Stinging mouse, time bear, dream fox, baby hippopotamus, wind chime lion, volcano rabbit, glass mammoth, weather bath leopard... "Friend of felines" Fan Ye created a variety of strange and cute little animals and their wonderful stories in "Time Bear, Mirror Tiger and Invisible Kitten", and "well-known pet blogger" Gu Xiang drew illustrations for them. The book is jointly launched by Century Wenjing and Time Bear Culture, hoping to melt sentimentality in the moment full of uncertainty and give readers a big "bear hug".
Fan Ye, a teacher at Peking University and a translator of Spanish literature, has translated García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude", Cortázar's "Ten Thousand Fires In One", Bolaño's "Unknown University", Infante's "Three Sad Tigers", Sernuda's "To the Poet of the Future" and other works. Gu Xiang's previous familiar identity for readers is a writer, author of essay collections "Zhao Qiao Village", "Good Kitten", "In Russia", etc., but she is actually a painter, has held personal exhibitions, designed T-shirts, and painted many book covers. Fan Ye and Gu Xiang both have cats, and Time Bear, Mirror Tiger and Invisible Kitten is the first original fantasy literature they have collaborated on.
"Time Bear, Mirror Tiger and Invisible Kitten" includes two parts: "Animal Handbook" and "Invisible Kittens and Other Stories". In the first part, The Animal Handbook, Fan Ye fictionalized more than 40 species of animals according to modern zoological classification methods, and also carefully compiled Latin names for them. Baby hippotamus infans", bench tiger "Tigris bank", volcano rabbit "Romerolagus diazi"... At first glance, I thought it was a popular science book, but a closer look found that it was actually false and true. The second part, "Invisible Kittens and Other Stories," is a little less sad and more bright and lively. The way the author fiddles with words and stories has also become more willful: stories that are interrupted at the beginning, stories that are half told, stories that are not told, stories that are broken, stories that are off-topic, stories that cannot be told...
In Fan Ye's own view, this is a book that is difficult to define, "Some people say it is fantasy literature, some people say it is fairy tales or pseudo-fairy tales, which makes sense." Fan Ye gave each animal in the book a Latin literary name, and very few are true. If you look up the animals like the thorn rat and the volcano rabbit by Latin name, you will find that there really is such an animal. Another example is the wind chime lion, although it is a fictional animal, but its Latin literary name corresponds to the Chinese meaning of Zhuangzi, revealing that the author's source of inspiration is "The Theory of Qi Things".
Gu Xiang drew his sword to help with the illustrations, which gave Fan Ye courage and surprise. He joked: "If the reader finds the text boring, at least they can look at the picture." For example, the cover of the book is painted with 'Immovable Bear', which I write very generally, but Gu Xiang's painting saves the bear. ”
Fan Ye's immovable bear is motionless, because he is afraid that if he moves, he will frighten the most timid stars in the sky, which may be a bit like the ancient poem "don't dare to speak loudly, for fear of frightening the people in the sky." Gu Xiang's illustrations have the feeling of still life paintings of the Dutch school. Fan Ye felt that Gu Xiang painted the bear like Morandi's still life, which was very cute. It also has an indescribable feeling, like the bottles and cans you see Morandi painting. Because there is still a mystery of immovable, very empty, but it seems to have the power to fight decay.
Under Gu Xiang's brush, the tower bear is a bear that is lined with a towering tower, as if it is disconnected from the real world. Gu Xiang said: "The sky and the ship are two very incompatible things, which shows that what it does is an unrealistic thing, and I have not thought about what use it will come in." But shipbuilding is a difficult thing, like all poets and painters do. ”
Gu Xiang's birthday bear, the main body of the picture is a huge birthday cake, a small bear that seems to be fully equipped is climbing up. The painter turned the birthday cake into a dramatic rescue story. Talking about why a match is carried on the bear's back, she said, "You know that it is not easy for a person to have a birthday and live year after year. "The story seems to have a new meaning.
Fan Ye's text, combined with Gu Xiang's paintings, creates a wonderful effect. The last story of the book is "Once Upon a Time There Was a Rabbit", and the reader will wonder why one rabbit after another stood on the shoulder of the previous rabbit and saw the end of "Kissing the Giraffe" and would not feel warmed.
Liang Yong'an, a professor at Fudan University's Department of Chinese, believes that this is a book that is "particularly permeable, full of childlike curiosity and imagination, and if you read it carefully, you will find that there is a kind of experienced person looking back in it, which is both naïve and complex" book. He is willing to share it with his children, but he can also read a lot of fun.
Liang Yong'an likes sleeping bears, which have two hobbies, traveling and lying down, which are also his hobbies, and he thinks this writes a contradiction. The bear "often travels while lying down, just looking at the landscape in bed." Many young people today are like this, yearning for poetry and distant places, and because of the reality of all kinds of can not go. "Lying in the "sleepy tour" has all kinds of yearning for life, which is an imagination about life in the depths of the soul.
Fan Ye has always been embarrassed to talk about his own works, as he said: "After you write something, to some extent it does not belong to you, it actually belongs to every reader." The book comes out and is still unfinished because you don't know what other fate is behind it. Different readers will have different interpretations, some of which are beyond my imagination as an author. But that's what's interesting, and that's the charm of a book or literature. I think I can add such a sentence to explain: the themes, plots, and characters in this book are basically fictional, and if there are similarities, it is purely coincidental, and welcome to the seat. ”
图片来源：出版方提供 Source: Author: Shi Chenlu