Romance novels
Wang Anyi
Let me talk about the books I read when I was younger. I often say I like Tolstoy and Hugo, but when I was younger, Tolstoy wasn't my favorite writer and didn't particularly like Hugo. My favorite is Turgenev, a name that may be unfamiliar to you young people, because Russian literature is not fashionable today. When I was younger, I couldn't fully understand his novels. The Russian political background in the novel, the bitterness of the intellectuals, the lack of a way out of the ideas, the more profound contents I do not know much, the impression left in the memory is vague. Reading is like this, leaving what you like, putting aside the things you don't like and not understanding, waiting for the future days to know, as if ruminating. So, I only saw the love part. Turgenev's novels always have love, and it is unfortunate love, young people do not like smooth love, but are attracted by the tragedy of love, young people are always sad.
Turgenev's love story is sad. In First Love, a young boy falls in love with an adult woman, very, very deeply. In this love, there is not only lust, but also the desire to grow, hoping to enter the adult society and talk to this society on an equal footing. The woman was beautiful, gentle, and seemed to know his affections, with some subtle responses. As it turned out, she loved his father, a mature man who had lived through life and had a wife and children. This is not just a simple loss of love, but a game of failure, age, experience, maturity, and all this related to the charm of the game. However, there is a more distant game, this game is not yet finished, the winner has not yet been decided, that is, the time of the future. He will one day reach his father's age, but his father will never return to his youth. Therefore, both sides of the game, father and son, are painful. Turgenev's novel has a core relationship between father and son, and he has a long title called "Father and Son", but I don't notice it, I only see love, because I am also in the age of transformation, and love has enlightenment significance for growth.
Reading Turgenev's novels is really not something you read in vain. Slowly, we build a moral aesthetic, and those who love each other have not given up on altruism. Although love is selfish, intellectuals' ideals of humanity constrain them and keep them in a higher understanding of love, and tragedy is where tragedy occurs. Turgenev's stories are completely different from the life I experienced when I read them, and the people and things he wrote about were extravagant to my situation, but why did I get comfort and inspiration from them? There may be a secret passage, it may be youth, it may be the yearning for love, or it may be the need to grow. This can be said to be the true meaning of reading life, you and a certain book - I don't know which one, there will be a secret channel, it is this secret channel, so that you meet a confidant in the book, and it is lucky to meet this book.
The french writer Romain Rolland's ten-volume "John Christophe" is also a very good novel. Mr. Fu Lei's translation of the Chinese edition is divided into four books, and in the "Cultural Revolution", we do not know where to get the first one, which includes the first three volumes. The first three volumes are precisely the growth process of the characters from infancy to youth, and there is a love at each stage. For those of us who are young female readers, it's very exciting and satisfying. The first love is puppy kitten-like, with the heroine named Mina, a piano student of John Christophe. He was a poor boy with musical talent who had taken on the responsibility of supporting his family from an early age. In addition to playing in court bands, he also taught piano to help the family. Mina's mother, a widowed noblewoman, generously hired him as a piano teacher for her daughter Mina. Mina is a wayward girl, born superior, eating and wearing, and her mother spoils her. At first she looked down on Christophe, who was rather arrogant towards him because of his rude appearance, poor dress, lack of hygiene, and lack of manners. Christophe was a recognized child prodigy, and he did not buy her account, and the relationship between teachers and students was very tense. But one day, something happened that turned the situation around. On this day, the little teacher accused the student of playing a wrong note, Mina did not admit it, pointed to the score and said that it was so, Christophe looked closely at the score, but what he saw was the little hand of the girl petals completely unconsciously, and he kissed it on that hand. This one rash move scared both men. The quarrel subsided, the piano lesson continued, but the mood stirred.
Mina's life is very simple, and she has not reached the age of entering the social circle, and she has nothing to do all day, and it is inevitable that she will think wildly. Christophe's kiss gave her a new discovery, and it turned out that she had been deeply in love with the boy. Love covered her eyes, and then looked at Christophe, everything in his life became lovely, the piano played well, the talent was brilliant, his rudeness was nothing more than a manifestation of manhood, his ragged shirt was the style of the artist, and even his appearance became handsome. Christophe also thought that he had already loved Mina, and that their hostility was nothing more than a small awkwardness that was common between lovers. As a result, both fell into a love network. This love was soon seen by Mina's mother. She was a graceful woman, and she appreciated Christophe's talent, but she also understood that the class to which he belonged was different from theirs, and that the relationship between him and his daughter was just a child's game, an inappropriate game. So, instead of continuing to develop, she ended in time and left with Mina.
Later, Christophe meets Sapina and begins a second love affair. Young people's imaginations of love are conceptualized, so Sapina's story made me a little dissatisfied. First, she was older than him, a little widow who had been married once and had a child; second, she was not from a very good background, neither a princess nor Cinderella, but a lady boss, who opened a small shop with a needle and thread, and obviously lacked the romantic color of the heroine. Fortunately, the occurrence of their love is more dramatic. He followed Sapina to the countryside to attend a wedding feast for relatives, and outings and songs and dances created a folk party, and the secret feelings quickly grew. Because of the heavy rain, they stayed in the small hotel, and they broke the passage through the thin wall and pushed the door open with a raised hand. Both men knew that the other was standing on the other side of the wall, waiting for the other to strike, but neither had enough courage to finally stumble on the opportunity. This ending satisfies our tragic imagination of love, and when we read the novel later, we understand that in order to make a child into an adult, it takes a lot of tempering, and Mina is just practicing, as if imitating the adult relationship; when it comes to Sapina, it is lust that comes to the surface, which means not only the progress of external life, but also the internal - that is, the maturity of physical and mental development.
The third love made me even more unhappy. Ada is a rude woman who works as a clerk in a hat shop, which is even more secular. She and Christophe did not have any spiritual communication. He had piano lessons with Mina, Sardina had a chorus on a boat, and although Ada also met on an outing and also entered a country inn, it was deliberately arranged, the purpose was clear, and he quickly went to bed. This is too vulgar and revealing for our moral aesthetics, for abstinence education, and most importantly, for romantic love. Most disappointingly, Christophe was very content with this. At that time, we only had the first copy, and the next three didn't know where to get it. Years later, reading the whole book, it turned out that There was Still Andonard and Grazia waiting for us. By this time, our experience and reading have accumulated to the point where we can enjoy the poetry of its pathos to the fullest. It's like growing up with Christopher, the character in the book.
Now reading the book, my favorite paragraph is exactly the one I was impatient with and eager to skip. For example, Christophe entered the stage of rebellion, whether it was life love or music, there was no future, no meaning, he hated his environment and even his nation and country. He went to the Jewish family to find a heterogeneous culture, and then to the Arms of the French female singer, hoping to draw fresh life, he went to the group of folk music lovers, trying to trace the originality of music, but always ended in disappointment. At the most desperate time, because of an accident, involved in a security incident, he had to leave his hometown and go into exile in France. On the hastily boarded train, he shouted in the direction of Paris: "Save me, save my thoughts!" When he arrived in Paris, he found that music was like a big factory, full of chord-making shops, everywhere. But he still couldn't find the real music, and his mind still couldn't be saved. He went to literature to find, to social circles, to find in love, still did not understand the point. In the end, he fell ill and was stranded in the top floor of a low-rent apartment, surrounded by mediocre little citizens, trivial daily life, but felt that there was an artistic spirit quietly approaching. Later, he met Andonard's brother Olivier, who stayed at home for seven days and seven nights, talking about France, Germany, the nation, humanity, revolution... These chapters were seen as a burden when they were young, and they are sloppily skimmed over, but now they feel wonderful! Thank you very much Mr. Fu Lei, he translated so well, it was a feast of words. According to experts in French literature, "Mr. Fu Lei can be said to have rewritten this book. In French literature, Romain Rolland and Johann Christophe are far less influential than in China, thanks to Mr. Fu Lei's re-creation. "Sometimes, a book that gives you different nutrients at different stages becomes a kind of life experience.
Stills from the movie Jane Eyre (1970)
Jane Eyre was also a book I loved to read at the time. I read "Jane Eyre" in the bleak days of the Cultural Revolution, the story is far from reality, it takes place in another world, fortunate and unfortunate are interesting and meaningful. When I have read many books, I can't help but feel simple when I read Jane Eyre. Love and self-esteem, after ups and downs, and finally maintain a happy ending, are too sweet and similar to genre novels. But because of this, it nourished my tired life and eased my bitterness.
Reading has turned my life into two worlds—the life I actually lived and the life I imagined, and the relationship between the two is difficult for me to explain. They seem to be parallel, even contradictory, but they seem to intersect and harmonize, and I stand in the book and look at the actual life at the same time, and in the actual life, look at the book. They were separated from each other, and this distance opened up my vision.
This article is excerpted from Wang Anyi's Novel and Me, Guangxi Normal University Press
Writer Wang Anyi