Editor's Note
In order to vigorously recommend excellent works, The China Writers Network has set up a "Conference Room Ten" column to focus on those new literary works that have received widespread attention or have not been fully valued, invite young and middle-aged writers and critics to participate in the evaluation, collect special reviews, news dynamics, work interviews, creative paths and other relevant information, and jointly carry out reading and discussion with readers, and strive to comprehensively present the charm of the works from a rich perspective.
In the fifth issue of February 2022, we recommend Xu Zechen's short story collection "Qingcheng", "If the Snow Closes the Door", and "Running Through Zhongguancun". This group of works contains the writer's short and medium-length works, as well as new works in recent years. Xu Zechen's protagonists are mostly named after place names, and the heroines of the same name in Qingcheng, Juyan, and Xixia, as well as Dunhuang, Baoding, Chang'an, and Pingyao in other works, all leave a deep impression on readers. The preference for geography reveals the writer's attachment to a thick, deep, and different cultural space, and perhaps promises the endless life of human culture in a pluralistic world.
Xu Zechen, born in 1978 in Donghai, Jiangsu Province, graduated from the Department of Chinese of Peking University and is currently the deputy editor of People's Literature Magazine. He is the author of "Going North", "Jerusalem", "The Royal City Is Like the Sea", "Fairy Tales of Qingyun Valley", "Tales of the Western Suburbs of Beijing" and so on. He has won the Zhuang Chongwen Literature Award, the Chinese Literature and Media Award, the Novelist of the Year Award, the Lu Xun Literature Award Short Story Award, the National "Five One Project" Award, and the 10th Mao Dun Literature Award. Some of his works have been translated into nearly twenty languages, including English, French and German.
"Running Through Zhongguancun"
《Qingcheng》
"If the Snow Closes the Door"
Author: Xu Zechen
New Classics produced
Publisher: Beijing October Literature and Art Publishing House
Publication date: October 2021
Synopsis
"Qingcheng" includes two novellas created by the writer Xu Zechen, "Western Xia" and "Juyan", and the short story of the same name, "Qingcheng". The three works are concise and profound, and the author uses ancient place names full of historical significance as the spiritual symbols of the characters, and explores the emotional and spiritual self-consistency of modern women. Three sad and clear love stories tell the emotional encounters of three women, telling their hardships, bitterness, confusion and perseverance, and also writing about their integrity, tenacity, kindness and love.
"Running Through Zhongguancun" selects three novellas with the theme of "Beijing" in Xu Zechen's works, namely "Ah, Beijing", "Running Through Zhongguancun" and "Heaven on Earth". All three works tell the story of the living conditions of small people who are wandering in Beijing and are at the bottom of society. Under the bustling scene of Beijing, the author shows the dark, turbulent, embarrassing and not without comedy of the low-level life of the special group of "North Drift". "Running", running for survival, has a goal, has speed, and has strength; with the exuberant and upward vitality of the little people, it reflects the reality that they are struggling and unwilling to sink.
"If the Snow Closes the Door" selects seventeen short stories by Xu Zechen, and the content also covers the two major veins of the author's creation- "Beijing" and "Flower Street". With strong literary and ideological nature, the work expresses the theme of young people's struggle that the author has always explored. Most of the protagonists are well-intentioned and have the wisdom to make fun of suffering, and the author writes about the uneasiness in their lives and the turmoil of their souls. The text of the whole book is solid, sweet and warm, and the still water is deep, and there is a sense of close artistry and a sense of depth in thinking about the world, from which you can get a glimpse of Xu Zechen's growth trajectory for more than ten years.
Featured reviews
Jiang Fei: Xu Zechen's "Utopia" and the Possibility of Fiction
Xu Zechen is a sober writer, I have always thought so. "Sober" means that a writer profoundly understands and constantly reflects on why he writes, knows how to persist and create when he is wrapped in tangible or intangible things and disciplined, and at the same time profoundly understands what he can write, understands how to expand the territory step by step, gradually forms his own problem awareness, historical consciousness and formal consciousness, and creates infinite possibilities in a limited text. Unfortunately, there are many people who write novels today, there are many novelists who are lost by the temptation of various desires, but there are very few "sober" novelists, and many noisy novels are either just illustrations of certain grand themes, or just telling stories for the sake of storytelling, or just blindly pandering to the vulgar aesthetics of the market and the general public, lacking both the reflective challenge of difficult writing and the unique innovation of the novel narrative, in the final analysis, it is "confused" writing, it is a "no-self" novel.
Zhao Yi: Xu Zechen's short and medium-length assertions: On the difficulty of "series of novels" and the three questions of "Qingcheng"
Obviously, the pain of metamorphosis gives birth to the typical growth of women, Xu Zechen focuses on shaping psychological characters, using psychological potential energy to express the stage of life as he says, and even implicitly conforms to the subconscious female understanding, but he has no intention of seeking the authority of some critical theory or discourse. Only in this way, we read more about the maternal image and cultural lyricism in the Chinese literary tradition, the former is the archetypal expression, and the latter borrows the ideographic function of symbols. One of the memories of Xixia, Juyan and Qingcheng to readers is that they are all capable women who can take care of housework, providing a warm and appropriate daily life for men such as Wang Yiding, Tang Tu, and Lao Tie. Motherhood is like a utopia, providing rest and stable perception, on the one hand, prompting the reader that the three women are not rebellious images, on the other hand, once again pointing to the trend of female image writing and its judgment, the cultural and ideological meaning of the female image has always been related to the fatherhood and the value world of the male image.
Nie Zhangjun: The Myth of Love in the Era of Materialization: Reading Xu Zechen's Novel Collection "Qingcheng"
The "eagle" is an important image in "Qingcheng", representing freedom and distance. Chasing the eagle's wings has also been Qingcheng's long-cherished wish. However, Qingcheng voluntarily gave up the distance and decisively left the man who watched the eagle with her. From "Running Through Zhongguancun" and "Night Train", to "Jerusalem" and "Going North", "going to the far side" has always been the consistent theme of Xu Zechen's novel creation. In "Qingcheng", there is another trade-off between the far side and the foot in love. The three works all leave suspense in the ending, the past of Xixia, the person juyan meets at the end, and where the love between Qingcheng and Lao Tie will go. The truth doesn't really matter, just as the myth about love is true or not. Love can be the myth of the fall of the country, the mountain calling the tsunami; it can also be the daily life of chai rice oil and salt, and the waves are not alarming. Qingcheng accepted the reality that "eagles don't cough", and "a little wild" she practiced the restrained and strict Zhao characters. The coexistence of romanticism and realism is the true meaning of love, or life.
Ah Tan: Look at the dazzling rise of the fireworks in the world - Xu Zechen's short story creation
Storytelling has almost always been the core driving force behind the narrative of Chinese novels, while modern Western novels have sublimated creation into an adventure that the mind enjoys tirelessly. Therefore, the former is slightly stagnant in the macroscopic, and the latter is more colorful in the microscopic, even to the point of defeating ordinary readers. In the camp of post-70s writers, Xu Zechen is undoubtedly well versed in the essence of Chinese novels, and he expands the new with appropriate and courageous efforts, not only adhering to the national roots of the novel, but also attaching a unique new era label to the realist text in the way of "making something out of nothing", which can be called the realist text of the new era. This is not only a difficult choice for sudden progress, but also a great progress and sharp prominence of realistic creation, which can be considered as an epochal continuation of the inherent temperament of Lu Xun's novels. His short and medium stories often replace the story with the breath of human fireworks in still water and deep currents, and activate and stir the thinking that focuses on narrative unfolding, so that the realist text towers above the clouds and soars into a broader and more dazzling new space. More than ten years of literary solo exploration and repeated practice of years of precipitation, the flower street teenager in the early years has already fully possessed the near-infinite breadth and depth of Chinese literature facing the future in the displacement of time and space.
Editor: Chen Zeyu