Qianjiang Evening News Hourly News Reporter Song Hao
The 2021 (sixth) Harvest Literature List was announced this month, and Zhoushan writer Huang Liyu's novella "The Luthier" ranked second in the list.
Judge, Fudan University professor and critic Jin Li called the novel "a burst of vitality that is different from the mainstream literary world." A city, two or three people, and a few anecdotes that have escaped from the sidelines weave a history of the demise of romanticism. ”
Writer Ai Wei
After the list was released, Ai Wei, chairman of the Zhejiang Writers Association, sent a circle of friends overnight:
"Special congratulations to Zhoushan Huang Liyu, who likes his short stories. There is a hoarse, solitary stealing sound in his novels, and I often hear a crunching duck-like laugh somewhere in his novels. He hadn't written in over a decade and was expecting him to write more. A good novelist. ”
In the interview, Ai Wei did not hesitate to praise Huang Liyu. For a long time, he has always felt that Huang Liyu is a very good novelist, "good language, rich meaning, and his unique expression in the novel." ”
Similar exclamations are not only Ai Wei, but many writers familiar with Huang Liyu feel that his fame and talent among readers are not equal.
"I'm not at all surprised that this work has been unanimously approved by everyone." Xu Zechen, deputy editor of "People's Literature", winner of the Lu Xun Literature Award and the Mao Dun Literature Prize, said so. Writer Ma Xu also said: "Huang Liyu was already such a cow many years ago, but the amount was too small. ”
From Hangzhou, Beijing, Wenzhou... Writers everywhere are unanimous in their praise for Huang Liyu's talent and their regret that they have read too little of his works.
The recorder in "The Wrapping of the Ages"
Huang Liyu, born in Zhoushan, Zhejiang Province at the end of 1957, in the 1990s, after further studying at Lu Xun Literature College, he successively published many novels in literary magazines such as Harvest, Huacheng, Everyone, and Zhongshan, and his fame rose for a while, and in 1999, the novel collection "One Shot Killed You" was published.
When asked why he chose the path of literature, Huang Liyu said that there may be many factors in choosing literature, but most importantly, the threshold for writing is the lowest. He said that he needed a camera to love photography and loved to play the piano, so it was unimaginable that I would have to have a piano at home when I was a teenager. Don't say it's the piano, just to let his mother buy the first pen in his life, he also has to cry on the ground for half a day, so that the neighbors are moved by compassion.
The novella "The Violin Maker", which has attracted everyone's attention this time, describes the wandering and difficulty of the literary and artistic youth in the county in the 1980s, and the emergence of an "old Keler" in Shanghai, which had a profound impact on them. In their eyes, the old man represented a whole new outside world.
The "I" in "The Luthier" is both a narrator and a shadow of the author's early life. In the 1980s, literature and art deeply attracted a group of fanatical young people, and the life choices of several young people in the novel, in his view, "are both personal choices and the tide of the times." He called this "the wrapping of the times."
Because "everyone lives in a specific social environment, everyone's growth is all related to his living environment, his temperament, his spiritual outlook, and the way he views the world are inseparable from his living soil and the background of the times." He said that relatively speaking, the relationship between the Chinese people and the times seems to be closer, and the personal fate of those who are now nearly ancient is simply a history of new China.
The era of heroes has created heroes, and the era of literature and art has created a large number of literary and artistic youth. As a member of the "Wrapping of the Times", Huang Liyu silently records the fate of ordinary people in the Shrouds of the Times that he observes.
"Learning to write is an exercise in the ability to observe and generalize the world. The beauty of literature teaches us more, it makes me full and at peace in my heart, and I look at everything with a broader mind. ”
Zhong Songjun (Shang Luo), a writer who worked in Zhoushan in his early years, recalled Huang Liyu's bedroom, study and reception room at that time: "On the wall is a Chinese painting with frogs, stones and grass, with three brush characters: Dream Frog Land. The sofa was shabby and almost collapsed in half. The north-facing window is covered with green window screens, not much light can be penetrated, look up to see the skylight, is a piece of glass, it seems not to steal the light, occasionally the sun leaks from the skylight, but increases the darkness in the room. "In a room like this, you have to write a novel." Zhong Songjun said.
Huang Liyu said that for him, whether the work is published or recognized by the outside world, it is an accident. In the end, writing is very personal, the outside world is noisy, everyone has to face the world alone, writers are even more so, loneliness and sleepiness are the norm, of course, there are times when writing in the middle of the night to steal pleasure.
Writers who have been "absent" for more than a decade
In the eyes of Ai Wei and others, Huang Liyu has not written for many years. Xu Zechen said that many years ago, everyone liked Huang Liyu's novels, but then he did not see his new works for a long time, and he also asked people about Huang Liyu's recent situation.
"I should say I'm just absent, or 'not present.'" Huang Liyu said that this time is more than ten years or more, but writing and reading have always accompanied him, which is his way of life. For a long time, he had doubts about his own writing, at least not good enough. With the deepening of reading, Huang Liyu felt that what he wrote was not on the table at all. "This 'table' has nothing to do with publishing or not publishing, it is a dead knot of my own." Huang Liyu has been trying to untie the knot for a long time.
"In this world, writers are all kinds of people, and some writers can write 10,000 words a night, which is unimaginable to me. There is no good or bad way to write fast or slow, some writers are geniuses, and I am certainly not, and every expression is difficult for me, like walking on thin ice. ”
Huang Liyu mentioned a friend of his, "She has never published any works publicly, but she writes six short stories a year, much better than me!" Huang Liyu said, "Her goal is to produce a collection in the future, at least the works in it have no major shortcomings." But her requirements became more and more demanding, and that book was pushed further afield. Huang Liyu was moved by this true literary spirit far from the hustle and bustle.
"At the end of the day, it's still lazy." Huang Liyu ultimately boiled down to laziness. But he also carefully brewed in the process of "slowing down", exploring in the confrontation with himself.
Huang Liyu uses dialect in "The Luthier". He believes that "dialects best present the most fragile, sensitive, and literary side of a writer's heart." "But because the southern dialects are very different from the northern language families, southern writers will have a particularly difficult exploration of Chinese writing."
Jin Yucheng, Si Jidong, Zhang Ji, etc. have all made good attempts in this regard. Huang Liyu found that "in addition to using the words of the dialect, you can also use the grammar of the dialect to express its charm." ”
Huang Liyu's writing is full of caution, and it is precisely because of this that Xu Zechen can say: "I know that Huang Liyu may not write, but if he writes, it will certainly not be bad." Because of the quality of his work, his playful style, his understanding of the novel... I'm a big believer that if he's going to write, he can definitely write good things. ”
New Fiction Forum
Today, there is very little information about Huang Liyu on the Internet, and many readers do not know his name, but Huang Liyu is a group of people who are in the early days of the Domestic Internet.
At the end of the 1990s, he created the literary forum "New Novel Forum" to attract a group of literary youth from Tiannanhaibei, among which Zhang Chu, Si Jidong, Baqiao, Xu Zechen, Tian Er and a large number of young people who were interested in writing were active, and now this group of literary youth has become the backbone of Chinese literature.
As the moderator of the "New Novel Forum" forum, Huang Liyu pulled friends to become resident writers, including ghosts from Guangxi, Ai Wei from Zhejiang, Xia Feng, Li Xiuwen from Hubei, and Ye Kai, editor of Harvest. Ye Kai found Cao Kou here, and his short story "Me and Zhao Xiaobing" was soon published in Harvest. Then Cao Kou had a bunch of literary followers.
Huang Liyu was the editor-in-chief of Haizhongzhou magazine
Writer Yang Yifen was a young literary teenager in 2002, when she met Huang Liyu in the bookstore and her eyes widened. At that time, she was playing in the "New Novel Forum" and knew this big man in the same city. Later, Huang Liyu edited the literary journal "HaiZhongzhou" and launched Yang Yifen as a "new sharp".
On the forum, writers hold a workshop on their works, post the works of a certain writer, and read the comments together. "Sheng can initially use the name 'Folding Lotus', and after she posted a novel on the New Novel Forum, BaQiao wrote her a review. Ba Qiao mentioned language, he gave an example, he said Sheng can's 'eagle flies in the sky', he would write: 'The eagle moves around in the sky.' ’”
The popularity of Ai Wei's work seminar was very high, "That night, I don't know how many people were crowded into this small chat room, and more people couldn't squeeze in. And the people inside are all happy, eager to say hello, booing and asking for warmth. ”
Before the New Novel Forum, Ai Wei had known Huang Liyu. Ai Wei was in Ningbo at that time, and Ningbo and Zhoushan were geographically close, so there were contacts. In fact, the predecessor of the New Novel Forum was Huang Liyu and a mimeograph magazine "New Street" founded by a group of Zhoushan wen friends around him, and the new works of Huang Liyu and his friends were first published in "New Street" magazine. Through reading, Ai Wei had a deep understanding of Huang Liyu and Zhoushan's literary friends.
"Huang not only provides you with a text, but also a rich meaning beyond the text." When Ai Wei read Huang Liyu's work at that time, he felt that there was a potential expression in it, "This expression is very charming. "That charm is still there today. Ai Wei will express his love for Huang Liyu in person and praise him on different occasions.
Ai Wei said that the novels I read on "New Street" at that time, in addition to Huang Liyu, the novels of other people were quite good, the words were good, and I could see their talents and possibilities. However, these young literary friends in Zhoushan rarely submitted articles, and there were not many streams with the outside world, and Ai Wei once expressed regret for Huang Liyu.
"I often feel that sometimes when you write a good novel, you may not have a good literary fortune." Ai Wei said, "So I am particularly happy, this time Huang Liyu can be on the harvest rankings, won the second place in the novella, I think things in the world are finally fair, finally, everyone sees that he wrote well." ”
The second issue of the Selected Novels in 2021 featured Huang Liyu's "The Luthier", which begins with the following words:
The piano is melodious. The aftersound is loud. How fortunate we are to come to Zhejiang Zhoushan writer Huang Liyu's "Violin Maker" in the "Wind of Literature". How lucky Huang Liyu was, after years of silence, finally ushered in his soul work "Luthier". This is another masterpiece that connects the "new period" and the "new era" literature after Cheng Yongxin's "The Shape of the Wind". Full of flowers and stars, a vast and abundant eighties came to the face. As a spiritual enlightenment teacher, the old man of Shanghai lit up the obscure life of Wu Bingsheng and other people in the small town. The arias on the G strings, the Shanghai brand coffee, and the riverside flute stir up the vibrant artistic spirit, and the glory and dreams of literature roar in the narrative of the clouds and flowing water.
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