at Night" is a collection of fantasy stories, in which some people take the job of "cutting clouds", trapped in "knowing and living without end", and finally rely on the fox's card game to solve the problem; some people wake up in the twenty-first century exhibition hall in the museum, only to find themselves in the future, and are asked by posterity to repeat "Dream of the Red Chamber"; some people hide things to put a certain mood, so they discover the secret of the ancient monument of the temple, and hide the key next to the secret; some people are like the legendary purple-winged starling, once they find their own melody, The form immediately turned into ashes in the shape of musical notes...
The award ceremony was broadcast live on station b
"In the Name of Birds and Beasts" is a series of mountain and forest novels created by Sun Pin, Sun Pin narrator "I" returns from the modern city to his hometown of mountain forest protection, along the back of the mountain, the pulse of the river, one after another without a trace of "search" and encounter with everything in the hometown. In writing, Sun Pin skillfully incorporates time, history and memory into the text through elements such as cultural relics, mountains and forests, and former friends, gently opens the heart of everyone in modern life, and through the combing of the relationship between people and things, people and time, and people and self, guides a path of shelter with healing effects for the doubts, confusions, wanderings and pursuits of people at present.
Zhang Ji's "South Goods Store" is more realistic and more solid and long than several other works. Using a clean and simple southern dialect and a background of the Southern Goods Store, the author sketches the picture of Jiangnan town life in the late 1970s and early 1990s: gourmet utensils and mundane daily life, the rise and fall of the world and the light and shade of human nature, and the work unfolds with the life of Qiulin, a clerk of the Southern Goods Store, and connects the character stories in the supply and marketing cooperative system. The business experience of the teacher, the warmth of the man who sells tofu, the absurd love affair between men and women, the indifferent relationship between father and son... Life and death and fate.
Zhou Kai's "The Future Book of a Detective Novelist" is also his first collection of short stories, containing ten stories, the new book about violence, despair and loneliness, writing about the detective novelist who deduces his future, the editor-in-chief of the magazine who suddenly disappeared on the eve of the party, the tramp who lives in a tent next to the cemetery, the pretender who experienced seven lives in seven names... Zhou Kai said to himself: "At that time, my situation was very bad, I went to work on the radio station during the day, read the manuscript and stumbled, always complained, and at night I wrote at home such a bunch of hopeless people, almost fell into a vicious circle, and what was more terrible was that I had a vague fascination with such a dilemma, several times, I stood by the window and smoked, and what I thought in my mind was the sentence written in "Bastard Spring", 'I want to turn over and fall into a pile of meat paste'. There are many people in that kind of predicament, may really turn out, I did not turn out, now I think, may still be because of vulgarity, under the ambiguous fascination with the dilemma is still hidden in the good life. ”
Zheng Zhi's "Immortal Disease" also has a magical color, the author fantasizes that he is a mental patient who served in a submarine, a lonely bird driver in Shenyang airport, a poor ghost paradise with "Northeast characteristics" that Zheng Zhi has paid attention to before, alcoholism, night, and travelers' traces are also constantly floating in the story. In the northern cities at the turn of the century, the characters are always in a state of loss. In "Immortal Disease", the magic story and detective novel elements are mixed, rich regional colors, special forms of daily life, and narrated in a concise and humorous tone of spoken language, telling the escape and return of a boy to his own destiny.
The authors who came to the scene also shared their current writing and troubles, Chen Chuncheng said, in the early days of his writing, no one talked to him about literature, saw a particularly good book, and wanted to share it with people, but there was no one to talk to. In the year since the publication of "Submarine at Night", it has been discussed too much, "and I think that I write very little, not worthy of being talked about and dissected, and when I was writing recently, I was not as comfortable as before, and I would think frequently that others would talk about me." Zheng Zhi maintained his usual humor, and he joked that the biggest challenge he faced was very specific, that is, he had no readers for many years and could not make money.
Zhou Kai said that when he wrote before, he would still think about many grand propositions in the novel, but he found that in the end it would still fall on language, on how you use language to express and narrate, how to use your own exploration, and use your own methods to erase the boundaries of language, which is the most I have thought about recently.
As one of the guests of the award, Ah Lai also talked about the issue of language, ah said that what he valued most in the selection was "whether the language of Chinese has a new development in the author's literature", and whether there is any sustainable potential in addition to the works completed at the moment, in the next work or in the long writing career.
Ma Jiahui pays great attention to the author's sense of language and the perspective of seeing things, how the experience of the author's life background is placed in his own novel writing, how they view the relationship between people and people, people and nature, etc., which are also important angles for him to select novels.
Liang Hong believes that in recent years, the boundary between fiction and non-fiction has become more and more blurred, and writers have paid more and more attention to internal accuracy when writing, which allows their non-fiction writing to soar and have a solid sense of reality. Virtual and real, building a broader space. Liang Hong also commented on the works of several writers: "Zheng Zhi has a kind of carving-like reality; Sun Pin's novel has a huge mountain and forest texture, and the natural space of history is as charming as an overlooked ruin; Zhang Ji is small and big, carrying people's hearts in a small grocery store; and Zhou Kai uses knowledge as a narrative to become a new heavy space." ”
Ge Fei commented on the works of the five writers: "When a thing disappears, there should be a writer to write about this disappearance, Zhang Ji's "South Goods Store" is like this; Zhou Kai's novel narrative rhythm is very charming, retracted and relaxed; Zheng Zhi's "Immortal Disease" is very charming, the language is very powerful, and the writing is very simple; Chen Chuncheng's "Submarine at Night" Each article will give people new surprises, sometimes magical, science fiction, and sometimes related to the content of "Dream of the Red Chamber", which is very extraordinary; and Sun Pin's novel is touching. The author describes the problems in society very well and sincerely. ”
Editor-in-Charge: Zhang Zhe
Proofreader: Yan Zhang