China Youth Daily Client News (China Youth Daily, China Youth Network reporter Jiang Xiaobin) Famous writer Jia Pingwa's new work and long note novel "Qinling Chronicle", recently published by the People's Literature Publishing House. He returned to the Qinling Mountains where he was born and grew up in Si, carrying the traditional cultural genes contained in the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" and "Liaozhai Zhiyi", and leisurely told the things, personnel and historical events in the Qinling Mountains, and wrote a history of the grasses, trees, animals, villages and characters of the Qinling Mountains and rivers.
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." This is his first work named after "Qinling" and his 19th novel.
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. ”
Jia Pingwo
In the past few years, Jia Pingwo has been to the Kunlun Mountains where the Qinling Mountains originated; to the Birds and Mice Tong cave mountain in the Qinling Mountains; to the Taibai Mountains and Huashan Mountains; to the Seventy-two Daoyu between the Taibai Mountains and the Huashan Mountains, as well as the Tianzhu Mountains and Shangshan Mountains in Shangluo, but he deeply feels that it is only a dime.
In the Qinling Mountains, Jia Pingwo realized what it was like for a bird to fly into the woods, and what it was like for a grass to grow in a ravine. He regarded the peaks as the knot of tall and heroic spirit, and the ponds as the gathering of cool and moist air, and the woods that appeared on the hillside or in the depression made him look at them the most.
"Life is the sun shining brightly on some days, the wind and frost in some days, rain and snow..." "Sometimes life, death has a place, in fact, people are a breath that comes out of the ground, from where it comes out and 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 life insights over the past 70 years. 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." ”
Corresponding to the chaos and majesty of Qinling, the vastness is boundless, in the new book, Jia Ping, who is seventy and does not exceed his heart, breaks through the boundaries of style, consciously inherits the tradition of classical Chinese texts, and has his own style in interesting brushwork.
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.
As early as when Jia Pingwa wrote "Shangzhou", he had already paid tribute to the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" in his heart, and in many later works, the story telling method of "Liaozhai Zhiyi" was also 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.
"Notes on novels have been around 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".
Jia Pingwa, known as the "evergreen tree of the literary world", has been engaged in literary creation for nearly 50 years since he published literary works in 1973. Looking back at previous works, from "Bingwa" to "Shangzhou Chulu", "Waxing Moon, Positive Moon", "Impetuous", and then to "White Night", "Qin Cavity", "Ancient Furnace", so that "Lao Sheng" and "Yamamoto", whether novels, essays, stories written by Jia Pingwa, all occurred in the north and south of Qinling in the sense of literary geography.
Jia Pingwo said bluntly in the afterword to "The Chronicle of Qinling": "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, and I kept writing about Qinling, and no matter how big my ideas were, I only wrote myself into a small tree in Qinling at the end."
Source: China Youth Daily client