Courtesy of writer Jia Pingwa People's Literature Publishing House
Beijing, May 10 (China News Network) (Reporter Ying Ni) "Life is the sun shining brightly on some days, the wind and frost rain and snow in some days..." "Sometimes life, death has a place, in fact, people are a gas that comes out of the ground, from where it comes out and finally where it comes back from." "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 he will bloom the flowers, and for the crops, the seedlings will grow strong, and they will bear long ears as much as possible, and the grains will be full."
The writer Jia Pingwa, known as the "evergreen tree of the literary world", presented his 19th novel, "The Record of Qinling".
Since his literary work was published in 1973, Jia Pingwa has been engaged in literary creation for nearly fifty years. 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, and stories written by Jia Pingwa, all occurred in the north and south of Qinling in the sense of literary geography. And "Qinling" is his first work named after "Qinling".
Asked why it was named, he said: The best adjective for Qinling is Qinling.
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. "I am a person in the Qinling Mountains, born there, raised there, and have worked and written in Xi'an City for more than forty years, and Xi'an City is still under the Qinling Mountains."
"Decades have passed, and I have been writing about Qinling, writing about the glory and suffering of its history, writing about the revitalization and sorrow of its reality, writing about the victory of its landscapes, plants, trees, birds and animals, and writing about its spirit of Confucianism, Taoism, and the 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. ”
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.
As the writer himself said: "The landscapes and rivers of the Qinling Mountains that he has written, everyone and the people, do not dare to slacken off, perfunctory, frivolous and slippery, and strive to write every sentence of the Chinese text." "The Record of Qinling" is such a simple and thick text, telling a long and modern story, and it is interesting to read.
The whole book tells nearly sixty Qinling stories in the form of notebook novels. The reader can see: loyal dogs that can understand people's words; caves where high monks enter and flow out of the spring; soap horn trees where people hold and cry, and the leaves shed tears together; fools who can write poetry, 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". "The Record of Qinling" can be described as the writer's "One Man's Classic of Mountains and Seas" and "One Man's Chat and Wisdom" that has been immersed in the years and accumulated half a life.
"Qinling Chronicle" book cover Courtesy of the People's Literature Publishing House
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".
Jia Pingwa also admitted that when creating this work, he did not want to write the novels and essays that are now popular, and 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 note-style novel "Qin Ling" was born.
Corresponding to the chaos and majesty of Qinling, the vastness is boundless, and in the new book, Jia Ping, who is seventy and does not exceed his heart, breaks through the boundaries of style, inherits the tradition of classical Chinese texts, and has his own style in his penmanship. (End)