Mo Yan is the first Chinese Nobel Laureate in Literature, how high is this honor? Let's take a look at who has won this award before.
You may be more familiar with: Roman Rowland, George Bernard Shaw, Russell, Hemingway, Camus, Yasunari Kawabata, Solzhenitsyn, Bob Dylan...
Some people may feel that these are all master-level figures, is Mo Yan really qualified? To know whether Mo Yan has the strength to win the Nobel Prize in the end, we still have to read his works, which are the most convincing.
Born in the 1950s, Mo Yan began to create literature at the age of twenty, and in his early thirties he wrote the famous work "Red Sorghum Family", which is a literary height that many people cannot reach.
The book has also been hailed as "Mo Yan's most prestigious novel," and the New York Times book review also said that through this novel, the writer placed his "gaomi northeast township" on the map of world literature.
How good is this book? Twenty years later, Mo Yan re-read this book and could not help but sigh: people are old, and books are still young. He himself admitted: Although "Red Sorghum Family" is a rare work and has many rough technical points, the hero Haojiejia rogue's courage in the text is precisely to borrow the brute force of the newborn calf to erupt.
After reading this book, I confirmed my view of one thing: in any industry, there are geniuses. If geniuses work harder than ordinary people, they will be invincible. It is no exaggeration to say that Mo Yan's "Red Sorghum Family" is such a genius work.
For this book, more people may be familiar with the original book first, but the 1987 film "Red Sorghum" directed by Zhang Yimou, which finally won the Golden Bear Award at the 38th Berlin International Film Festival, which is also the first Asian film to receive this honor.
In the words of the more popular at the moment, it is that the artistic component of this film is very high, how high is it? Douban more than 200,000 people scored a high score of 8.5, which is of course inseparable from Zhang Yimou's personal ability, he has his own set of film language and narrative logic, which can also be said to be an invincible existence.
But just as importantly, Zhang Yimou came across a good script, a bullish original novel. Without the support of the characters and plot of the original novel, who can make a movie with a strong local temperament and national style in such a short period of time?
Mo Yan finished writing "Red Sorghum Family" in 1986, Zhang Yimou took it to make a movie in 1987, Mo Yan was still one of the screenwriters, at that time, both were in their thirties, it was the golden age of doing a career, and it was the strong combination of genius and genius.
The movie is good, but the original novel is more wonderful, absurd, bizarre, mysterious, thick, and the words pour out the author's genius-like Kit Kat ideas, flowing with the wildness of the spray, full of sad and desolate heroism and the rogue spirit of cunning and robbery.
What story does "Red Sorghum Family" tell? One sentence can be summed up, it tells the story of how the people of Gaomi Northeast Township resisted Japan. But this story, which was dismantled into several parts by the writer, disrupted time and space, and rearranged and combined.
The novel is divided into five parts, which completely disrupt the previous linear narrative structure in terms of plot, what you think is the beginning, maybe the end, the ending you read, maybe the beginning of the story. At first reading, I was a little confused, but I would soon be attracted and moved by the writer's meticulously woven period of folk anti-Japanese deeds in gaomi northeast township.
When I first read this book, I was amazed by the writer's rich life experience, meticulous life observation, whether it is everything in the field or the things in the farmhouse, the writer is familiar with it, using his precise and sophisticated language, portraying the truth and feeling, as if he saw the experience with his own eyes.
The writer's Gaomi Northeast Township is both rough and thick, but also precise and meticulous, full of the afterglow of the anti-Japanese resistance with artillery and bullets, but also full of thick nostalgic thoughts, both the praise and praise of the compatriots in the Gaomi Northeast Township who fought the bloody war of resistance, as well as the deep pain and mourning of the national land where I suffered a lot.
The biggest impact of this novel on me was that I didn't feel like I was reading a novel at all, I thought I was reading a local chronicle full of blood and legends, those splendid stories woven by the heart of the writer, the family past, as if it had really happened.
Writers call it a "family novel", the first novel in life, more or less will have the shadow of an autobiography, just like Cao Xueqin, who wrote the huge work "Dream of the Red Chamber", because there are many things in life, only by personally experiencing, can it be written truthfully and crediblely. I also believe that the writer wants to use the pen in his hand to erect a monument to the hot soil tree that nourished him, and to come out of the legend.
The bloody struggle on the bridge of the Ink River, the tired white bones in the sorghum field, the saltwater mouth that was destroyed... They are all telling the sad and bitter anti-Japanese past, Yu Zhan'ao is a bandit, but also a hero, a king and a bastard, but also a good man. In that special era, in the face of the great national righteousness, at the juncture of life and death, there were no absolutely good people, no evil bad people.
Uncle Luohan who was stripped alive, Qian'er's sister and brother who hid under the dry well, the insulted second grandmother, the incense officer who was killed by the bayonet, the jiu'er who fell on the way to deliver the meal, the old Geng who was stabbed eighteen times and did not die... Every ordinary person is telling that tragic history with his life.
Ten years after Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize, I opened up his literary world for the first time, approached the high-density northeast countryside that he had never stepped out of, and suddenly attracted by all kinds of absurd and bizarre, eerie, but clearly like legends that had happened and experienced, it seemed to restart the hormones that I had long since ceased to erupt, making me suddenly full of some kind of divine power.
That story is very far away from us, so far away that the characters in the story seem to have been sleeping for many years, but as Mo Yan said, people are old, and books are still young. Every time we re-read it, we can feel the overwhelming anger from "my grandfather" again, and the eternal charming youth from "my grandmother".
Author: Xi Si Shao, this article is to read less of the original works of the Red Chamber.