"Life is sunny on some days, wind and frost, rain and snow on some days..."
"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."
Jia Pingwa's latest long-length notebook novel, "The Record of Qinling", is published by the People's Literature Publishing House, which is his 19th novel in the past 50 years of literary creation, and the first work named after "Qinling".
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. ”
Whether it is novels or essays, the stories written by Jia Pingwa all occur in the sense of literary geography in the north and south of qinling, and most of the important events in China's great history also occur here. 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 piece of grass to grow in a ravine. He regarded those peaks as the knot of tall and heroic qi, and those ponds as the gathering of cool and moist qi. Each tree is a building, the various branches and strands of the form that is for balance, the staggered rhythm of the tree and the tree, and their echo with the surrounding environment, let him know the life of the place, but also let him understand the expression of time.
Corresponding to the chaotic majesty and vastness of the Qinling Mountains, Jia Ping's concave breaks through the boundaries of style, consciously inherits the tradition of classical Chinese texts, and has its own style in terms of interesting brushwork. Jia Pingwa said: "'Yamamoto' is a long novel, "Qinling" is short, more than 100,000 words, and some people think it is a note-taking novel after reading it. When writing unconsciously, only realize that this is like water, water can not be separated, water is water after all, write the water out, others can use buckets to hold can be square, with a basin to hold can also be round. ”
In 1987, Jia Pingwa's 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 7th 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, the 670,000-word novel "Ancient Furnace" was released and won the "Shi Nai'an Long Fiction Award" and the fourth "Dream of the Red Chamber Literature Award". After that, Jia Pingwo had new works come out almost every year.
From Shangzhou to Qinling, Jia Pingwa is constantly walking, these solid works, presenting the novelty and change of text and content, it can be said that each one is a change of face, and the style is becoming more and more colorful. 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. As a result, a different "Qinling Chronicle" was born.
"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. 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, commented on the stylistic characteristics of "Qinling Chronicle".
The insight in "QinLing" comes from the writer's life insight. 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. ”
Some critics believe that Jia Pingwo had already paid tribute to the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" in his heart as early as when he wrote "Shangzhou", 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.
Indeed, in "The Book of Qinling", the reader can see: a loyal dog who can understand people's words; a soap horn tree who holds and cries when people hold and cry, and the leaves will shed tears together; a small clerk who can enter the dreams of others... These stories lead readers to break through the cramped and narrow reality and enter a chaotic and majestic and open situation, so that readers have an interest and imagination in traditional texts, and produce the feeling of reading the contemporary "Classic of Mountains and Seas" and "Liaozhai Zhiyi".
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." "Mr. Ping'ao's hometown is in the confluence of the north and the south, and this kind of spiritual beauty in the south and the ruggedness 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 Pingwa's deep creative experience." Mo Yan once said this about the influence of his hometown on Jia Pingwa's creation.
In the afterword to "The Book of Qinling", Jia Pingwo wrote: "I laugh at myself, born in Qinling and grown up in Qinling, but an ant in the fork of qinling ditch, constantly writing about Qinling, no matter how big the idea is, at the end of the day, I only write myself as a small tree in Qinling." ”