The size of the city is expanding dramatically, but people's living circles are getting smaller and smaller, and people are more estranged from each other, although they are in the hustle and bustle of the bustling city, it is difficult to hide their inner loneliness. So, what is loneliness? Everyone has a different understanding. In the field of literature, "loneliness" has its own image genealogy. Such as Kafka's "The Castle", Camus's "The Outsider", Salinger's "The Catcher in the Wheat Field", Calvino's "The Baron in the Tree", Lu Xun's "The Lonely One", Yu Dafu's "Zero Remnant", Yu Hua's "Alive"... In a sense, these classic texts are all the life experience of the "lonely person". In the essay collection "The Widow", the young writer Ah Yi turned his lonely and wandering experience into a small narrative, shaping a unique personal "lonely" spiritual portrait in modern life, and also showing a powerful and textured life.
Since the publication of the first novel collection "Grey Story" in 2008, Ah Yi has been surrounded by the honorary group: "People's Literature" Novella Award, Annual Young Writer Award, Phoenix Network Annual Top Ten Good Book Award ("Widow"), "Novel Selection" Biennial Award, selected for the Chinese Novel Society Annual Ranking, Chinese Literature Media Award, Pu Songling Short Story Award, Lin Jinlan Short Story Award, Chinese Young Writer Award... For his own fame, Ah Yi did not have great feelings, and even confessed: "I can't say that I am a writer, I am just a writer." ”
For a long time, Ah Yi lived alone, very lonely, he liked his book "Widow" the most, "Widow is the meaning of a lonely family, a single person, but also refers to a very lonely migrant worker who comes to the city." Ah Yi was born in a small village in Jiangxi, after graduating from the police academy, assigned to work in the county rural police station, a few years later he quit his stable police job, went to Zhengzhou, Guangzhou as a reporter, and then came to Beijing several times, and Beijing seems to be not the end of his wandering, but more like the beginning of the drift on another platform, floating in the city, looking for his own shelter. The content of "The Widow" is selected from the blog and diary of Ah Yi's youth, when Ah Yi was moving from the countryside to the city to rent a house. With this book, Ah Yi completes the lonely and honest spiritual record, and also embarks on the road of transformation from the policeman Ai Guozhu (Ah Yi's original name) to the writer Ah Yi. Crushes, fathers and grandchildren, careers, sparks of thought... Many of the characters and stories in Ah Yi's later novels can be found in this book, such as in "Model Youth", Zhou Qiyuan still did not go out of the county town ("Yu Lian"),the train brought the murderer to the county town at that time ("Accidental"), and later the train was upgraded to a high-speed railway, and brought the liar Tang Nansheng in "The Liar Comes to the South"....
"'The furniture is getting tall again.'" This bizarre sentence comes from Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier's Seeds of Return, a novel about stepping back in time and returning to old age. Similar attempts are featured in Martin Amis's Arrow of Time, Fitzgerald's The Wonders of Benjamin Button, and Lee's Mints. I accidentally crashed into this magic circle while editing a book manuscript. I need to choose the narrative content of these years in my blog and notebook. Just for convenience, I started with a recently updated article, watched it for many days, and kept seeing the long last century. In the process, my grandmother came out of the grave and walked to the stall selling oranges, the father who had suffered a stroke walked like a fly, my sister lost her wrinkles, and the people I had hurt were still showing their resolute and innocent smiles as if they had wriggled through the glacier. All misfortune is disappearing, and objects are moving from a mournful twilight to a vibrant morning—only I am like a musty stake, always nailed to the river of time..." "I am like a dark stone, most of the time in the room. It is neither based on the human world nor exists in the underworld, but lives alone where yin and yang overlap. The world as you see it has long since been depressed, with a dim and transparent glow, like the sky is coated with a thin layer of sulfur, while the cold wind is blowing around it. One day, a man said to me, 'I think you're a living dead.' 'Yes, I am.'' I rarely defend myself. The thing is, it's not that I don't want to change, but there's always a lazy and deep force in my body that pulls me down. I feel like a fucker, sometimes not to fulfill my promise of not living well, but just to give myself a stable bed of debauchery. "The Widow" is not a diary or blog in the pure sense of the word, in Ah Yi's own words, these are "small narratives". From 2011 to 2005, tracing the psychic history of a writer until the hidden source, while obtaining the aesthetic experience of reading, a string of vivid life courses and sensitive soul records also surface on paper. The famous critic Li Jingze affirmed Ah Yi's writing, saying: "Ah Yi's writing shows a farther, larger, more hidden but more real China. ”
In Ah Yi's view, "The Widow" is "not a casual book." "I'm used to recording an event (or a scene) when it stabs or severely affects me. A lot of times I feel like a normal person, so I think those things can stab and affect others. I'm lonely and honest, and I dissect other people and I dissect myself. Compared to novels, these articles are more like painstaking effort than just a product for sale. I always take my life to meet and endure the world, without reservation. But it eventually banished me into deeper loneliness. ”
Of course, Ah Yi subjectively also wants to tell the "big story" of his life through such a "small narrative", "from the countryside to the county seat, provincial capital, coastal city, municipality, capital, and the future also wants to go to New York." And everything about this wandering life full of trauma and pain, in Ah Yi's own understanding of life, has a secret and romantic extreme beginning. The last chapter of The Widow is titled "Origins," which is given meaning by its name, and goes back to the forefront, on February 10, 1995, when he wrote, "Today I see her. She sat in the corner, the faint glow kept stopping on her face. She was thinking about something, or not thinking about anything, and a breath of grief flowed from between her eyebrows like a fountain. Her eyes were trembling. She didn't know at this point that I was like an infected bystander, looking at her with a wry heart. It was the first time I liked a member of the opposite sex, like a closed valley suddenly opening up and the wind blowing in endlessly. ”
Of course, in addition to loneliness, "The Widow" also has a tearful warmth. The article "The Womb" is written about the life course of the author's grandfather before his death. After Grandpa's death, the author writes: "Now, when I am lonely Enough to miss a pear, I miss Grandpa; when I am lonely Enough to miss a pot of charcoal, I miss Grandpa." I miss the warmth of the layers of warmth that he and his ancestors had bred, who cut themselves off from trains and ships, preferring to pick grass and eat and talk around the fire. And in that miserable county town, my grandfather would only do one thing, he stood on the second floor, stretched out an ugly old umbrella, and shouted softly like an old cow: 'Bring an umbrella, bring an umbrella, you have an umbrella.' Those of us who left without looking back during the long rainy season in Jiangnan. ”
A B has the same keen sense of touch as Kafka, and his descriptions can surprise people like seeing Kafka's fragmentary small texts. In 2011, the year "Widow" was first published, Ah Yi won the Best Newcomer Award at the 10th Chinese Literature and Media Awards for this work, and his award speech was: "Ah Yi's essay collection "The Widow" is an empty echo after his roaring in the wind, and it is also a self-sorting of his heart. The hilarity is lonely, after the carnival is the mess, although Ah Yi is undecided between anger and calmness, his writing ability and life insight are beyond doubt. ”
In 2021, Yilin Publishing House launched a new edition of A B's works publishing plan, and the new edition of A B's works will meet readers in a new binding form. He has previously published his first work, the collection of short stories, The Liar Comes to the South. "The Widow" is the second variety of the new version of Ah B's work, and it is also a re-edition return ten years after the first edition. The new version is designed by the cutting-edge designer Xie Xiang, and the overall design is based on the text. The cover chooses a pair of worn-out shoes as the main visual picture, on the one hand, the shoes symbolize the life path that Ah Yi has taken from the county to the city, from the police to the writer, on the other hand, the shoes are worn and the laces are loose to compare a sense of loneliness that is difficult to go out, which in turn extends to the situation of "loneliness".
Today, 10 years later, looking back at "The Widow", Ah Yi was also full of emotions in an interview with the Reader's Daily reporter, he frankly said: "I feel that when I was young, I would be more eager to tell my thoughts, situation, passivity, and obstacles, and now I am in middle age. (Readers' Daily all-media reporter He Jian)
Editor: Wang Xin Responsible Editor: Dong Xiaoyue Review: Zhou Hua