Through the growth stories of seven female characters named "lili", "Like Snow Like a Mountain" vividly shows the spiritual puzzle of a woman's whole life cycle from adolescence, youth to middle-aged and elderly people, and is related to the current social hotspots. This is Zhang Tianyi's personal hope, but also contains the moral correction and re-examination of women in the new era.
Zhang Tianyi is the author of the people's literature publishing house |
The stage of life is also firm and soft
Text / Snow Cherry
"All women have the same puzzle hidden in them, and their sorrows and joys, secret pains and loves and hatreds are very different and interconnected. They are all lili, and they are all me. Young writer Zhang Tianyi said in the afterword to "Like Snow Like a Mountain". This newly published collection of novels is really eye-catching, she breaks the stereotypes of conventional narrative and gender, intercepts the cross-section of life, jumps out of the "victim" thinking, tells the plight of modern women with delicate brushstrokes and ingenious ideas, makes the darkest moments shrouded in light, lets the common dilemma reach the atrium, gives people painful resonance and enlightenment, about brave life, about focused love, about returning to self.
As Flannery O'Connor said in Habits of Survival, "A full knowledge of the devil can effectively resist it." "I've found that violence has a bizarre effect of re-exposing my characters to reality and preparing them for the moment of grace." Zhang Tianyi seems to know this well, she uses sharp narratives to fight against the dilemma of survival, uses restrained language to present bleeding scars, is not manipulated by emotions, and turns over the boiling and rough truth to people. Through the growth stories of seven female characters named "lili", "Like Snow Like a Mountain" vividly shows the spiritual puzzle of a woman's whole life cycle from adolescence, youth to middle-aged and elderly people, and is related to the current social hotspots. In fact, from the title of the book, we can also understand the author's deep meaning: such as snow, symbolizing women's softness, such as mountains, symbolizing women's tenacity, in the deep and fiery stage of life, how to sharpen the character of being firm and soft, which holds her personal hopes, but also contains the moral correction and re-examination of women in the new era.
"True women's writing is rich and abundant rather than single and monotonous, and it is like a well-connected nerve, connecting the relationship between women and men, women and women, and also connecting people and reality, people and nature." 」 Zhang Tianyi's novel has this kind of openness and transparency, she starts from the perspective of daily experience that is easily ignored and ignored, both the delicate emotion of the "microscope" and the aesthetic tension of the "magnifying glass", invisibly completing the transcendence of daily experience, so the female perspective is just a door she provides. When we actually enter the interior of the work, we will be pleasantly surprised to find that there are other doors that can also be entered, such as the swedish poet Tronström's poem, "Everyone is a half-open door / leads to a shared room." ”
"Snow Mountain" tells the miserable old age of Jiang Lili, a woman living alone, the author does not lay out a straight narrative, is good at cutting from a third perspective, and adopts the means of story set story, the plot is fascinating. Wu Tong and her boyfriend Ma broke into a city where they could see the snowy mountains to attend a classmate's wedding, and when they came out to buy socks, they met aunt Jiang, a former neighbor and the mother of Wu Tong, who had lost her only son, and the three of them went to eat bowl noodles, outlining the past events and entanglements in their memories, like peeling onions. Attending the wedding, through the lonely mood of Mother Jiang, the book "Into the Thin Air Zone" carried by the witch boy, the mountaineer Hall climbed to the top of the mountain and died alone, and the loneliness after breaking up with her boyfriend afterwards, "She is invited to taste a kind of lonely crystallization". Loneliness is like the recurrence of old diseases, infecting each other, and the ultimate victim is not only Mother Jiang, so the "snow mountain" metaphorically means that they cannot dissolve the pain, and will eventually become a mountain of reality in front of the self, highlighting the necessity of self-reconstruction.
In recent years, it is not uncommon for female writers to explore the growth of modern women with the help of realistic themes, for example, Wang Zhanhei's "Folk Grandfather Life Encyclopedia", Zhang Yiwei's "Family Experiment", Dulan's "Fables of the Prairie", etc., with very different styles, each with its own characteristics, and all have various efforts and innovations in breaking through women's consciousness. In contrast, the spiritual world constructed by Zhang Tianyi's pen has no accusations, no indiscriminate feelings, the transcendence of daily experience and the diversity of narrative texts, mostly taken from extremely ordinary and impossible to ignore things, snow-like fragments of daily life wrapped in unspeakable crimes and punishments, and mountain-like carved bones of the past with unspeakable love and pain. She is like a generous and benevolent surgeon, just right to uncover the scars, and can find the light source just right, cast a beam of light in the fate or life difficulties, so that the reader can arouse emotional resonance and spiritual resonance, and still get a courage to face the pain and the ability to surpass themselves, such writing makes people have to have unlimited expectations.
New Media Editor: Zheng Zhouming
Featured images: Photo Network, pexels
Tips to meet with us on time every day: