We are no strangers to stories.
As children, the bedtime stories that we listen to in the arms of our parents and listen to are either fanciful, fun, or warm, and moving, which are our first encounters with stories. The story was the most pleasant and irreplaceable lullaby for us at that time.
When we grow up, we can effortlessly see all kinds of stories on the Internet and on videos, and our ears and hearts are even about to be overwhelmed by the ocean of stories.
And in the fast-paced urban life, we seem to be increasingly inclined to exciting, violent, incredible stories, and for those static, thought-provoking stories, we seem to be gradually losing patience. Every time I pick up a thick book and open a movie that lasts more than two hours, I start to lose concentration and start to get sleepy.
Can we still go back to the time when we were nestled in a quilt, listening to stories, feeling stories, and thinking about stories? Check out this "Story Convenience Store."
Story Convenience Store
Luo Yijun
This book originated from the audio program "Story Convenience Store" that was urged more times to watch the ideal APP in 2019. The convenience store "boss" is Taiwanese novelist Luo Yijun, and the convenience store "shelves" are full of 40 stories, which are like a time machine, bringing us back to the time when we first listened to stories and harvested the happiness of listening to stories at the beginning.
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1
Weave stories in your life
Most of the stories in "Story Convenience Store" are Luo Yijun's personal experiences and trivial hearsay, he incarnated as an old friend you haven't seen for many years, in the tavern, in the most casual and humorous way, to tell his story.
Luo Yijun has an ability, probably a keen insight that belongs exclusively to novelists, and he can weave the most wonderful stories from the life of a chicken feather in a place. As a result, he was also called "the man who could tell the story the most", the same thing that seemed ordinary to most people, but suddenly became a good story in him.
In "Strange Circumstances", Luo Yijun tells the story of taking his wife to the 97th floor of the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong during his honeymoon. They mistakenly took the employee elevator of the Bank of China in Hong Kong, and as a result, they were locked on the 97th floor as criminals, and finally, they had to go to the first floor layer by layer. Meanwhile, SWAT troops are busy hunting them down and besieging them...
Luo Yijun told this story in a funny way, like a thrilling film noir, and even associated with Kafka's absurdity of people trapped in modern institutions:
"We were on the 97th floor and two of us ran down the stairwell, and when we ran fast, if there was an alien looking down from above, wouldn't it be like looking at a thunder dragon?" The Bank of China Building in Hong Kong is very much like a thunder dragon, but the spinal cavity of the thunder dragon is the stairwell where the two of us are running, a narrow space that comes down vertically from a high altitude. The two of us are like two fallen leaves, always spinning, all the way down, all the way down, all the way down... It sounds like a funny story, but if it continues to be told in other stories, it actually involves a very great name in the history of twentieth-century novels, called Kafka. ”
Luo Yijun uses such humor and ridicule, honesty and tenderness to pinch trivial daily life into a good story of psychedelic sentimentality and warmth and laughter, which are related to the common experience of ordinary people such as father, love, death, regret, comfort, sympathy, wishing, body, madness, dreams and so on.
These stories are like a beam of light shining into the small secret room in our hearts, penetrating the seemingly mysterious veil of the story - in fact, we are surrounded by stories every day, the fairy tales we listen to when we are children are stories, the novels we watch later are stories, and the movies are also stories... The stories that happen around us, and even our entire lives, can be said to be a story.
Although, most of us are not novelists, do not have the sensitivity of novelists to perceive stories, or the talent to tell stories. But when you step into this cozy story convenience store and browse the stories on the shelves, you can't help but think about how to tell a story of your own.
2
Experience life in the story
In the preface to the book, Luo Yijun shared such a small story:
"I write at a coffee house on weekdays, and a few times I meet a buddy or a girl and tell me a story about them, and it's as shocking to me as witnessing the Leo meteor shower burning the whole sky. I don't think the greatest novelist he or she told could make it up, but no one knew he had such a great story because he wasn't a novelist. ”
Those great novelists in the history of literature are not these sparkling pearls scattered in the corners of the world, picking them up one by one, and then using the art of storytelling to let these pearls illuminate the dark space of the world.
Stories From Convenience Store features many stories from classic novels, from Bolaño's 2666, Alice Monroe's Heirloom, Calvino's Castle of Fate, to Márquez's Happy Funeral in Dreams and Twelve Tales of a Foreign Land, Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country, and Schultz's Cinnamon Shop. Locke's retelling and interpretation of these novels in a military-unique perspective and easy-to-understand way not only reinvigorates the charm of the classics, but also invisibly arouses the reader's reading impulse.
For example, in the "Story about Making a Wish", Luo Yijun first told several ridiculous wishing stories that happened to him: making a wish with a bodhisattva, if he is admitted to college, he will be a vegetarian for a lifetime, if his classmates can wake up from his coma, he is willing to live ten years less... In the end, he actually brought out the Nobel Prize winner Alice Monroe's short story "Beam and Pillar Structure", in which the heroine of the novel made a wish to heaven in order to escape the revenge of her cousin's death, only to exchange her only happiness.
Looking at this novel alone, you may not be able to quickly understand the deep meaning, but in "Story Convenience Store", Luo Yijun is like a puzzle player, dismantling and disrupting the story of the novel and the story of daily life, and cleverly combining them into a complete puzzle. Literature has become no longer obscure, but has formed a clever interaction and fusion with life.
No wonder many readers who read the book will sigh - "Under his introduction and deconstruction, the world's famous works that are out of reach are no longer mysterious, and they seem to have a little more confidence in their hearts (the bottom that they can't read and can't understand)", "Planting several herbs" and "Simply a large-scale grass planting scene".
Part of Luo Yijun's "planting grass" book list
There must be some time in each of our lives when we encounter a state that cannot be described in the original vocabulary, such as attending a funeral for a loved one for the first time, or being betrayed by the person we love the most for the first time... And these "indescribable" and "mixed feelings" feelings can often find resonance in literary works.
Through reading, we make contact with the great novelists who have passed away, and if we are attentive enough, the experiences and emotions that flow through the body and mind of those people will also ripple in our hearts, and even inadvertently, their stories will become a small and beautiful thing, redeeming us who listen to the stories.
In "Story Convenience Store", you will find that the original novels are so close to our lives, they are not shelved and floating in mid-air, but in every interface, every possible relationship, and every choice of state that occurs in our daily lives, is the realization of the electric light of life.
3
Let the story nourish life
Today, we live in an era of information saturation, we can "watch" a movie in five minutes on a short video website, and "finish" a book in ten minutes, and these fast-food ways of acquiring knowledge seem to invisibly consume our patience with things and imagination of life.
We are less and less patient to finish a book, to listen to the words of those around us, to think about our relationship with the world. We are becoming more and more like a screw, constantly being tightened, and at the same time, we seem to be constantly anxious and confused.
Perhaps all we need is a good story. As Liang Wendao said: "Stories can contain too many things, and there are too many things that can be done with stories, such as the so-called reasoning, what is the reason that the story can't say?" ”
In a good story, you can appreciate the hazy poetry of life and the dark secrets of human nature, and harvest the comfort of emotion and the pleasure of wisdom.
The story lets us know the greatness of heaven and earth, the infinity of time, the smallness of man, and learn enthusiasm, humility and self-examination; let us gradually slow down in this era of accelerating rotation and gradually slow down to feel the real life.
There is a passage in "Story Convenience Store": "We may realize through these cleverly flipped stories that some moments in your life, some people you have forgotten for many years, they are actually a good story; realize that our hearts and ears that listen to stories do not need to be filled with today's overwhelming mobile phone information, online videos, advertisements, and serials." ”
Therefore, you may wish to try to feel the people and things around you with a delicate heart, weave stories from trivial days, listen to stories from excellent novels, maybe life will become more open, and exude hazy poetry and beauty.