Hu Xuewen: My 2021 Good Book Recommendation Fiction Category

(Courtesy of the author/image)

Hu Xuewen (novelist)

The Only Story, by Julian Barnes, translated by Guo Guoliang, Yilin Press, October 2021

Julian Barnes is the kind of writer who can make waves in a creek. "The Only Story" is a love story that has been seen and narrated countless times, and although it takes place between middle-aged women and young students, it is not new after all, especially compared to Nabokov's Lolita. But Julian Barnes, with his expertise in uncertain narratives, constructs in memory, and disassembles in gaze, with facts, imagination, hypothesis, observation, and more psychological waves and soul torture, so that the cycle is repeated, swimming back and forth, making the novel waves surge. The love story is more like a false shot, the gun is dangling past, but the sharp edge is pierced into the heart, and there is a growth potential, making people have indescribable pain. If this story is unique, it is not surprising that outside of the story, the percussions and echoes of love are even more fascinating.

"Prisoner", Li Rui, Harvest, No. 4, 2021

The novel focuses on the village under the Taihang Mountains one hundred and twenty years ago, and on this small stage, a farce and tragedy of the great world is staged. The day is just a porcelain bottle, easy to pour and fragile. When it is broken, from county orders and headhunters to bandits and villagers, everyone is faced with difficult choices, more often involuntarily, and human nature is cut open, naked and real. There are many people of all colors, both those who sacrifice their lives for righteousness, those who steal their lives, both the perpetrators and the victims, they are part of the torrent, and they are also the bubble above the torrent. The novel is extremely readable, and between the lines is a serious and valuable thought, the torrent recedes, but the dust may not settle.

"Zhongyuan", Yan Lianke, Flower City, No. 2, 2021

"Zhongyuan" is an oral multi-voice part, in which the husband, wife, and son tell the unusual, almost absurd story of the family in their own voices and in their own way. It is written about the family, and the perspective is the world outside the family. Zhongyuan as the title undoubtedly has a deeper meaning. Yan Lianke narrowed the world and placed it in a family of three to watch and torture. Why is this so, each has its own cavity. Neither the process nor the result matters, what matters is the oscillations and aftermath of the event, the mood and momentum of the oral account. The novel is more distinctive in that while shaping the characters, the writer is also "shaping" the personality and image of the language, sometimes paying more attention to the latter, the characters retreat to the background, the language as the protagonist goes to the foreground, and the language is the deserved protagonist. The novel is full of local flavor and avant-garde throughout.

"Flying Stories", Li Hao, People's Literature Publishing House, October 2021

Li Hao's "Flying Stories" is both a collection of short stories and at the same time can be regarded as a "long story"—because each of its stories is supported by "flying", forming a book of imagination and fables more or less similar to Juan José Areola's Fables. Unlike the creations of most Chinese writers, and unlike the novels we are accustomed to, Li Hao's novels emphasize modern and postmodern factors such as magic, absurdity, and fables, which are full of avant-garde and magical. In this "Collection of Flying Stories", forty-two flying stories have wings, and he makes full use of his imagination and fully "takes", from the historical stories of China and Europe, from Greek mythology, from the stories of Houyi, Liu Chan and even Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai... However, once "brought", these familiar old stories have changed their faces, with new directions and new thinking. After having novels like Borges' novels, Márquez's novels, and Günter Glass's novels, reading Li Hao's "Flying Stories" has a refreshing feeling.

"Domino Boys", Zhang Chu, October Literature and Art Publishing House, October 2021

"Domino Boy" is a collection of novellas by Zhang Chu, including representative works from 1999 to the present. From the highly exploratory "Domino Boy" and "Kiss dedicated to Anda", to the organic combination of form and content, "In the Clouds" and "Basement", to the realistic "Pain" and "In the Name of Evil", Zhang Chu embodies the transfer and shaping of the aesthetic concepts of the times with his understanding of the novel. The protagonists in the novel are all small people at the bottom of the county town, who sigh, struggle, and seek under the pressure of daily life, not forgetting the vision of beauty, they long for dignity and love, but they are always disappointed in the sigh. Zhang Chu's collection of novels is, in a sense, an aria of a frustrated person.

Hu Xuewen