Xie Youshun (Professor, Department of Chinese, Sun Yat-sen University)
(Courtesy of the author/image)
East and West, Echoes, People's Literature Publishing House, June 2021
Things always have the ability to discern and tell the secrets of human nature. At the beginning of Echoes, when the murder occurs, the human experiment with different characters begins. In this line of the case, although Ran Dongdong's thinking was meticulous and his steps were frightening, allowing the murderer to manifest and be arrested, she suddenly found that according to the evidence obtained now, all the parties could find a reason for exoneration. Ran Dongdong was unwilling, and finally she found a breakthrough in Xu Shanchuan's wife, Shen Xiaoying, and the truth was finally revealed. The case is far more complex than we think, and human nature is darker than we think. The other is the emotional line, but every fission of the feelings of the couple of Ran Dongdong and Mu Dafu eventually goes to the opposite side of their own hopes, perhaps this is the narrative focus of "Echo": under the seemingly orderly and beautiful life world, there is also an unfathomable psychological world, which cannot help but ask, dig deep, and force the eyes, because in everyone's psychological world, there are chaotic, gloomy and obscure corners, and the emergence of every decisive moment makes humanity deviate from an inherent track. And some human weaknesses directly lead people to the abyss of sin. "Echo" writes about the abyss of daily life, but also writes about the darkness and fission of the psychological world, at the same time, he also measures the bottom line of human nature and recasts the belief in love through the awakening and guilt generated by the self-knowledge.
Zhu Wenying: "Someone is coming", Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House, May 2021
Underneath the seemingly traditional, gentle appearance, there is a modern and avant-garde heart, which is full of ghosts and waves, and is also wandering in the worldly life, which is Zhu Wenying, which is the way of writing and imagining in "Someone Is Coming". She has an integrated ability, fiction and art, East and West, narrative and counter-narrative, she offends, blends, reflects, creates, moves with the "I" and re-recognizes the world.
Xu Xiaowen: "Flowers Know the Answer", Changjiang Literature and Art Publishing House, June 2021
Xu Xiaowen's poems see vientiane and also see the self. Everything is in her arms, and I am everything, just as her stories are all heart words. This collection of poems, "Flowers Know the Answer", the details are so detailed, the life is so powerful, these fragments of thoughts are full of awareness, whispering, introspection, love of the world; what she listens to and discovers in the humble place, but in the high place of the spirit marks the indescribable weight of the soul.
Zhao Yuebin (Professor, Shandong Normal University)
Yu Hua: Wencheng, Beijing October Literature and Art Publishing House, March 2021
Yu Hua is always expected. So before his new book was on the shelves, he preemptively ordered one. But this time, with a little consumer rationality, I didn't grab two books like the last time I bought another famous artist's new work—I found that even if only one was redundant. But Yu Hua still has his brand protection, even if it is disappointing, it will not let you be disappointed and deceived - it is like buying a fake and shoddy product for making money and killing people.
After getting "Wencheng", I read it in one breath, and most of Yu Hua's novels have this charm. He knows how to tell a good story and how to make you obsessed with reading it. "Wencheng" is the same, it leads the "legend", and it is indeed like a long-ago folklore, not only twists and turns, but also has a taste of talking about dreams: in order to find the "Wencheng" where his wife Xiaomei is located, the male protagonist Lin Xiangfu took their daughter from the northern countryside north of the Yellow River to the south to the xizhen town thousands of miles away, south of the Yangtze River. Although Xiaomei was not found, he took root here, became a well-known rich family, and together with local giant merchants and celebrities, fought against the plague of soldiers and bandits, and finally even took his own life. In the end, he did not find Wencheng, did not find Xiaomei, and only a skeleton was left, which was sent back to his hometown in the north by loyal servants. When the boardcar pulling the coffin left, it made a brief stop in front of a tombstone. But no one knows that what is buried there is the Xiaomei that Lin Xiangfu is looking for. And the xi town they died for is the Wencheng made up by Xiaomei.
Yu Hua's novels are often set in a small southern town, whether it is famous or not, but in fact, it is basically born from his hometown of Haiyan. For example, Lin Xiangfu has a thousand acres of fertile land here, "Ten Thousand Mu Dang", and Haiyan County has a drinking water source called "Thousand Mu Dang"; and the towns and villages near Xi Town, such as Hangzhou, Shanghai, Shimen, and Qijia Village, are also the actual place names around Haiyan; more conclusive evidence is the important gateway of Xi Town, "South Gate", which has not only appeared in works such as "Shouting in the Drizzle" and "Brothers", but also Yu Hua's juvenile hometown is the south gate of Haiyan. In addition, haiyan county is stationed in the thousand-year-old town of Wuyuan, and the so-called "Wencheng" may also mean the opposite of "Wuyuan". "All I have to do is write, I just go home." It can be seen from this that Yu Hua's words are true. "Wencheng" is probably also a homecoming work. Not only that, the hometown of Lin Xiangfu on the north side of the Yellow River written in the novel also seems to vaguely correspond to Yu Hua's ancestral hometown, the straight line from Gaotangnan in Shandong to the Yellow River, which is about a hundred kilometers. What is even more interesting is that Yu Hua also wrote a company commander of the Beiyang Army who could read the Shandong Quick Book, like the county chief who was criticized for fighting in "Xu Sanguan Selling Blood", who was also a Shandong native, but this company commander was more unlucky and sad than the county chief, and was corrected on the spot, and his hometown was really named To Gao Tang's subordinate place - Liaocheng, Shandong. You see, "Wencheng" seems to be writing about the "southern past" of northerners, Shandong people, to some extent. With the help of Lin Xiangfu and the Liaocheng Company Commanders, Yu Hua also completed a distant look at the homeland of his ancestors. In this regard, "Wencheng" is probably also an original work. Maybe everyone has a Wencheng in their heart, and maybe everyone finds a Wencheng that is another place.
Hu Xuewen: "There is a life", Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House, January 2021
Luo Weizhang: "Who's Knocking on the Door", Guangxi Normal University Press, April 2021
Put "Yousheng" and "Who Is Knocking" together, not only because both are also large-scale long river novels, but also because they both have a kind of arrogance, the former 550,000 words, the latter 630,000 words, just look at the word count may be daunting, and then look at the native China it writes, you will feel the burden or vacity of "Fang Sheng Fang Fang Death, Fang Death Fang Sheng" in the endless desolate background.
It is very coincidental that Hu Xuewen and Luo Weizhang, the authors of "Yousheng" and "Who Is Knocking on the Door", were also born in 1967, and their birthplaces are in the relatively remote villages of their respective provinces, Hu Xuewen's hometown is in the Bashang region in the northwest of Hebei Province, and Luo Weizhang's hometown is in the Daba Mountainous Area in the northeast of Sichuan Province. Because of this, the Song Zhuang written in "Yousheng" will be located in the "Saiwai" that Hu Xuewen is familiar with, and the "LaoJun Mountain" written in "Who Is Knocking on the Door" is simply Luo Weizhang's hometown. Like many literary giants who are obsessed with their own "places the size of stamps", the two writers also sowed the seeds of their hometowns on the boundless earth, rebuilding their own compass camp and Huilong Town in their works.
Therefore, although "Yousheng" and "Who Is Knocking on the Door" are ambitious big books, they write about small places, small things, and small people, and they write about the thousands of problems of the countryside and the chaos of human feelings in the world, although they are only coiled between square inches, they have written endless books that look down on heaven and earth and explore the mysterious in a cramped and cramped limited place: they focus on ordinary reality and go deeper into the abyss. Red dust rolls in, born as a human being, perhaps the most difficult is "life and death". It is said: "Birth, old age, illness and death, the time is coming." Another said: "Life, old age, illness and death are contrary to wishes." It is also said: "The health care person is not enough to be a big thing, but sending death can be a big thing." In this regard, the two novels are just like two mirrors, one reflects "health", the other reflects "death", and the two counterparts may be able to glimpse the magical world we are in, and also let us see the spiritual image of the current era. So "YouSheng" uses the memories of a centenarian, a midwife, "Grandmother", to tell a story about "birth". Although the bedridden "grandmother" only talked about a day and a night, Hu Xuewen used what he called an "umbrella-like structure" to prop up the sky of Songzhuang, where many generations rose and fell and lived endlessly, and painted a history of rural life and survival that spanned a hundred years - of course, it was also called "the secret history of life in China in a hundred years". On the contrary, if "There is Life" is the true words of the undead who say the truth of the living, then "Who is Knocking on the Door" is the requiem elegy sung by the living in the face of death: its narrator is "I", a poor poet, but the focus of the narrative is focused on the father, centering on the three central events of wishing the father's birthday, treating the father's illness and giving the father a funeral, telling the three generations of this extended family, the reasonable conflict and life-and-death intersection experienced in the past ten days, and also implicating the grand background and changing times they carry. Such people who "do not match the world in their hearts at all", like any ordinary person, have to accept the death of not being able to spend money, and the etiquette of having to spend money. From this, it may be seen that "There is Life" and "Who Is Knocking on the Door" are just distant echoes of the field of life and death, they not only share the breath of the pen and mind, but also write a painful and majestic poem of "life and death".
[Cuba] Carpentier: Kingdom on Earth (translated by Sheng Li), People's Literature Publishing House, July 2021
Perhaps "The Kingdom of Man" is not a new book, but it has been translated in full and published in World Literature as early as 1985. Probably due to copyright reasons, it is only now that a single book has been published in China for the first time. It's the foreign novel I've worked on the most in 2021, so I'll add a few strokes here. "Kingdom on Earth" has been called "the definitive work of epoch-making magic realism", which should be true. It was in its preface that Carpentier proposed the idea of a "magical reality", and many years later, a "magical reality" came out, and there was a "big explosion of Latin American literature" represented by writers such as Juan Rulfo, Julio Cortázar, and García Márquez. Mexican writer Fuentes claimed that "we are all descendants of Carpentier", in fact, not only Latin American native writers were blessed by him, but Chinese writers such as Mo Yan, Su Tong, and Ah Lai also did not hide their love for him, and Chen Zhongzhong's "White Deer Plain" was directly influenced by "The Kingdom of Man". "Kingdom on Earth" was written in 1948, but it is written about a hundred or two hundred years ago: based on the historical facts of the Haitian Revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the main plot of the novel has historical basis, the place where the story takes place is indeed well documented, and even the main characters are real names and surnames, and it is not an exaggeration to say that it is a complete historical novel. But Carpentier's seminal significance lies in the fact that his writing is not only "wordless" in its fidelity to history, but also understands the ubiquitous "magical reality" of the American land. He said that "to produce magical feelings, we must first believe in magic", so we will see that the protagonist of the novel can change at will, and can bravely declare war on the majestic "kingdom of the world" with his own failure. It is a novella of more than 70,000 words, but it spans a person's life, and it is intertwined with the devastating French Revolution on a small island in the Caribbean Sea, which can be called a highly condensed magical chronicle of the Caribbean world. It is worth noting that at the end of the novel, the troubled villages and towns are blown away by a storm, and Macondo in "One Hundred Years of Solitude" also disappears in this way. It can be seen that short and concise may not be able to cast epics, and a small book can also become a novel in a novel.
Lu Yiping (Novelist, Associate Editor of Young Writers Magazine)
Who's Knocking, Luo Weizhang, Guangxi Normal University Press, April 2021
The writer writes about the daily trivialities of secular life, pays attention to the fate of individuals, takes the ordinary family narrative as the axis, and uses the emperor's 630,000 words to outline the vivid and vivid character map of the three generations of the Xu family, thus completing a long river novel with epic character. The novel takes "the father's illness" as the fuse, adopts the narrative method of "directional explosion, and explodes the inner world of the children one by one", intertwining various complex and subtle emotions between relatives and condensing them into sighs and questions about life and death, morality and human nature. The death of this "Chinese father" means that an era has come to an end, and all the children and grandchildren have appeared as the protagonists of the new era. The baptism of the great era quietly changes everyone, how to persevere and maintain themselves between morality and desire? What each person thinks and does in the times undoubtedly points to their different destinies.
"The Paradise of the Fallen: Selected Novels of Polyakov", translated by Zhang Jianhua, Sichuan People's Publishing House, January 2021
This book is part of the third series of the "Golden Russia" series, containing six short stories by Polyakov. Polyakov was an intellectual with a strong sense of social responsibility, and one of the few Russian writers who was always able to touch the most pressing wounds of society and wrote about social reality more freely and grippingly. He embodies the sharpness and pungency in lightness, reveals the cruel reality in humor, and contains anger and scolding in laughter. Standing behind the era after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he watched the collapse of human ideals, the power, absurdity, humanity, love, suffering and joy of the world, touching the crux of society, the pain points of the times, but full of compassion. His work is a good example of what the writer himself said— "The consistent tradition of Russian satire begins not so much with ironic narratives as it begins with unpleasant national realities, for which all of us, each of us, bear different responsibilities." ”
"Moonlight Samurai", Rainbow Shadow, Flower City Press, July 2021
Mysterious, modern, classical, youthful, and unique are the characteristics of this novel. The writer resurrected the vivid, fierce and fierce human life in Chongqing from 1976 to 1996, with a particularly charming daily life, rivers and lakes, love, and the most touching thing is that it is full of the true feelings and warmth of the world. What is left over from an absurd era is cleverly expressed, but there is no trace. The writer used it to resurrect an era and embody the greatness of the novel. As Dai Jinhua puts it, Hongying's works "often express desire simply, and this desire has many layers of desire, including physical desire, sexual desire, and at the same time the whole powerful, intense hunger of life", and the same is true of "Moonlight Samurai".
Wild Future, by William Wang, CITIC Publishing Group, July 2021
This collection of novels, constructed in words between consumer society and the world of science fiction, provides us with a reliable way to look ahead and understand the future. Although it is a science fiction novel, the writer did not succumb to "science fiction", but followed its principle of "literary" superiority, showing its "excellent novel consciousness and outstanding narrative skills". William Wang was a novelist who was not easily tamed, and he was always committed to the experimentation of text and the exploration of human nature. This time, with the help of the cloak of science fiction, the writer more fully shows the changes of life and the changes of the times, and puts a deeper meaning on the multiplicing reality, so I agree with the writer himself, which is a "deep realism" that tries to understand the "quasi-future" of the technological era.
Xie Youshun Zhao Yuebin Lu Yiping