What issues are women's writing concerned with? In novels, non-fiction and even picture books, how to present women's stories and women's dilemmas? Read women's stories from these new books below.
Fu Zhen's Zebra was published in January 2022
"Zebra" is based on some of the real experiences of the author Fu Zhen.
In the novel "Zebra", Fu Zhen wrote about the dilemma of women from all walks of life in marriage, family, workplace, and personal choice, and on the topic of women's anxiety, Fu Zhen believes that women do not have a stable, clear, and mainstream gender cognition like men. "Now that the traditional image of women has collapsed, we don't want to be goddesses, we don't want to be good wives and mothers, and we don't want to be hot moms or superhuman mothers, but new cognition has not yet been established." In the midst of this chaos and division, we become more and more anxious. ”
In "Zebra", the author deliberately designed two contrasting contrast groups, Allen, a 40-year-old female journalist from the United Kingdom, and Yu Jie, who came from a province in China, with the task of passing on the inheritance of the family, and finally committed suicide in a foreign country. Different categories of women have different and similar situations when facing childbearing. No matter where women give birth, whether they are in the fields, or in clinics in Bangkok that use medical means and have access to medical services, women are helpless when faced with the moment of childbirth.
In rivers and land, Beijing and Bangkok, "Zebra" is also full of exotic colors, and the life experiences of different countries are also woven into the novel by the author: "She looks at the purple void on the edge of the sky, as if it were a tunnel through time." Maybe this experience will seep into their flesh and blood, ushering in an unknown new relationship, or maybe it still can't escape the baptism of daily life, washed away by the cyclical tides. They will live in Beijing, or return to London, or move to Bangkok. Maybe it will be lonely, or there may be one or two children and a happy family. On a sunny Sunday, they walked together in the park, rode a bicycle, ate ice cream, enjoyed the trivial warmth of family life, but also endured the chaos and internal and external troubles that parents had to endure, and involuntarily began to worry about nuclear war and the future of the earth... But that's not all yet coming. At this moment, in the gap between the past and the future, she found her place in time. The past never dies, the future is still unknowable, but man always lives in the present, not in the past or the future. Eternity is made up of every present moment, and she has to learn to dwell in the eternal present. ”
Written by Walter Tevez and translated by Rear Wing Deserter, it was published in March 2022
The original work of "Abandoned Soldiers in the Rear Wing" was launched by the People's Literature Publishing House
At the end of 2020, a Netflix American drama called "Rear Wing Abandoned Soldier" received attention, and recently, the original work of "Rear Wing Abandoned Soldier" was launched by the People's Literature Publishing House, the Chinese translation was translated by translators and young writers, and Hou Yifan, a chess grandmaster and now the number one chess player in the women's world, served as a technical consultant.
The story of "Rear Wing Outcast" can be very simple to say: In the late 1950s, beth Harmon, an eight-year-old orphan girl in Kentucky, stumbled upon chess and eventually grew into a chess grandmaster.
Eight-year-old Beth was first noticed as a victim of a car accident that took away her mother, who was dependent on her. The statement published in the newspaper declared to the world that this child was alone in the world from now on, and her single shadow would never be hidden.
The children in the orphanage are just like her, subconsciously alert to the world. Adults distribute sedative pills in an attempt to stifle the child's liveliness and uniqueness with dullness and order. The children had uniform hairstyles, no personality, and a dull life, until Beth met a handyman in the basement playing chess, first watching, and then learning, that the world outside of chess was as if it had disappeared or assimilated, and it was no longer so unbearable. In the night when you can't sleep, the dark ceiling seems to be illuminated by a cone of light, transforming into a chessboard, and the world at this time is only her and chess. After that, she played the master, the master's friend, the boy chess player of the whole middle school, the chess player of the whole state, and the chess player of the whole country.
Walter Tevez, author of "Rear Wing Outcasts," said: "I feel like my characters are all very similar, they are all isolated individuals, doing things that are not fully understood or deeply empathized with by mainstream society, and I am always attracted to such people or things." Like Beth, he began learning chess at the age of eight, spent two years at a children's rehabilitation center, was given sedative pills, had a collection of forty or fifty chess books, and participated in nearly 20 chess tournaments. He admits that Rear Wing Outcasts is highly autobiographical. The reason why he wrote "Rear Wing Abandonment" with women as the main characters, he said that he believes that there is no physical or biological reason why women cannot become the top grandmasters like men. In the world he constructed, Beth was not limited to women's competitions, chess was a sport that was purely based on strength rather than gender.
But "Rear Wing Deserter" is not to establish male and female hostility, but to present absolute love and obsession regardless of gender. In Beth's world, she does not hate the inability to provide for her adoptive mother, but appreciates the appropriate freedom that her adoptive mother gives her, and she wants to win not every male who plays chess, but to find the most perfect way to play in her beloved chess world and enjoy the fun of intellectual competition. "Rear Wing Abandonment" certainly sets a model for women, but it is far more than that. She is each and every one of us, every ordinary person who is constantly groping in their favorite field and wants to make a name for themselves. The world of genius remains lonely and contradictory, just like every one of our worlds.
Stills from "Rear Wing Deserter"
Deborah Levy's Hot Milk was published in March 2022
What was the craziest thought you've ever had in the process of spending time with your parents?
"That day, I drove my mother up the highway. After driving for a while, I parked the car by the side of the road, moved her out with her wheelchair, pushed her to the middle of the road, and left her there. Not far away, a white truck was coming towards us. ”
This heart-wrenching scene comes from the novel "Hot Milk" by British writer Deborah Levy. The redesigned pink cover and the warm name "Hot Milk" are ironic to the content of the book, a book that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and tells the complex and delicate relationship between a mother and daughter who are dependent on each other.
In "Hot Milk", her mother Ruth is sick, like a spontaneous paralysis, trapping her in a wheelchair. For Sophia, who has a master's degree in anthropology, she had to interrupt her doctoral studies and make her mother's body her research subject. But whenever she tried to get close to the truth of the condition, the mother had completely different symptoms. Sophia sympathized with her mother, but was suspicious. Her mother's leg disease was like an invisible net, trapping her in her current life. And the mother, who claimed to be unconscious of her legs, could detect that the fly had landed on her leg and deftly slapped it off with the newspaper in her hand; in addition, she found that her mother had walked alone to the supermarket to buy a hair card... So, in the midst of great panic and contradiction, Sophia pushed her wheelchair-bound mother onto the highway.
The French feminist writer Elena Sisu once wrote in her article on women's writing, "The Laughter of Medusa", "A woman is never far from her 'mother', she always has a little milk that belongs to her mother." She writes in white ink. In Sisu's view, the "mother" could serve as an unnamed, non-functional source of goodness. This is a trait unique to women and different from men. From this dimension, "Hot Milk" is such a book soaked in white ink.
Levy focuses her pen on a woman's body and lust, and she writes about all women, young women, aging women, women who like men, women who like women. She writes about the truest appearance of the female body. Ruth "had a drooping chest, layers of flesh on her lower abdomen, and her skin was pale and silky." Sophia saw that her body was "getting bigger and bigger" because every day she was sunburned brown, and the extra flesh of her waist was squeezed out of her belt like coffee spilled from a paper cup.
The author Levy is adept at writing about the injustices and harms suffered by individual women in the wider world, while weaving into her reflections on the great proposition of humanity. "Hot Milk" is a profound exploration of her original family, intimate relationships, and individual dilemmas, as well as a concern for the common destiny of women.
Alessandra Olano, a translation by Canoe, Once Upon a Time I Thought About a Hundred, was published in March 2022
The picture book "Once I Thought about a Hundred" explains the difficulties of life
Feeling powerless, sad, helpless, one after another, "Why is life always unsatisfactory?" "Why didn't anyone come to help me?"
Alessandra Olano, the author of the picture book "Once Upon a Time I Thought About It A Hundred Times", is an illustrator and brand designer at The New York Times, and Olano is a person who is accustomed to planning for the future, but he did not expect that his life had undergone a series of upheavals: marriage breakdown, career collapse, and his mother's serious illness. To heal herself, she began painting. The translator Canoe believes that what the author is describing is not her own dilemma, but the problems that many women encounter in the process of life.
Book Shadow
Regarding the origin of creation, the author said: "When I was a little girl, I was used to following the rules, following some fixed process, and I wanted to figure out what would happen next. I resist and fear risks and accidents, which is why I'm always stuck in my comfort zone of feeling safe, and my life should have gone on like this. But it didn't go as well as I expected, and in fact, my life fell apart completely. Without the slightest warning, I suddenly found myself facing the breakdown of my marriage, the obstruction of my career, and my mother's serious illness at the same time. It felt like a boulder that could never be pushed apart pressed against my chest, pressing me to the point of almost suffocating. ”
In addition to words, more and more authors tend to heal themselves in the form of hand-drawn, appealing to emotions to images, which is an effective sorting out and recording of emotions, the author said: "The more I paint, the more subtle and rich my feelings are, which makes me finally experience an unprecedented power, a sense of humor that can compete with pain." ”