Yu Hua: 10 novels that influenced me

-Ten Novels-

"BlueFish" (Dukesnes)

In exile (Kafka)

"The Singer of Izu" (Yasunari Kawabata)

The South (Borges)

Jimper the Fool (Singer)

Kong Yiji (Lu Xun)

"Tuesday Nap Time" (Márquez)

The Third Bank of the River (Rosa)

Flat Boat on the Sea (Stephen Klein)

The Bird (Bruno-Schultz)

I often put the names of Yasunari Kawabata and Kafka together, not because they should be together, but because of my personal habits. I can't forget when I first read Izu's Song Girl in the winter of 1980, when I was 20 years old, and I met Yasunari Kawabata in a dim apartment near the Yongjiang River in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province. Five years later, also in winter, also at the water's edge, in a riverside room in Haiyan, Zhejiang, I read Kafka. Thankfully, I didn't read them at the same time. I was young and ignorant at the time, and if the confrontation in literary style was too fierce, it would make my reading overwhelmed and unbearable. In my opinion, Yasunari Kawabata is a symbol of infinite softness in literature, Kafka is a symbol of extreme sharpness in literature; the gaze in Yasunari Kawabata's narrative shortens the distance between the mind reaching things, and the cutting in Kafka's narrative expands such a distance; Yasunari Kawabata is a labyrinth of the flesh, Kafka is the hell of the heart; Yasunari Kawabata is like a blooming poppy that makes people sleepy, and Kafka is like heroin flowing into the blood vessels that makes people excited and demented. Our literature accepts two very different testaments, while also suggesting that the vastness of literature sometimes exists in some hidden consistency.

I used to be obsessed with Yasunari Kawabata's descriptions, the details connected by fibers, and I was talking about the way he described the details, and the gaze of his narration was meticulous, reaching almost every line of things, and at the same time it seemed to have not arrived, and I used to think that this description was a way of feeling. Yasunari Kawabata likes to touch things with his gaze and inner fluctuations, and he rarely touches them with his hands, so when he constantly shows the details, he is also constantly hiding something, and what is hidden is always more fascinating. It will lead the reading to an inaccessible state, because there is a magical space behind it, and it is a space without boundaries, which can be infinitely expanded or reduced at any time. Why do we cover up our contemplation after reading it? This is because we need to walk into that magical space and keep walking. That quality also comes to Kafka and Márquez, as well as many other writers, which is one of the reasons I love Tuesday Nap Hour.

García Márquez is the undisputed master and has been awarded this award since his lifetime. "One Hundred Years of Solitude" portrays an idol of a writer who is imaginative, an idol who squanders his imagination, but in fact, Márquez hides careful restraint in the narrative, and it is the fierce confrontation between the two that makes the great Márquez. "Tuesday Nap Time" shows the writer's restrained talent, a story that can appear in any era, and therefore a story that writers of any era can write.

Why do priests get upset in front of an ordinary mother? Why do withered flowers make us shudder? The questions left by Márquez are very clear, and the answers behind the questions are equally clear, making us feel that we have felt it, and at the same time we feel that our feelings are far from enough.

Kafka's work, I chose "In exile." It's a shocking story of an abandoned officer and an abandoned killing machine. The relationship between the two is a bit like a spoiled love, or their history is shared by them, and the absence of any one makes both of them lose at the same time. I chose "In exile" because Kafka's work has the clearest narrative scale, and I am referring to the fulcrum of a writer's narrative that generates power? What does this unpredictable writer, this writer who terrifies and unpredictably leaves readers with, gives us? How did he build the absurd edifice out of the bricks of narrative? In exile clearly shows the branches and leaves that stretch out of Kafka's narrative, and in the nuanced description of the killing machine, the writer expresses the same accurate sense of reality as Balzac, and this sense of reality continues to emerge in other parts of the story, and it is these realistic descriptions that construct the foundation of Kafka's story. In fact, this is true of all his works, but people are more likely to be attracted to the absurdity of the building, thus ignoring the practicality of building materials.

The same is true of Bruno Schultz's Birds and João Guimarão Es Rossa's The Third Bank of the River. In addition to Birds, I chose two other Schultz short stories, The Cockroach and Father's Last Escape. I think only in this way can the father figure that appears in "Birds" be complete. We can think of them as three chapters in a single work, and they are all very short. The "father" that Schultz endowed is almost the most flexible image in our literature. In addition to the image of a human being, he also has the image of a bird, a cockroach, and a happy crab, and he can continue to come back after he dies continuously. It was an empty father, who had neither human nor animal boundaries, and floated like a ghost, and as long as he attached himself to it, anything would exude the desire for life.

João Gimaran Es Rosa also created an image of a father in The Third Bank of the River, and it is also an image that is detached from the concept of father, but he does not combine with animals, he just goes farther and farther in his own image, and finally goes out of the territory of man, and interestingly, at this time he is still a living person. This father, who never came ashore, made Rosa's story a story that never ended. The Brazilian writer tells this story without the slightest outrage, it seems to be a story of the beginning like everyday life, but it is not a story of daily life at all, and it shocks the reader because it leads the reader to the unfathomable night sky of the mind, or to the third bank of the river.

After Kafka and Schultz, Singer was the third writer I chose from the Jewish nation. Similar to the first two writers, Singer's characters are always struggling to escape the fate of wandering, which is actually the fate of a nation. The difference is that Kafka and Schultz's characters are wandering in the abyss of their hearts, while Singer's characters are walking on the path of reality. This is also why Singh's characters are full of dusty air, while Kafka and Schultz's characters are spotless, because the latter live in the depths of the imagination. However, they are all lost lambs. "Jimper the Fool" is a masterpiece that shocks the soul, and Jimper's life is almost fully displayed in a short few thousand words, just as writing the tip of the wave is writing the whole sea, and Singh's narrative only makes a few fragments of Jimper's life shine, but his entire life is also illuminated. This is a soul whiter than a blank piece of paper, and his name is so closely associated with a fool that his fate writes a history of being deceived and oppressed.

As far as I know, Lu Xun and Borges are symbols of clear thinking and quick thinking in our literature, the former like mountains rising above the surface, the latter like a river sinking into it, both of which point out the clarity of thinking and also show two different ways of thinking. One is the chilling day in literature, and the other is the disturbing night in literature, the former is a warrior, the latter is a dreamer. The "Kong Yiji" and "South" selected here are both models of narrative like gold, and both are lean and bone-like images in literature. In Kong Yiji, Lu Xun omits the description of Kong Yiji's first few visits to the hotel, and when Kong Yiji's leg was broken, Lu Xun began to write about how he came. It is the duty of a great writer that when Kong's legs are sound, he can ignore the way he came, but when his legs are broken, he cannot avoid it. Thus we read the singing of the literary narrative. "Suddenly, I heard a voice, 'Warm a bowl of wine.'" The sound, though extremely low, was familiar. When I looked at it, there was no one at all. Standing up and looking out, Nakong Yiji sat down at the threshold under the counter. First the voice came, and then I saw the people, such a narrative has been extraordinary, when "I warmed the wine, took it out, put it on the threshold", Kong Yiji felt out the four large money, the trembling description appeared, Lu Xun only used a short sentence, "Seeing that his hand was full of mud, it turned out that he came with this hand." ”

That's why I love Lu Xun, whose narrative arrives at reality so swiftly that it's like a bullet passing through the body rather than staying in it. Unlike Lu Xun as a warrior, Borges as a dreamer seems to be trapped in an unknowable romance, and his concise and clear narrative is actually filled with rational dazedness, and he is often keen on such confusion, so his characters are often clear-headed, but their fate is vague.

Lu Xun's Kong Yiji seems to have come to reality after the memory has been condensed, and Juan in "South"? Dahlman is a man who strives to return to memory, and the different naming of the narrative directions gives the two characters different paths, Kong Yiji is realistic and touchable, Juan? Dahlman is mysterious and difficult to grasp. The former starts from memory and comes to reality; the latter starts from reality and returns to memory. Both Lu Xun and Borges seem to suspect that time will heal their wounds, so their characters will only go farther and farther in their own misfortune, and finally they will return to the same place and disappear into their common destiny.

Laxenes's "Blue Fish" and Klein's "Flat Boat on the Sea" were the records of my first reading, and they recorded my uneasiness when I first came to literature, as well as my excitement and insomnia. This is twenty years ago, and without the works of Laxines and Klein, and Yasunari Kawabata's The Singer of Izu, I think I might not have entered the door of literature. Just as I first learned what a movie is after I first saw Bergman's Wild Strawberries many years later, Blue Fish and Flat Boat on the Sea let me know what literature was twenty years ago. I still love them to this day, not because they made me feel the first love, but because they taught me about the enduring and vastness of literature.

This is pretty much my twenty years of reading literature, and of course there are many more that I haven't mentioned here. Every time I read those great works, I get carried away by them. I was like a timid child, carefully grasping the corners of their clothes, imitating their steps, and walking slowly in the long river of time, a journey of warmth and mixed feelings. They took me away and then left me alone. When I came back, I realized that they had been with me forever.

Yu Hua

April 30, 1999

Excerpt from "The Warm Journey: 10 Short Stories That Influenced Me"