"One Hundred Years of Solitude" is definitely a novel that has become a god.
But the number of readers who can read the novel can be said to be very small.
In the usual literary history, it is said that Mo Yan imitated Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude", but Mo Yan made a disguised denial, and he did not read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" in its entirety.
He only read the beginning of "One Hundred Years of Solitude", and then his hands itched and he began to write "Red Sorghum".
Ordinary people can't read the beginning of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and can't read it. Therefore, I was particularly impressed by the first sentence of the novel, because every time I reread it, I had to go back and read the first paragraph again.
"One Hundred Years of Solitude" is difficult to understand, and if you look at the reasons, you can think that the author is very unfriendly to readers, and deliberately writes the narrative so that it is unbearable to read. In the novel, there is a bunch of chaotic narratives, and large paragraphs of discussion replace the image portrayal, it can be said that the author gave up the shaping of the characters, but constantly piled up the characters, and swarmed up with the ancient brain.
Moreover, to read "One Hundred Years of Solitude", we must understand the historical background of Colombia, the author's country, but the history of Colombia is unknown to Chinese readers, and they do not know any superficial information about this country.
Illustration of One Hundred Years of Solitude
In fact, our distant perception of this country is also because of the civil unrest in this country that we hear a little bit.
And the novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" does not help us to perceive the touching emotions of the people of this country that can touch our hearts, so in the eyes of Chinese readers, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is more like a showmanship novel, without having a unique statement about the history of this country and an ingenious elaboration on the psychological potential of the people of this country.
Therefore, everyone is happily reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude", and if they can persist in reading it, they are still confused, and they will not leave any real impact on this country, nor will they have a deeper desire to care about the historical background and mentality of the people in this country.
Illustration of One Hundred Years of Solitude
But everyone is praising "One Hundred Years of Solitude", because it is easier to promote praise because it is difficult to read.
The first sentence in the novel, because everyone often reads this beginning countless times, is particularly impressed, and Chinese writers especially like to imitate this beginning.
One Hundred Years of Solitude begins: "Many years later, in the face of the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia will recall the distant afternoon when his father took him to see the ice." (Using translations translated by Huang Jinyan and others)
Illustration of One Hundred Years of Solitude
Márquez, who described himself as the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, said emotionally: "The discovery of Juan Rulfo, like the discovery of Franz Kafka, is undoubtedly an important chapter in my memory." ”
In Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo (translated by Tu Mengchao, Translation Lin Publishing House, September 2007 edition), there is a description that is believed to have been copied by Márquez:
"Father Redriard will recall that night many years from now. That night, the hard bed made it difficult for him to sleep, forcing him out of the house. Miguel Paramo died that night. ”——
Compared with the beginning of "One Hundred Years of Solitude", there is the keyword "many years later".
At the beginning of "One Hundred Years of Solitude", the recognized Chinese imitators are:
"White Deer Plain": "Bai Jiaxuan later became proud of the fact that he married seven women in his lifetime."
"Red Sorghum": "On the ninth day of the first month of August in the ancient calendar of 1939, my father, a bandit, was a little more than fourteen years old. He followed the team of the legendary hero Yu Zhan'ao, who later became famous all over the world, to ambush the Japanese car team on the Jiaoping Highway. ”
Stills from "Red Sorghum"
The beginning of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is usually considered to contain three kinds of time and space of "past, present, and future", thus overflowing and praising to the point of no return, calling it "this kind of beginning has never been in the past." ”
The three time-space points here are: the time and space where the narrator is located is "now", the "future" time and space is the execution moment of the execution team, which is the behavior that occurs in the future, and the time and space of the "past" is the memory of looking at the ice cube, which is relative to the narrator's present time point
Is this narrative really unique?
Non also.
Let's look for a passage from Tolstoy's War and Peace. This paragraph appears in section VII of the first part of the second volume (see page 36 of the 1992 edition of the People's Literature Publishing House):
"The wheels were still turning by inertia, and Miss Duke Maria long afterward remembered the fading screams of the wheels, merging with what had happened next in her memory."
Miss Maria
Here, according to the magic of the beginning of "One Hundred Years of Solitude", there are also three time and space, "now" is the time and space of the narrator, "past" is the wheel rolling away from this one thing, and "future" is the time when Miss Maria later recalls this special event.
Is this type of language as magical as we Chinese feel?
This kind of sentence pattern, in the Indo-European language system, because the "tense" is mixed in, and presents a very normal voice, such as the "past future tense" in English, which actually contains three time points, "now" is the time point of the narrator, "past" is the past point in time, and "future" is a time and space that is delayed than the past point.
Stills from War and Peace
Because there is no tense in the ancient Chinese language, it is fresh to feel the unpredictable changes in this tense, and it is also a headache for beginners to learn Indo-European languages.
In fact, this sentence pattern at the beginning of "One Hundred Years of Solitude", as long as we pay attention, we will find that various Indo-European literary works often appear.
Previously, the author has written that in the representative literature of the Stalin era in the Soviet Union, "Whetstone Farm", there is also such a sentence pattern. Logically speaking, the so-called dogmatic novels such as "Whetstone Farm" should not appear such fashionable sentence patterns, but in fact, the depth of the portrayal of human nature and society in this novel is very intriguing, and some of the novels in the language are also very surprising.
It can be seen from this that a very common sentence pattern in Spanish novels is analyzed by us as a classic analysis of strange goods, is it too demeaning to our own insight?