Modern Express News (reporter Zheng Wenjing) Jia Pingwo, known as the "evergreen tree of the literary world", has been engaged in literary creation for nearly fifty years since he published literary works in 1973, and has published a large number of works. On May 10, the People's Literature Publishing House launched Jia Pingwa's new work and long note novel "Qinling Record", which is Jia Pingwo's first work named after "Qinling" and his 19th novel.
Break through the boundaries of style
Write something different
Jia Pingwa became famous in the 1980s. In 1987, his first novel, Shangzhou, was written about the simple life of his hometown of Shangzhou in the countryside in the early 1980s. The following year, he released a novel "Impetuous", which won the Mobil Pegasus Literature Award in the United States, and also established his position in the Chinese literary circle. In 2008, "Qin Cavity" won the seventh "Mao Dun Literature" Award, which is the third work of Shaanxi writers to win this award after Lu Yao's "Ordinary World" and Chen Zhongzhong's "White Deer Plain".
In 2011, he published the 670,000-word novel "Ancient Furnace", which won the "Shi Nai'an Novel Award" and the 4th "Dream of the Red Chamber Literature Award".
After that, Jia Pingwo had new works come out almost every year. In 2013, he published "With Lights" and was awarded the "2013 China Good Book". Launched in 2014, Lao Sheng won the sixth "China Excellent Publication Book Award" in 2016. "Yamamoto" in 2018 is a strange book written by the writer for many years and has gone deep into Qinling several times to comfort Qinling. 2020's "Temporary Sitting" was also widely acclaimed.
From Shangzhou to Qinling, Jia Pingwa is constantly walking, and these solid works present the novelty and change of their texts and contents, which can be said that each one is a change of face, and the style is becoming more and more colorful. The publication of "Qinling Chronicle" has brought a different textual experience - note-taking novels.
When creating this work, Jia Pingwa said that he did not want to write the novels and essays that are now popular, but wanted to break through the boundaries of style and write something different. He believes that novels can borrow prose brushwork, and prose cannot absorb the meaning of novels. Thus the different "Qinling Chronicle" was born.
Carrying the Classic of Mountains and Seas and The Tale of Chatting with Zhiyi
The traditional cultural genes contained in it
This time, Jia Pingwo returned to the Qinling Mountains where he was born and grew up in Sisi, carrying the traditional cultural genes contained in the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" and "Liaozhai Zhiyi", leisurely channeling the things, personnel affairs, and historical events in the Qinling Mountains, and dedicating a chronicle of the grasses, trees, animals, villages, and characters of the Qinling Mountains and Rivers that have accumulated in his heart for many years.
The "Classic of Mountains and Seas" writes about the landscape of the ancestors and the imagination of the world, is an ancient book that preserves the most ancient Chinese mythological materials, and is also another form of Chinese history, covering the geography, astronomy, history, mythology, meteorology, animals, plants, minerals, medicine, religion, etc. of the ancient Chinese period; "Liaozhai Zhiyi" uses nearly 500 short stories, on the basis of inheriting the legends of Wei Jinzhi and the Tang and Song Dynasties, with its colorful character stories and aesthetic ideas of different customs. It has become a treasure of Chinese literary fiction.
Some critics say that Jia Pingwo had already paid tribute to the Classic of Mountains and Seas in his heart when he wrote "Shangzhou", and in many later works, the story telling method of "Liaozhai Zhiyi" can also be vaguely seen. And "The Record of Qinling" is the writer's "One Man's Classic of Mountains and Seas" and "One Man's Chat of Zhai Zhiyi" that the writer has been immersed in for many years and has accumulated half a life.
Indeed, in the Book of Qinling, the reader can see: loyal dogs that can understand people's words; caves where high monks enter and flow out of springs; soap horn trees where people hold and cry, and their leaves shed tears together; small clerks who can enter other people's dreams... These stories lead readers to break through the cramped and narrow reality of chicken feathers, and enter a chaotic and majestic and open situation, so that readers have an interest and imagination in traditional texts, and have the feeling of reading the contemporary "Classic of Mountains and Seas" and "Liaozhai Zhiyi".
As the designer of this book said: This is a traditional book full of magic, a long note novel written by Jia Pingwa, a chaotic and majestic mountain, and three unrelated beings are like heterogeneous isomorphisms in art design, pointing to the same theme - the endless Chinese context.
Seventy years of life insights for writers
Tell a long and modern story
"Life is sunny on some days, wind and frost, rain and snow on some days..."
"Sometimes there is a place for life, and there is a place for death, but in fact, a breath of qi comes out of the ground, from where it comes out and finally returns from where it comes back."
"Whether it is a man or a beast, a flower or a tree, or a crop, he will do a good job for man, he will do a good job for the beast, he will open branches and leaves for the flowers and trees, and the flowers will bloom, and the seedlings will grow strong for the crops, and try to produce long spikes, and the grains will be full."
These insights in "The Book of Qinling" come from the writer's seventy years of life insights. These sentences have no fancy rhetoric, and all the words are as if they grew out of the land, simple and unpretentious and full of sincerity and spirituality. As Jia Pingwo himself said: "The mountains and rivers of Qinling That I wrote about, people and people, did not dare to slacken off, perfunctory, frivolous and slippery, and strived to write every sentence of Chinese characters well." Although it is a mosquito that falls on the face of the lion, it is a mosquito on the face of the lion, and it is never a crab on the market, and the grass rope that bundles the crab also sells for a good price. ”
Jia Pingwa's works have always been both traditional and modern. "The Record of Qinling" is such a simple and thick text, telling a long and modern story, and it is interesting to read.
Notes on novels have existed since ancient times, and Lu Xun once roughly divided this kind of literature with more complicated content and free writing into two types: "Zhiren" and "Zhiwei". "Qin Ling" has both. The writing seems to be a transcript of the actual visit, and the ability tends to be strange. In the micro-reading room, the traces of the changing circumstances of survival, the filtering and clarification of customs, and the details of life and the taste of life in the depths of the mountains are faintly visible. Shi Zhanjun, editor-in-chief of the "People's Literature" magazine, said this about the stylistic characteristics of "Qinling".
Qinling has been writing about Qinling for decades
Write yourself as a small tree here
"Mr. Pingwo's hometown is in the meeting place between the north and the south, and this kind of spiritual beauty in the south and the roughness of the north have an impact on a writer's creative psychology, as well as a very subtle combination between the culture of the northwest region and the culture of the Central Plains and the south, which I think has formed a lot of Mr. Jia Pingwo's deep creative experience." The writer Mo Yan once said this about the influence of his hometown on Jia Pingwa's creation.
Jia Pingwo is a native of Qinling — "I am a person from Qinling, born there, raised there, and has been working and writing in Xi'an City for more than forty years, and Xi'an City is still under Qinling." ”
In the epilogue to "The Chronicle of Qinling", he said bluntly: "I laugh at myself, I was born in Qinling and grew up in Qinling, but I was just an ant in the fork of the Qinling ditch, constantly writing about Qinling, and even if I had a big idea, I only wrote myself as a small tree in Qinling at the end."
Indeed, Jia Pingwo "has been writing about Qinling", and "Qinling" has always been the foundation of Jia Pingwa's creation and the source of inspiration.
When writing Shanben in 2017, Jia Pingwa said that Qinling was "a dragon vein, standing there, carrying the Yellow River and the Yangtze River, ruling the north and south."
In 2021, he wrote "The Record of Qinling" again, but he did not know how to say Qinling: "Decades have passed, I have been writing about Qinling, writing about the glory and suffering of its history, writing about its realistic revitalization and sorrow, writing about its landscapes, plants, trees, birds and animals, writing about its spirit of Confucianism, Taoism and red revolution. First it was to focus on the Shangzhou in the Qinling Mountains, and then to zoom in to the entire Qinling Mountains. If I can sum up in one sentence, it is: Qinling and the me in Qinling. ”
As a long-term writer, Jia Pingwo usually does not have much time to go abroad or go abroad, and his living environment has always been in the Qinling Mountains, which has given Jia Pingwo a steady stream of creative inspiration, and he has always been sincere in depicting the grass and trees of the Qinling Mountains. It can be seen from the "Record of Qinling" that Jia Ping's mountains, plants, trees, flowers, birds, insects and fish are all spiritual, they not only have their own attitudes and attitudes towards life, but also constantly remind everyone who enters the "Qinling Mountains" or lives in the "Qinling Mountains" with their own state of existence and time karma: respect for tradition, reverence for nature, protection of ecology, and the coexistence law of man and all things in heaven and earth.
(Courtesy of publisher)