"Everyone has an obligation to feel that life is not easy, at least it takes a little trouble." Those "not easy in life" have created the novelist A B and filled the life of each of us. A few days ago, Ah Yi's new edition of the essay collection "The Sun is Fierce, Everything Manifests" was published by Yilin Publishing House. This book, Ah Yi creatively unfolded in the form of a dictionary, and included the keywords of his life and writing in alphabetical order: past experience, where he was, reading and watching movies, self-admonition... Through the text that wanders between reality and fiction, Ah B completes his search for himself. Singer Li Jian included "The Sun Is Fierce, Everything Appears" in the reading list: "Ah Yi's people are interesting, the works are wonderful, and this essay is vivid and concise. ”
"The sun is fierce, and everything is visible. The security guards hid in the shadows. The sweat of selling pancakes is raining down. Traffic on the viaduct is busy. You take a CT picture and think of the doctor saying, the lungs are dense, the shadows are a little heavy, our hospital is too small, you go to the big hospital. The essay in the essay collection "The Sun Is Fierce, Everything Appears," titled "Unreality," is only 67 words long, but it describes three normal lives under the sun—security guards, pancake vendors, and "you" seeking medical treatment. At the same time, you can also feel the author's exploration and thinking about life. In fact, in Ah Yi's case, essays serve as a stub of time, and their texture has another kind of simplicity and truth.
It is worth mentioning that the title of the essay collection "Sunshine Is Fierce, Everything Appears" also originates from this. In an interview with reporters, A B revealed: "'The sun is fierce, everything is manifested' is the title of one of the small articles in this book, it is written that I found a serious illness in the hospital, the weather was particularly sunny that day, I walked out of the hospital alone, and everyone around me was busy with their own business, I felt that all this was a disguise, or just a deliberate presentation." The world is so bright, but the truth is that everyone is going through their own hardships in everything.
Ah Yi is a writer with rich experience, and rich experience also means that he has experienced many difficulties in life: quitting his job in the county system and moving to many cities; writing has suddenly changed during the rising period, and illness has cast a huge shadow on writing... From the workplace, feelings, diseases, ideals, to the dumb mouth during the interview, the ringing of the phone for no reason when watching the drama, the moon cake that has not been eaten after the Mid-Autumn Festival... The "not easy things in life" in the book may have been experienced by everyone. In 2008, Ah Yi published his first collection of novels, "Grey Stories", and since then, he has been out of control. In 2010 alone, four of Ah Yi's short stories were published in the spring issue of Today; his second book, Birds, See Me; Accidental Murders won the People's Literature Novella Award; and he himself won the Most Promising Newcomer Award at the Chinese Literature Media Award. To this day, Ah Yi has successively published the novel collection "Where is Spring", "The Missing Person of Love History", "The Liar Came to the South", the medium novel "Wake Me Up at Nine in the Morning", "Below, What Should I Do", "Model Youth", and the essay collection "The Widow". His works have been translated into thirteen languages and published overseas.
The Sun Shines, Everything Appears is his 7th book published at the age of 39. It is quite interesting that now that the new edition of the book is launched 7 years later, there is actually a number "7". Looking back at his writing a few years ago, Ah Yi is also full of emotions, he frankly said: "Many authors in his writing career, will go through a process of 'full of emotions - try to restrain'. I am even more so. The book happens to be at a midpoint. It wants to restrain its feelings, only to make an objective description, and wants to get the reader's understanding and response, so it does not completely restrain it. ”
In fact, many of the articles included in this "Sunshine Fierce, Everything Manifests" essay collection are very similar to "Unreal", all of which are the same short and the same unfinished. For example, "Foreshadowing II" has only 7 words, but people can't look away for a long time. It is worth mentioning that the whole book is arranged in the order of the B-Z alphabet, and the titles at the beginning of each pinyin can be read separately together as small single pieces, and many pinyin sequences even have a poetic feeling, which is enough to give people a sense of freshness in reading. For example, a group of subtitles at the beginning of N: Twilight in the South, Loopholes in Men, Inner Terror, Girls, Goddesses, such sentences are full of poetry and make people think. For this form, Ah Yi explained: "Alphabetical arrangement in Han Lao, Milos and even the Borges Bookstore in Guangzhou have a tradition, which is an editorial aesthetic in literature. That bookstore is arranged from a to z by the author's initials, which is charming. ”
The "dictionary" was originally a literary form unique to Poland, consisting of a loose prose style composed of short texts (entries), and the articles were arranged in alphabetical order of the first letters of the entries. In 1997, the 86-year-old Polish poet and Nobel laureate in literature, Chesław Milosz, wrote his memoirs, a special book about the people and things he wanted to tell in the form of a dictionary, called the Milosz Dictionary. In Milosz's view, the greatest benefit of a dictionary is that it can be a substitute for a novel or memoir, a substitute for a lengthy essay about the 20th century, concise, jumpy, unrestrained, and freewheeling. And Ah Yi's "The Sun Is Fierce, All Things Manifest", strictly speaking, is not entirely an orthodox collection of prose essays, which includes notes, objects, scene depictions, novel exercises, notes on reading books and movies, miscellaneous feelings and reflections, and even poetry.
Ah Yi wrote a lot of words that he would not repeat in this book without reservation. There are more than a hundred entries under the letter, and there must be one that makes you feel empathy. For example, the letter D under the "Waiting" article, very short, writes that an old professor in his 70s walks to the center of the theater at a party for the 60th anniversary of the founding of a magazine, and recites, and halfway through the recitation, the door is pushed open, "Death, dressed in a tweed uniform, walks in, takes off his gloves, sits in the empty last row, and looks at him without a word." "The letter M under the letter 'Interview' is more and more familiar the more you read it." In 2001, I went to a newspaper in Tianjin for an interview. At a long conference table, there sat a dozen well-dressed old newspaper comrades and professors of the Journalism Academy, wearing glasses and calm expressions, looking at me, and occasionally someone tapped the table with a pen, and here sat only me, a young man from Jiangxi County. Before they could ask anything, I was crushed. I felt like everything I had stocked up —knowledge, beliefs, opinions, even test-taking skills—was locked up. I blushed under their arrogant gaze, and my hands and feet trembled. I was soaked in growing shame, and even wanted to stand up in sorrow, pull open the door and leave, even though I had sneaked in from thousands of miles away. I waited for them to announce the end of this interview. The article "Eye of the Knots" under the letter J refers to the French writer Anatole François's "Cranbier", Cranbier is an old vegetable seller who walks the streets and alleys, and when the police come to drive him, Cranbier hesitates to leave because he wants to wait for the guests who want to collect the vegetable money. Cranbir tried to explain to the police, but the police convicted Cranbier. Here, A B highlights the delay caused by the stalled return of mrs. Beal, the buyer, to return to the store to withdraw the money, and the delay caused by the tripped by the customer, which caused Cranbier to "clash" with the police for the sake of waiting for the vegetable money. At the end of the article, A B wrote: "The vegetable seller does not know how fragile the dignity of the police is, and the police do not know how difficult it is for the vegetable seller to survive. There is also the letter W under the "Wang Shouyi Thirteen Incense", which tells that many years ago, "I" went to her grandmother's house with my fiancée, and I did not bring enough things, so I went to a commissary to buy it, and the result was that only Wang Shouyi thirteen incense was taken there, and "I" took thirteen incense to give gifts. "If I marry her, our kids will all be in their teens." In the end, the fiancée did not become a wife after all. The "I" who "emotions will be lazy" cannot give women a sense of security after all. Ah Yi made a CT machine with his own pen and showed his life thoughts to everyone.
"The Sun Is Fierce, Everything Manifests" is also a private reading and movie history, a guide to the growth of writers worth learning. What books have you read on the road to writing, which movies you have seen, where the plot of the novel comes from, how to change the way the same story is written, how to overcome difficulties when writing... What to go through to become a writer, Ah Yi told them one by one. Writing books, Hemingway, Faulkner, Márquez, Maugham, Agatha Christie, Borges, Ryunosuke Wasagawa, etc., are all famous artists, and A B's perspective is different from the general. "Hemingway is like a souvenir of the market, and Faulkner is a lone temple with a hard climb." The French novella "The Outsider" by Albert Camus: "The outsider is passive, inactive, indifferent, involved in events, detached." Because he can do anything to him, he is portrayed as cold and insidious. He also mentioned the basic setting of La Traviata: "The concept is beautiful, and by breaking the beautiful, the beauty is highlighted, in four steps: A. The protagonist is set as a prostitute; B. Gifted to Margaret for lung disease; Kill Margaret in solitude; Open the coffin and let the reader witness the remains of the magnificent man with hollow eye sockets and green spots on his face. There is also "Zola's Selected Short Stories": "I picked out three articles, "The Foil", "The Victim of Advertising" and "Onshner", which were boring and tasteless, just like people who used to sit on the toilet dug out the old potty potty, and I really couldn't appreciate it." ”
Speaking of literature, "I think, in the end, I am its servant", and "always have to strike a dangerous balance between self-show and self-attack." I wrote something, eagerly, in one step, as if the salesman were introducing the function of the pot to a housewife. Everywhere you show off the causes and consequences of things. And a good writer will stop and start with the mood, the word mood is appropriate, it is a state, the atmosphere that surrounds your characters. Good writing, the words are clear and clear, like the flow of water under the sun, but there is an undercurrent lurking under the words. This undercurrent is vague and formless, but it really exists. It is done by the reader and the author together. This is the code for writing. Good writing is about passing the words clearly to the reader, like slowly stretching an earthworm into the water. "There are good teachers who tell me about the openness at the end of the novel, and it's an option. But I never dared to give up the finish line. Fiction, in my understanding, like film, has a definite end. I was afraid to see a movie with no conclusion. ”
Everyone who chooses to be alone is walking on the road of few people. Although this is a small part of the endless world, the root of many things, another possibility of life. He was always mean to himself without mercy, but never betrayed himself. There are some people in this world who lie in the mud and watch life squash themselves, while some people break through the fog barriers and tell us that people have the possibility of living in the clouds. From beginning to end, Ah Yi has turned himself into a foreigner who is in the city and can never intervene in it, and he is always diligent in recording the loneliness and coldness that cannot be erased and repeatedly struck. Compared with his novels, these essays are more like his bootlegs, more sincere, calmer and braver. (Readers' Daily All-Media Reporter He Jian)