On the vast land of northern Xinjiang, the snow is white, everything is desolate, and a group of statues dressed in black and with solemn looks stand here silently, as if they have gone through thousands of years. Recently, a video taken by Liu Liangcheng was widely circulated among friends and readers. These statues, known by Liu Liangcheng as "Manggusi", are from the Mongolian heroic epic "Jianger", and are also the fierce enemies of the demons in Liu Liangcheng's new book "Bemba" in which countless warriors fight to defend their homeland. Recently, Liu Liangcheng's new book "Bemba" was launched by Yilin Publishing House, liu Liangcheng said in an interview: "'Bemba' is the most enjoyable novel I have written, and it is also the childhood epic I wrote to myself, and the most naïve time in my writing history. ”
I have been looking at the world with the eyes of my childhood
"It's the most naïve time I've ever written"
"Bemba" tells the story of three children: a child who stays in lactation and does not want to grow up; a child who does not want to be born and is forced to return to his mother's womb; and a child who manages the outside country in the mother's womb; they make the weight of the real world into a relaxed and fun game to play the whole world.
Speaking of the creation of "Bemba", Liu Liangcheng said that it began more than a decade ago, and more than a decade ago, Liu Liangcheng traveled to Xinjiang and Buxel Mongolian Autonomous County, which is the hometown of the hero Jiang Ge. Located on the northwestern edge of the Junggar Basin, "sheep roads are spread over every valley prairie, a path that sheep have walked for thousands of years, embedded deep in the earth." "He was so shocked that he traveled all over the grasslands and mountains and met many herders. Since then, Liu Liangcheng began to read the Mongolian heroic epic "Jianger", and he never forgot this grassland, "In those ancient nights, on the vast steppe, a group of people sat around, listening to these raps, and heard the moon set stars and the east white, all without tiredness." Touched by the hope and strength that epic innocence brings to the tribe, and by the brilliant imagination of time in human childhood, he has since germinated the idea of "writing a naïve novel." For more than a decade, this idea gradually expanded from birth to become a novel "Bemba".
For "Bemba", Liu Liangcheng also told such a story, Liu Liangcheng and his little granddaughter once played such a game, "She said to go to the store to buy me a bag of salt, she asked her aunt how much salt was in the cabinet by the wall, and then handed me a bag she bought." In fact, there was nothing, but she very seriously gave me a bag of salt that was not there, I took it in my hand, smelled it, she asked me if it was salty, I made a very salty expression, a bag of salt that did not, just gave it to my hand." Liu Liangcheng admitted that when he was a child, he must have taken many things that he did not have, and then he threw them away and forgot, "As soon as people grow up, they no longer believe in things that they do not have, but fortunately there is literature, and literature is made out of nothing in the real world."
When the little granddaughter put a bag of salt that did not exist into Liu Liangcheng's hand, Liu Liangcheng found the basis for the existence of the novel "Bemba". "When I was 2 years old, I had countless things that I didn't have. It's just that I grew up. I threw that two-year-old self into my childhood. It's just adults who grow up. The elders are only the old men. It has nothing to do with that child."
Liu Liangcheng has written many childhood stories, and he has always looked at the world with the eyes from childhood, "Although I also have a pair of adult eyes that can see the world and see the world thoroughly, I don't like to be thorough, and once I see the bottom, I pursue infinity."
Every time I write, when Liu Liangcheng writes to the deepest depths, there is always a lonely child sitting in his heart. "He's always been small and doesn't want to grow up. He jumped out from time to time and took control of my mind. He didn't recognize me as an adult. He would stand up and say no, no, no. Like my little granddaughter, I took her for a walk and I said it was getting dark, let's go home. She said no, no, it wouldn't get dark. When she said it wouldn't get dark, I believed it, and I knew that even if it was dark, she would take a day and put it in the palm of my hand."
The motif of most works is time
"I want to write about the face of time in Bemba"
In "Bemba", Liu Liangcheng stands at the end of the epic to restart time, reorganizing the mountains and rivers where the imagination of the ancients stopped, and achieving this novel full of imagination and naïve language, shaping a country of Bemba that does not age and does not die, and everyone lives at the age of twenty-five.
What is the deep meaning of this treatment, Liu Liangcheng frankly said, "I want to use time as an essence in "Bemba", rather than a means to write, write the face of time. ”
Many writers often devote their energy to telling a good story, but Liu Liangcheng does the opposite, although he has a story, he is more concerned about the core of the package in the story.
In Bemba, this kernel is time. Liu Liangcheng believes that in fact, the predecessors are imagining time, they are in that era, surrounded by powerful Manggusi (enemies), people are afraid of aging, once they age, they will be bullied and conquered by others, so they naively imagined a "everyone lives at the age of twenty-five" Bemba country, not aging or dying, are young people, strong enough to resist all foreign enemies. "If time doesn't go forward, they have enough time to eat, drink, and fight, and if they lose one battle, they can fight the next." "Bemba" then goes on to think about the concept of time: What is time for us? What kind of situation can we imagine about time?
Writer Bi Feiyu sighed: "We can't write such works, we are a category, and he (Liu Liangcheng) is a category." ”
Not only "Bemba", in fact, the motif of most of Liu Liangcheng's works is time, he transcends the surface of the story and writes the essence of time with a posture of flying off the ground. He once said: "I hope that my words will eventually show a face of time." The village is the expression of this face of time. It's slow and long, and it's the way it looks like time I know. ”
Whether it is "A Man's Village" written in the early years of working in Urumqi, or the later novels "Virtual Earth", "Chiseled Void", and "Carrying Words", they are closely related to time, and "Bemba" can be described as a fantasy novel that travels arbitrarily through time.
During the interview, the reporter also learned that in fact, Liu Liangcheng initially embarked on the road of writing as an amateur literary youth. After graduating from secondary school, he worked as an agricultural machinery manager, wrote poetry at the age of twenty, wrote the essay "A Man's Village" in Urumqi in his thirties, and returned to the countryside from the city after the age of fifty, built a college, and appointed himself dean. He farms, plants flowers, raises dogs, feeds chickens, and still writes.
On social platforms, he calls himself "Liu Liangcheng Village", while in the city's schools, bookstores and podiums, he is known as "Writer Liu Liangcheng". It can be said that Liu Liangcheng is a real pastoral writer, but also a spiritual guardian under the clamor of materialism.
In 2014, he single-handedly created Xinjiang's first artist village, Rapeseed Valley, and devoted himself to building Mulei Academy, practicing and cultivating and reading the lifestyle, which can be called "contemporary Tao Yuanming", poetically inhabiting between ideal and reality. In his eyes, all things have a spirit, he will smile at a flower, watch the wind blow the shadow obliquely, measure how far a wind is, and heal the body and mind of modern people with Miyazaki-like time and space. Li Juan, a writer in Xinjiang, once said, "Liu Liangcheng stood in the center of the village, did not squint, and slowly wrote all the warm and down-to-earth things: a village where people and animals coexist, the details of a soft and joyful life, an ancient and solemn order, and a fair and beautiful destiny." "This is a moving footnote to Liu Liangcheng's work. Yangzi Evening News/Purple Cow News reporter Huang Yanwen