Zhang Dinghao
(Writer, Associate Editor of Shanghai Culture)
(Courtesy of the author/image)
Divorced three times and raising four children independently, a single mother who worked as a middle school teacher, telephone operator, emergency nurse, cleaner, drunk and abstained from alcohol, and wrote novels about her life in amateurs, such a resume must have made critics feel like a treasure, thinking that they have found a typical "low-level writer" who can be supported, used and played freely by them, but Lucia Berlin uses her novel to break this delusion. In fact, she is a writer among writers, well-educated, concise and rich, and her thoughts are broad and profound, and if you look for a frame of reference, I think she is a bit like the combination of Lydia Davis and Elena Ferrante, honest to the point of unsettling, relentless in the face of human weaknesses, and at the same time possessing joy and the ability to capture joy. I believe that the introduction of the Chinese translation of her novel in 2021 will bring a little new atmosphere to the contemporary Chinese novel, just as Raymond Carver brought about it in the past, and it is quite possible that Lucia is a stronger and more emulated existence than Carver.
Yichun, Zhao Song, Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, January 2021
Yichun is the name of a remote town in northeast China, but "Yichun", a collection of novels that reflects the author's creative outlook in the past ten years, has little direct relationship with the so-called times, sense of history and even the practical problems in northeast China that critics are concerned about, and Zhao Song has no intention of driving the novel to become a witness to some kind of general and outdated concepts, on the contrary, the direction of his efforts for more than ten years is precisely to tear apart this kind of universal and old that is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and present a "unique and strong" "way of experiencing the world". We can see in "Yichun" a special, unique experience belonging to this era, it is attached to the telephone, mobile phone text messages, QQ chat room, email, WeChat, scattered in every corner of "Yichun", a new voice composed of text participation, a kind of conversation that does not have to meet, an emotional circuit that can be unfolded at the same time like a parallel circuit. People seem to be forced by modernity to go their own way, but in fact they have more complex and secret communication possibilities. Zhao Song hopes to restore the connection between the novel and life, and return to life all kinds of turbulence, adventures and passions that seem to belong only to the novel.
Faces, Dongjun, Shanghai People's Publishing House, March 2021
The eponymous story of the novel collection "Faces", composed of more than three hundred narrative short chapters, lasted five years, although Dongjun humbled himself that these short chapters were the product of novel writing, but when they were collected into armpits, it may become the most powerful exploration of the possibilities of the novel by Dongjun so far.
Today's literature is often a simplification of life, and then reduced to historical perjury. Dongjunfen opposes this simplification and degeneration, and he wants to write a complete life, not a life that can be summarized and analyzed by critics and then serve some kind of narrative. "Faces" explores the integrity of life from two directions. One is to find and feel the secret connection between all things, and the other is to listen to and present the other as an enigmatic and comfortable life. In a sense, Wittgenstein's proverb serves as the ambition of The Face: "Anything that can be said clearly can be said clearly; anything that cannot be said should be silenced." ”
Huang Dehai
(Associate Editor of Sinan Literature Anthology, Distinguished Researcher of Museum of Modern Chinese Literature)
Who's Knocking, Luo Weizhang, Guangxi Normal University Press, April 2021
The details of "Who Knocked" are dense and solid, and the relationship between things is complicated, but it is sparse because of the resoluteness and decisiveness of the pen. The rush of my father's birthday, the fruitlessness of treatment, the strange changes in funerals, the twists and turns of rural poverty alleviation, the work in the city to seek perfection, and the song at the end of the song are scattered, which is reminiscent of "Dream of the Red Chamber" for no reason. There is no reason for this idea, the voice in "Who Is Knocking on the Door" is by no means as round as in "Dream of the Red Chamber", on the contrary, Luo Weizhang deliberately uses dialect in the voice of the character, and if he is careful, he can almost hear the tone of the dialect in the narrative language. If you have to take "Dream of the Red Chamber" as an analogy, "Who's Knocking on the Door" can probably be called "The Red Chamber of the Countryside", right? If so, is it possible to say that Who's Knocking on the Door inherits a certain tradition in a special way? Or, just don't want this analogy, we see in this book, those who are far away from home have come back, and the familiar etiquette and the like have become unfamiliar. Consciously or unconsciously, they want to find what is reasonable in this strangeness, and they also try how to be in it again and bring the fruits of their travels back to their homeland.
"The Guide", Li Hongwei, Beijing October Literature and Art Publishing House, September 2021
If at some point in the future, because of scarcity of resources or other problems, human beings need to be forced to make choices, how will people decide their future? Li Hongwei's "The Guide" may be seen as one of the samples of some kind of determination. Interestingly, despite the various possibilities of decision-making, Li Hongwei always stood in the middle and never had the tendency to give a single one easily. Although no tendency is given, the wisdom accumulated in choice is still passed down in a special way, adding possibilities for the future. Perhaps in order to fully express the possibilities of diversity, this long story composed of the possibilities of three complex eras uses a variety of writing methods, including suspense, science fiction, documentary, etc., to show the various possibilities of the future that human beings may face. The possibilities offered by this novel, carefully examined, have a reason why this is indispensable, and the other possibilities are not weakened by this, but provide sufficiently rich and open space for rebuttal. It is in this space that Li Hongwei shows his excellent imagination, using these experiments in thinking to explore the boundaries of human reality and thinking, and using complex human figures to try to break the possibility of these boundaries, so that we can face the real world more majestically.
"Golden Branch", Shao Li, People's Literature Publishing House, January 2021
In The Golden Branch, after completing the wedding arranged by his grandmother, the father followed his grandfather to the revolution, fell in love with his mother, and married and had children. Unexpectedly, the marriage of the grandmother's order had a daughter, and the previous wife also vowed not to leave the family after marriage. Since then, the father's two marriages have their respective children and offspring, and in the process of growing up, there have been intersections and conflicts, and the relationship has become more and more complicated. In such a long span of time, the social form has undergone several major changes, and each generation has formed a cut and chaotic connection with the era in which they are located, both involuntarily following and simply directly choosing, thus forming an inherent world view and outlook on life. In a complex intergenerational relationship, the "I" must face the legacy of the previous generation and learn to deal with the relationship with the same generation and the next generation, and there is no one to say. In such a complex situation, "I" did not stop at seeing all the problems from my own eyes, but cut into the stories of different people through different perspectives, slowly partially understood the father and mother, and also had a new understanding of the wife and children in the father's previous marriage and their offspring, and finally realized my own problems in various collisions and exchanges. At the same time, "I" also have a deep understanding of others and myself, and have a deep understanding of future generations, which partially avoids repeating the stories that happened to me in the relationship with the younger generations, and conveys a different state of life from the previous generation. It is precisely because of such difficult self-reflection and growth that the father and mother, including other elders, peers and juniors, have established their own causal relationships in the narrative of "I", and there is a possibility of "right". Because of this, those clean and bright days are reverted to youth in memory, vividly regenerated in words.
"Moon", Guo Shuang, Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, October 2021
Reading "The Moon" will make you aware of the formation of a new world and worldview. Reading most of the novels in the past, you will feel that the protagonist has a stable space, and going to other places is just traveling. However, in "Moon", the characters are basically wandering, have no land of their own or stable living space, and have been turbulent, including the working environment and the work itself, including the various projects involved, which seem to be constantly changing. This state has left the land, away from what used to be called the countryside, and even away from the city as defined in the past. Even back in the countryside, the characters' spiritual world still carries the fluid cues of the big city. Therefore, no matter how the characters flow, they carry a unified spiritual space, which is caused by reading or experiencing. It is in this constant flow that a group of people in a situation that in the past seemed to be unsettled and unable to settle down, slowly formed a relatively continuous view of the world and views on people, is this not a new world? Because of this, their views on marriage and friendship, their relationship with the land, their relationship with the previous generation, including their outlook on fertility, have undergone tremendous changes, which are not the same as before. Perhaps it is precisely because the space is no longer stable that everyone has to face their own world alone, and this world has to be built with existing experience, to find a place in the spiritual world again, so that their spirit can breathe freely.
Zhang Dinghao Huang Dehai