"Dulan's writing is astonishing: a mixture of exuberance and decay, hardness and freshness. She is bright and agitated and cold and calm, hiding dirt and dirt and clean and pure. After reading "The Fool Unigo Disappeared", the famous writer Lindbergh expressed such an exclamation.
Mongolian, born in 1999, now studying at Inner Mongolia University, 22-year-old Du Lan has published works in well-known literary journals such as Harvest, People's Literature, october, etc., and won the Second Grassland Literature Award Newcomer Award, the 11th Ding Ling Literature Award , The 6th Chinese Young Writers Gemini Award, the 2021 Hall of Fame Annual Humanities List Annual Cutting-edge Writers and many other awards, becoming a highly anticipated new generation of literary newcomers.
Anning, a writer who is a college mentor, shared a story told by Dulan:
One day when she was in elementary school, the Chinese teacher taught the Chinese character "pain", and she did not have much understanding of the world, but she actually stared at the word "pain" on the blackboard, and her whole body hurt for a long time, as if the soul of the word "pain" pierced her body in an instant. It was then that she discovered that Chinese characters had such a great magic power that it seemed that once the characters met, they would grow flesh and blood, give birth to breath, produce heartbeats, and even scream. This discovery made her begin to read all books related to Chinese characters with hunger, and she even read the instructions for a household appliance from beginning to end simply because she liked Chinese characters that were completely different from Mongolian characters.
Extreme sensitivity to words, so that Du Lan's literary creation is unique, Anning did not hesitate to praise, "Just opened the door to writing, it showed a volcanic eruption trend, and writers of the same age, far behind." ”
"The Fool Unigo Disappeared" is Du Lan's first book, just listed on the Douban new book express, there are bean friends commented, "probably may be the most wonderful novel in 2022."
The high school writer and painting in the book, she was worried that the printer was too hard, so she only printed a book of her own poetry, secretly dreaming that one day her works could be seen by more people. Now, she pours her unbridled imagination into words and injects soul into all things.
"The Fool Unigo Disappeared" 11 stories, rooted in nature, growing in the wind of the grassland, strange imagination rides on the wind. An animistic world is gradually enriched in the pen of this petite and shy, even somewhat socially frightened little girl.
With colorful species, lush vegetation and soft sighs, my body flowed freely, walking towards the realm of qi-
My tenant, Unigo, disappeared in the spring when weasels were running around the world. Although he disappeared, I could pass by him almost every day. As long as I am willing to let my mind run on a track of memories, he is everywhere.
He came to my house on a summer night without power. At that time, I was chatting with my cook, Mauna Yanagisawa, on her back on the couch. She was born to a large, very frightening female black crow from Japan. The person who named her was a staff member of the Osaka Health Administration who was probably a loyal audience member of "14-Year-Old Mom." The handsome young man from Osaka died by eating an unknown mushroom with a thick and hard surface and a mushroom wheel on the stalk. Yanagisawa Wasuna was heartbroken by this. After becoming my cook, every time she cooked mushrooms, she would rub them on the mushroom lid with green onions. Although what she presented to me now was a human gesture—a woman in her mid-thirties with sparse hair. But she still retains some of the crow's bad habits—she always shaves my beard in conversation. That's why our conversation was always interrupted by my cries of "Oops, Oops." We didn't spot Unigo until Mauna Yanagisawa fell asleep and was awakened while chatting. She sat up straight and pressed her lips to my ear, and as she spoke softly, the smell of a cockroach came out of her mouth: "There is one more person in our house." ”
I was startled out of a cold sweat and looked around the pitch-black living room: "Who?" Where is he? ”
"I don't know," she said, "I had a dream that I was washing dishes in the kitchen. ”
"It's just an ordinary dream." I retorted to her.
"No, no, you wait for me to finish. I washed the celery and shallots first, then I washed the potatoes, and finally I washed the tomatoes. I put the last tomato in the basket, and then I thought, it's time for me to wake up. That's when the terrible thing happened! ”
"What's the matter?" I asked in horror.
"My dream became a piece of sketch paper. The paper was covered with fine wounds of blood beads. ”
"It's terrible," I asked her, "then why do you say there's one more person in the house?" ”
She almost lost half of her strength anymore, just curled up on the couch and gasped: "We should light a candle, he may be hidden under the dining table, or in the cupboard." I felt incredible and didn't believe her words. Yanagisawa Got up, clutching the hardest cup in the house, and slowly walked to the small wooden cabinet where the candles were stored. She kept trembling and shivering, and I couldn't help but start to feel sorry for her. I weakly called out her name: "Have you found the candle?" I fumbled my way to her in the dark. People meet each other is always so magical. Unigo was lying on the ground wearing a shirt of gray and lisqueur, and he was exactly the same as the pattern on the floor, like a chameleon. I didn't spot him and stepped on his forehead. Then I took Yanagisawa's hand and stepped on his belly and walked back to the couch. She lit the candle, and the candlelight filled the living room. Yanagisawa suddenly turned back and stared at the floor in surprise, "Look! A pretty boy! ”
Lying on the floor, Unigo had his big eyes wide open, his forehead and belly full of our footprints. He was a boy of fourteen or fifteen years old, full of the breath of a child and a girl, and his entire cheeks were sunk into two pits, and there were spots of finch droppings in them. He has an infinite beauty close to nature, lying on the floor like a soft plant, without any sense of violation. I was nervous, he was a complete stranger, he had come to my house under extremely abrupt circumstances. I firmly believed that a child with natural beauty needed to be controlled, so I tied him to the table with a rope made of red linen. He made a "grunting" sound similar to that of a white pigeon and a pronunciation of the word "road" in Buryat. I tried to talk to him and he spat at my mouth. I wasn't angry, I was even a little excited, but it wasn't long before I started to lose my excitement again. When Yanagisawa Masayuki approached him, he behaved unusually docile, even using the tip of his nose to push the Alxa agate necklace on her chest. He seemed to remind Yanagisawa of the gray-green crow eggs with fine brown spots. Yanagisawa's eyes were soft and misty, and she squinted, patted his back, and rubbed her breasts, as if there was nowhere to vent her motherly love.
I whispered to Yanagisawa, "Did this beautiful boy scratch your sketch paper?" ”
"No," he said, unigo, "it's the door." ”
"What door?"
"The gate, the shaking gate."
"Why is the gate shaking?"
"I came in from under the gate, and it started shaking."
"You mean the shaking door scratched the sketch paper?"
"Paper is the door, the wound is rust." He answered me in a strange proverb and in a green and enthusiastic voice, exuding a rare sense of elegance, "The door reminds you that it is rusty and that it needs oil." He tapped the leg of the table with his palm and made a snapping sound. Hearing this voice, I remembered who he was. I've seen him—on the road where there's no end in sight, where a beam of light can illuminate it, he swings a broken red racket, hitting the leaves, and constantly making a crackling sound. Unigo was the "fool tramp" who came to our town when the new mayor took office. He was always wandering the streets, saying inexplicable things to the townspeople, and was disliked. The reason I didn't recognize him in the first place was because his age wasn't fixed, and I could only recognize him by some sort of voice he made.
"What's your name?" I asked him.
"Unigo."
The name was unfamiliar to me, but if I added a "fool" in front of it, it became incomparably familiar to me. Everyone in the town would call him "Fool Unigo." The name Unigo is difficult to remember, but the name "Fool Unigo" is endowed with magical powers. It is pure and rustic, to the point and extremely dramatic, leaving people with deep and indelible memories. This may be another KISS principle (Keep It Simple and Stupid).
——Excerpt from Dolan's "The Fool Unigo Disappeared"
Recommended by famous artists
Roughly speaking, all of Doran's current works can be regarded as a kind of "metamorphosis"—closer to Ovid Rather than Kafka in temperament and realm. This is the most amazing thing about Wataru, who in an unpretentious way gives her people and things equal rights—the right to live, the right to die, and the right to live—from contempt for and disapproval of a visible social rule. Or rather, Watanabe has an extremely free heart, and she weaves her fairy tale, in which the death of a person is nothing more than a long breath, and if you hear this breath, she is still alive.
——Critic Yang Qingxiang
What really moved me about the novel was the core of the story wrapped in a strange imagination. She has a strong sense of theme, that is, every story, she has to present philosophical theme thinking.
—Writer Anning
When first acquainted with Dora's novel, the reader may be inexplicably shocked by the dense, witty and poetic words in the text, but it will also produce a sense of reading that the monk is confused about. While being amazed by the endless witticisms of Du lan, he will also be anxious about the "unintelligible" of his novel. The storytelling that deliberately avoids the human way of thinking has formed a set of "narrative secrets" that belong exclusively to the novel: the scattered story lines are fragmented and dismantled by the lyricism of the east and west; the characters are blurred, and the drifting narrator deliberately smears oil paint and paints the cheeks; the swaying story theme is not known where it is, and it is ripped away by the poetic sentences, and it is missing... Words are disconnected from the story, the narrative is arbitrary and arbitrary, and feelings or emotions become the only grippers. It can even be said that Watanabe has pioneered a new paradigm of fiction writing, namely "sensory experience fiction", or "emotional fiction".
This term is easily confused with the "new sensations" in the history of modern literature, but in essence it is a thousand miles away. Only from the perspective of materials and footholds, the New Sensation School emphasizes the depiction of modern cities, while Dulan plunges into the inner Mongolian steppe, experiencing the ancient and distant way of life, indulging in the daily life of small people, and even naturally rarely seeing modern things enter the pen because of its materials. Whether it is an emotional novel or a "feeling experience novel", it focuses on the unique aesthetic meaning brought by Dulan's novel and the aesthetic enjoyment it brings to the reader. What runs through the novel is not a story, nor is it to establish a biography for the characters, but a strong emotion, they are either sentimental, or warm, or soft, or rough, or lingering, or violent and manic, or cautious, or open and closed. It is not so much to highlight the texture of the novel, but rather to say that the narrative of those texts is a flow of emotions.
It's an extremely free writing, and it's also a writing that resists reading and anti-typological thinking. Because of this freedom and anti-typology, The Dora novel is full of "literary defamiliarization" This defamiliarization comes from the way stories are told and the language is fresh and elegant, and on the other hand, from grassland experience and local knowledge. In today's literary world, where the typology and assimilation of writing are becoming more and more serious, the two unfamiliar ways of Dulan's writing are also commonly used countermeasures by writers. The latter is mostly adopted by writers, and the vernacular literature of the early 20th century and the roots-seeking literature of the 1980s and below are all literary achievements and representatives in this regard. The former, on the other hand, tends to be more of an examination of literary forms, and generally cedes to modernists, avant-garde novels, etc. The dangerous road that the previous generations of writers rushed left and right to fight suddenly appeared to be light and calm here in Dulan. This is entirely due to the completion of "free writing", a kind of writing that is achieved in a "vigilant human mind" way. Needless to say, the innovation achieved by Dulan in literary form is bold, novel, and not fallen behind, but it does not appear time-consuming, laborious, and deliberate. She did it with all her naturalness and easily.
——Xie Shangfa
Related books
"The Fool Unigo Is Gone"
Written by Watanabe/
Beijing October Literature and Art Publishing House
Published in January 2022
"My tenant, Unigo, disappeared in the spring when weasels were running around the world. But as long as I'm willing to let my mind run on a track of memories, he's everywhere. ”
"The Fool Unigo Disappeared" is the first collection of short stories by young writer Du Lan, and the third book in the October Literary "Future Writers" book series.
Eleven stories, rooted in nature, grow in the wind of the grassland, strange imagination comes by the wind, and there is a mysterious atmosphere of foreign races, poetic discernment and insight, which are interspersed with vitality.
Du Lan fictionalizes the child of nature, the unigod of the zero ethnic group, the huge and ugly multi-legged monster Modlertu, who is full of gentle and generous powers, and the newborn gale who is not tolerated by the world... "There is a difference - resistance - return to nature", which is the fate of the characters and the narrative cycle of the novel' flow. When the "alien" becomes the protagonist, everything that is bound speaks for itself, and the sound is like an electric light shining between the lines, exhaling the equal will of all sentient beings to live and die.
The nascent chaos in Watanabe's pen is pure, like a strange fragrance swirling around the blades of grass, and the ashes drilling into the machine, and all things are one, facing a wide range of tolerance and freedom.
Du Lan, Mongolian, born in 1999, is currently studying at Inner Mongolia University. His works have appeared in literary journals such as Harvest, People's Literature, October, Youth Literature, and Young Writers. He won the Newcomer Award of the 2nd "Grassland" Literature Award, the 11th Ding Ling Literature Award and the New Talent Award, and the 6th Gemini Award for Young Chinese Writers.
Author's words
During the holidays, I read my high school notebook with my classmates, which was full of novels and poems, and it was full of memories when I opened it. I used to write and draw on paper and pass them on to my classmates before the evening self-study. Near the college entrance examination, I had a sudden idea and wanted to print a book of my own poems. Students used the phrase "Fill up another cup!" "What a lovely thing to flip through my book." After getting ready, I took advantage of the weekend to find a print shop, and after entering the store to inquire, I found that I only had enough money to print a copy. The machines in the store seemed to be angry, and they said, "It's so tiring for a book to get us moving!" "On the way back to school, I was still thinking how nice it would be if there was a publishing house that could publish my books in the future. I'm stupid, I'm not very good at chatting, people read my books as if they're talking to me, and I love that feeling.
This year, thanks to the many well-meaning people with wings, I not only made my dreams come true, but also did not have to apologize to the bulging machine. "The wind makes the wind chimes become the wind, and the winter makes the winter brew into the winter", I believe that these novels will become bolder and more real because of some wonderful changes in the same book.
May 4, 2021
At Inner Mongolia University
Editor: Xu Qingyang Xu VV
Photography: Yan Jin