Lu Mei: My 2021 Good Book Recommendation Fiction Category

(Courtesy of the author/image)

Lu Mei (Editor-in-Chief of Literature Newspaper)

"A Knife, a Thousand Words", Wang Anyi, People's Literature Publishing House, April 2021

Wang Anyi's language is very solid. Tight is often airtight, logical and speculative, you say a word to me, the master is like a trick, full of the tension of action and the careful balance of step by step. Fortunately, the materials she uses are daily, life-like, the so-called diet men and women and worldly common feelings, which gives the master a solid space, and no matter how to play, it is inseparable from this human firework.

Flushing and Shanghai are the two main stages in the novel A Knife, A Thousand Words. Huaiyang chef Chen Cheng appeared in Flushing, interspersed with his childhood in Shanghai lanes, his obscured life, and his one-handed cooking skills. The first half of the novel advances the narrative in the tension of oil, salt, vinegar, dinner, and human fireworks, and the Zen-like dialogue outlines the insoluble entanglements and persistent wounds of history, era, and individuals. In the second half of the scene, the scene shifts to North Harbin, where the absent mother fishes out the fate of the little people from the big times, and revolutions, beliefs, and ideals surface. "A knife" (the kitchen knife among the three knives in Yangzhou) and "a thousand words" (a thousand words in the garden", "Yueying Bamboo into a thousand words"), turned out to be Wang Anyi's exclusive dark weapon in the void.

"One Day, Three Autumns", Liu Zhenyun, Huacheng Publishing House, July 2021

"One Day and Three Autumns" can be said to be Liu Zhenyun's "Yanjin version" of "Dream of the Red Chamber". Although the beginning of the pen began with the painting of the sixth uncle, and the painting of the sixth uncle has been extinguished - when the fake is true, it is true and false, there is nowhere to do anything, and the sixth uncle is the immortal Daoist who knows the world. Liu Zhenyun belongs to the kind of writer who only writes one big book in his lifetime, and this big book has a theme: hometown and destiny. In his long new work, cold jokes and great humor coexist, outside the painting, outside the play, the underworld, the hometown, each other cause and effect, each other,at the same time contradictory, two cancel out -- it turns out that this is our life, after tasting the bitterness of life, the understanding of the rationality of life, one day is three autumns, one day is three autumns, one day in exchange for three autumns. Liu Zhenyun wrote about human nature, land and destiny in reality and imagination, which is both humor and irony; it is both magic and reality.

Wild Future, William Wang, CITIC Publishing Group, July 2021

As the title of the book "Wild Future" shows, the novelist William Wang's greatest contribution in this collection of novels is to effectively provide a new "viewfinder" for understanding the world: the consciousness and culture of the future are influencing and dominating our real lives. "The future is no longer the other end of the line of time, the future is the present." Based on this recognition, "science and technology" or "science fiction" is only the path and inspiration for the novelist to imagine certain stages of human beings in the future, and the inevitable cultural consciousness he wants to explore is related to values, positions, emotions, ethics, psychology and other levels - a deep reality and human spiritual life. Therefore, this "future poetics" that William Wang strives to construct is everywhere deepening and broadening the overall connection between us and reality.

In the Name of Birds and Beasts, Sun Pin, People's Literature Publishing House, April 2021

Each of the three novellas in the book has a similar spiritual space: the mountain forest. No matter what kind of opportunity the protagonists have, their relationship with the mountains and forests is a hometown that cannot be returned, but Sun Pin chooses to use the "retrograde" way to let the protagonists wander in the mountains, rivers, ruins and ancient villages. What to explore? The form of time and the relationship between civilization; the placement of spirits and the confirmation of self-identity. When dealing with these relationships, Sun Pin "very much enjoys the healing function of the mountain forest scenery for people's souls", so the novel is full of natural landscapes, all kinds of plants, birds and beasts, mountains, rivers, the evolution of the vicissitudes of the sea and mulberry fields, the quiet and mysterious atmosphere, and the misty mist of the mountains and rivers she faces, and the secrets sink in the depths of time. The texture of the novel is full, the weather is abundant, and the natural things involved in the pen tend to be deep and broad.

Lu Mei