Writer Shi Zhongshan's latest novel "Ask the Vast Land" was recently launched by the People's Literature Publishing House, and an online sharing meeting was held, and writer Shi Zhongshan shared with the actor Sarina who starred in "Breaking into the Guandong" and "The World of Man", and Shi Yifeng, deputy editor of "Contemporary" magazine.
Since the writer Shi Zhongshan published his debut novel in the People's Liberation Army Literature and Art since he was 20 years old, he has published more than 100 novels and novel collections. His novel "Father Goes to town" was adapted into the TV series "The Years of Burning Passion", and the film and television drama adapted from another novel", "Happiness Like a Flower", has also attracted attention. Shi Zhongshan also crossed the film and television, serving as a screenwriter and producer, and his representative works include "The Years of Burning Passion", "Shi Guangrong and His Children", "Happiness Like a Flower", "Military Song Loud" and so on.
"Ask the Vast Land" online sharing session
Shi Zhongshan's new work "Asking the Vast Land" was published in the "Selected Contemporary Novels" in 2021, No. 5, and the single book was published by the People's Literature Publishing. "Asking the Vast Land" is a "cat and mouse game" in which Bi Jian, chief of the intelligence section of the Social Department of the Northeast Bureau, and the Kuomintang agent code-named "Old Master" on the eve of the liberation of the Northeast Bureau, spent his whole life.
From "On the Cliff" to "Rebels", spy war works have been widely popular in the past two years. Shi Zhongshan said that "Ask the Vast Land" is a continuation of the spy dramas he wrote before, "Underground" and "Mainland Island", but this is an "atypical spy drama", because the story shows more of a contest between people, introspection and repentance, as well as the fate of the characters in the context of the big era.
The story enters the scene of life in northeast China familiar to the author from the liberation of Shenyang in October 1948, "what is important is the details of the living environment, the details of the survival of the characters, and the characteristics of the times." In this book, I want to break the solidified result of the spy drama novel, and put my protagonist, especially this kind of anti-Number One 'old master' pseudonym Wang Shouye, such an old and treacherous and slippery personal figure, in the context of the big political climate of the new era, to see his changes. Of course, our protagonist is also driven by faith, from the intelligence section, and finally to the public security bureau, for many years has not given up the search for the 'old man'. What stands out more in this book is the beliefs of a group of us. It is precisely because of this belief that we have come to the end and let our story have such an ending. Shi Zhongshan said.
Sarina, an actress who recently played the mother of the Zhou family in the hit TV series "The World of Man", is also a good friend of Shi Zhongshan for many years. In the dialogue, she said that she had admired writers since she was a child, and when she graduated from college, she had secretly attended classes in the military writers class where Shi Zhongshan was studying. After watching the TV series "The Years of Burning Passion" and "Happiness Like a Flower" adapted from Shi Zhongshan's works, she went to read the original work again and found that the power of words was more powerful.
Sharing from the perspective of the contrast between genre novels and serious novels, the critic Meng Fanhua believes that Shi Zhongshan's novels are genre novels, and genre novels provide a very good reference for serious literature.
Meng Fanhua said that Shi Zhongshan's previous military-themed novels contributed to shaping a new military image, such as "Shi Guangrong" in "The Years of Burning Passion", which is different from the righteous and flawless character image in the past; at the same time, the film and television drama adapted from Shi Zhongshan's novel made such theme works more lifelike, thus winning the love of the majority of audiences. Talking about Shi Zhongshan's new work "Asking the Vast Land", Meng Fanhua said that he would prefer to see it as an "anti-special novel". Because of the success of a series of works from "Latent" to "Cliff", spy dramas have become a trend, such works are written by our personnel to break into the enemy's interior, and Shi Zhongshan's new work continues the tradition of "anti-special themes" in classic works such as "Yangcheng Dark Sentinel" and "Secret Drawings", which is also a type that readers and audiences like to hear. Regarding the title of the novel, he made a unique interpretation, "Ask the vast earth" comes from Chairman Mao's poem, and the next sentence is "who is the lord of the ups and downs", although there is no positive mention in the novel, but the reader can naturally get the answer in reading, and in the general trend of the times, "who is the master of the ups and downs".
The young writer Shi Yifeng, who is also the editor of The Contemporary magazine, is very familiar with Shi Zhongshan's novels and vividly summarizes the characteristics of them as "writing backwards". For example, Shi Zhongshan's Shi Guangrong is a combat hero and a lifelong warrior, but he does not write about the big thoughts and big events of this big man, but about the small events that Shi Guangrong deals with his daughter-in-law, children, and neighbors in his life. In the past, the monotony of military-themed works was that they only wrote big people from the big place, in fact, to write the spiritual "big" of big people, they often had to write from small places.
