Qianjiang Evening News Hourly News Reporter Song Hao Correspondent Fu Lin
Chen Yingsong, a writer and winner of the Lu Xun Literature Prize, launched a long new work "Tianlu Bay" a few months ago.
Since the early years of "Ma Xiling Blood Case", it has been deeply loved by readers. In 2020, his "Flying Locust Story" and "Hunter Peak" were on the eighth Chunfeng Yue Reading List, and this book is also one of the "'70 Years of Innovation to Serve the Country' Large-scale Reportage Literature Series" (the 2019 key theme publishing project of the Central Propaganda Department).
The novel "Tianluwan" takes the forty years of reform and opening up as the background of the times, lyrically describes the long and arduous entrepreneurial history of the peasants in the Jianghan Plain to achieve poverty alleviation and prosperity through struggle, and the panorama reproduces the great process of change in China's contemporary countryside.
Chen Yingsong's hometown of Gong'an County, Jingzhou City, Hubei Province, And Gong'an County, which was famous for the "Gong'an faction" Yuan Zongdao brothers in the late Ming Dynasty, is today the "First Grape County in Jiangnan", and "Tianlu Bay" revolves around the grape industry.
This contemporary vernacular novel contains the author's feelings for his hometown, for the land, and for agriculture? Recently, the author Chen Yingsong accepted a media group interview and shared the creation story of "Tianlu Bay".
"Tianlu Bay" is inspired by hometown and also from life
"Inspiration comes from home, but also from life. The purpose of writing this book is to record the history of reform and opening up in the Jianghan Plain of Hubei Province over the past 40 years, and the history of the development of the grape industry from scratch. Chen Yingsong said.
Starting with fieldwork in 2019 and writing in 2020, which lasted two years, "Tianlu Bay", a novel set in the grape industry and depicting the feelings of two generations of farmers about the land, was finally born.
For Jiangnan, grapes are a foreign fruit, it does not belong to this land, and Gong'an County has no history of growing grapes in the past. It wasn't until the 1980s that this law was broken under the exploration of several farmers, and later grapes even became a huge agricultural industry here.
In "Tianlu Bay", the introduction, planting, processing and output of grapes all have the special meaning and connotation given to it by the times, and these are derived from Chen Yingsong's deep "nostalgia".
Realistic depictions of reverence and gratitude to farmers
"In this novel, I can sum up my mood with these eight words: praise the land, praise the peasants." Chen Yingsong remembered that the countryside was once a kind of farming life that worked at sunrise and rested at sunset, with adobe houses, mud roads, faces facing the loess and back to the sky, and endless labor, picking dung, digging ditches, hoeing grass, planting seedlings... There is nothing that is not a heavy coolie. But in "Tianlu Bay", the image of backward farmers no longer exists, and readers can see the image of new farmers who dare to explore and innovate.
Chen Yingsong said: "For writers, fieldwork is an essential skill, and only when you really go to the field and walk in life can you truly perceive the awe-inspiring qualities of farmers." ”
Compared with other previous works, he admits that "Tianlu Bay" is an "outlier" in all his works. In the past, he wrote the Shennongjia series of novels, wrote about the poor life in the alpine mountains, and wrote about the mysterious and magical critical realism themes. And this novel, which originates from nostalgia, originates from the field, and has a story development spanning thirty or forty years, is completely a pure expression, and it is completely colloquial, life-like, and regionalized in writing.
Each of the characters in the book even has an archetype that carries their character traits. Chen Yingsong said: "By writing this work, I want to tell you that the peasants are indeed the greatest people in our time. ”
Feel the development of agriculture from the stories of farmers, and witness the changes of the times in a small place
China has been a big agricultural country since ancient times, and the idea of "agriculture-oriented, bengu bangning" shows the fragrance of the new era in Chen Yingsong's stories and character portrayals. In the traditional farming era, farmers used their hands as weapons, without advanced technology and without rich knowledge.
However, in real life, after the realization of agricultural mechanization, the peasants have completely bid farewell to agricultural life, and learning new knowledge and mastering modern agricultural science and technology are the top priorities in front of them. In "Tianlu Bay", the spiritual world of the farmers in the Jianghan Plain has undergone tremendous changes, and each grape has witnessed the development of modern science and technology, which reflects the promising and promising future of modern agriculture.
"When I was in a city in 2009, I found that almost overnight the countryside had been mechanized, and farmers no longer needed hoes, sickles and cattle, no weeding, no need to plant seedlings and cut grains, and everything was handed over to machinery." The clever, shrewd, and knowledgeable peasants have emerged, and modern, advanced, and fashionable new rural areas have blossomed everywhere.
This novel, which uses grapes to string nostalgia, is also a tribute to witnessing the changes of the times in a small place.
Chen Yingsong has published more than 100 novels, novel collections, prose collections, and poetry collections. His works have won several awards such as the Lu Xun Literature Award, the Chinese Novel Society Award, the People's Literature Award, the October Literature Award, the China Good Book Award, and the Spring Wind Yue Reading List. His works such as "Forest Silence", "Returning the Soul", "Hunter Peak", "Harvesting in the Sky" and so on are mostly set in Shennongjia, Hubei Province, and talk about his writing habits, he said that he mainly lives and writes in Shennongjia Mountain, because the air is fresh and the environment is quiet.
"'Tianlu Bay' is the subject of my first hometown, Shennongjia is my second hometown, the writer is born for the hometown, as a local writer, the symbol of the plain or the water town will surely appear again in future works."
This article is the original work of Qianjiang Evening News, without permission, it is forbidden to reprint, copy, excerpt, rewrite and carry out network dissemination of all works of copyright use, otherwise this newspaper will follow judicial channels to pursue the legal responsibility of the infringer.