"Private Life" / Author: Chen Yan
"Private Life" is Chen Yan's masterpiece, which is a "side novel" that narrates the life course of modern urban women. It starts from the protagonist's hidden female life experience, telling the reader about the special experience of a "girl" in the extraordinary process of growing into a "woman". The protagonist grew up in a peculiar family, and when she was a student, she was a stranger isolated from the "group", and grew up to have a tense "sexual" relationship with a man who was attracted to each other, and at the same time had close contact with the female neighbor He widow in an ambiguous relationship. When she finally gets rid of the shackles of these "deformed" relationships and is about to return to a "normal life" in the love of her lovers, an unexpected accident causes her to lose her mother, female neighbor and lover at the same time. So, in the midst of unparalleled pain, she became an "autistic person" and was sent to a mental hospital.
Judging from the name of the protagonist of the novel, Ni Ao, this should be a child with a paranoid personality and not very social. After reading the novel, it is also true. Ni had a clear hatred for his father. Her father was an undesirable little civil servant who often spilled out his unhappiness on his wife and daughter. Judging from the details of Ni's difficulty cutting through her father's pants, she has a certain "father-killing" complex; but at the same time, she hopes that she can find an ideal father-like lover, which shows that she has a slight "father-in-law" complex. From the transformation of "father-killing" to "father-lover", it can also be seen that the character's inner patriarchal thinking is still deeply rooted, "father-killing" is the climax, and "father-in-law" is the destination. Therefore, even if the writer subconsciously wants to rebel against male power, it is incomplete.
Unlike his dislike for his father, Ni Has a deep attachment to his mother. In the work, the shocking same-sex love is the main line of Ni's growing years. Chen Yan once said: "The closeness between the same sex is a spiritual relationship, more concise, more simple ... "In addition to the mother-daughter friendship, there is also the same-sex friendship, which makes the self-enclosed Ni Ao grow slowly."
This novel includes the basic themes of Chen Yan's consistent writing: the Oedipus/Shi Father complex; the Oedipus/Mother-hating Mood, the thought of survival and the pain of loneliness, exploring the evolution of female consciousness from one side to the other, and the protagonist is actually the embodiment of a broad female "self".
In short, this is a unique "female growth history", which is not only the growth history of women's flesh and physiology, but also the growth history of women's minds.