Li Li.
The poet Dylan Thomas said, "Don't go gently into that good night."
In the wee hours of the morning, the streets are covered with dim lights, like a steaming but empty stage, where people meet us in the night, and people get separated from us in the night.
When the night is also infused with many social attributes, we are night wanderers who are not completely controlled by ourselves.
The 14 stories written by Li Li in "Night Tour" illuminate some subtleties that are not easy to detect in the depths of our human nature.
Written by reporter Liu Jianyong
Things at night have a relatively more realistic feel
Among the Nanjing writers, Li Li, who grew up in the suburbs of Nanjing, seems to be better known for his editorial work. On the evening of November 20, 2022, at the 8th Lu Xun Literature Award Ceremony, Li Li attended as an editor. He was one of seven editors to receive a tribute on behalf of the literary editors that night. After the award ceremony, the Jiangsu writers present took a group photo, wearing jeans and a casual suit, he put his hands behind his back, and his expression was the most relaxed.
That night, it was Han Dong who introduced Li Li to me: "This is Li Li, and he is also one of 'them', and his poems are very well written. ”
"They" is a poetry group founded by Han Dong and Yu Jian. Interestingly, many of the novels in this poetry group are also very well written. For example, Han Dong, Yu Jian, Lu Yang, and Li Li, etc.
From Li Li's social media "Circle of Friends", it can be seen that as the deputy editor-in-chief of a publishing house, most of his time is devoted to work, and among the fragments of time left, his poems appear more frequently. For example, the poem reads: "The stray cats downstairs / decided that they would no longer have a presence / at noon, or in the night when the lights were shining / they foraged silently for food......"
Most of his poems are written in memos on his mobile phone, and judging from the time he took screenshots and posted them on social media, most of them were at night, mostly around 0:00.
Before the publication of his collection of short stories, Night Wandering, he did not seem to mention his own novels.
"It is only in solitude late at night that words and thoughts become real and clear with the withdrawal of that vast stage of the day. Li Li said in the preface to "Night Tour" that he believes that things at night have a relatively more sense of reality.
Each of the 14 novels in "Night Tour" is themed at night, and the stories mainly take place at night, but in the preface, Li Li says that his nightlife experience is actually not rich. Writers living in Nanjing, writing about nightlife, or writing about the theme of night, really don't need how rich the nightlife is. Nanjing, which sits on the Qinhuai River, has had the envy of other places since ancient times - "the smoke cage is cold and the moon is long and the sand is long, and the night is close to the restaurant in Qinhuai", at least since the time of Du Mu's time, Nanjing's night has been "caged" with many stories, not to mention the time when Yu Pingbo swam the Qinhuai River in the sound of oars and lights. It's just that before Li Li, there didn't seem to be any writer in Nanjing who specifically used the theme of night and wrote about those things that happened at night.
Li Li writes about the current life, from this point of view, Li Li shows the current nightlife of Nanjing, showing the unprecedented brightness, the unprecedented blur, and the unprecedented messiness and panic - this is the night of Nanjing, and the night of all developed regions in the world, and the night of human beings in history has never been so busy as it is now.
Through creation to balance the imbalance of life
The opening chapter of "Night Tour" is "The Night of Huang Lishu". "Huang Lishu" is a real place name, the highway from northern Jiangsu to Nanjing is closest to the service area of Nanjing, which is the service area of Huang Lishu. Although many people know about this service area, few people know what kind of place Huang Lishu is. In the years when Li Li often traveled on business, he would often pass by the Huanglishu service area, often take a break here, go to the toilet, and then cross the Yangtze River to Nanjing. A few years ago, his wife called him and asked him where he was, and he didn't say that he was about to arrive in Nanjing, but that he had arrived at Huanglishu. "Where is Huang Lishu?" His wife asked. He felt his wife froze.
Since then, he has wanted to write a story related to Huang Lishu, but he has never thought clearly what kind of story to write. It wasn't until last winter that a friend of his answered the phone and asked if he wanted to adopt a cat, which might be killed for disease control purposes. His friends were ready to adopt the cat, but then there was no follow-up, and they estimated that the owner of the cat was still reluctant. It was this phone call that gave Li Li the basic framework of the story of Huang Lishu, and he strung together several things that were originally unrelated, and then came up with the short story "The Night of Huang Lishu".
"Lobster Night" is pure fiction. Although Li Li does have a cousin who opened a restaurant, and the hero of "Lobster Night" also opened a restaurant, the image of his cousin and daughter-in-law in the novel, although it also exists in life, the cousin in reality will never get together with the cousin and daughter-in-law like in the novel. "I'm kind of like having fun, just trying to get them together, it's just fun. Li Li explained.
In the novels in "Night Tour", most of the stories go out of common sense and end unexpectedly. In "The Night of Huang Lishu", the protagonist and his family have made a lot of preparations in order to adopt a cat, and even took into account the psychological activities that the cat that has been raised at home may have in response to the arrival of a new cat, but the owner of the cat is reluctant to send it in the end; In the hero,The hero and his friend made an appointment to go to a mountain villa to play cards and fish.,But a friend missed the appointment.,They had dinner back to the city at night.,Crashed with someone on the road.,And they collided.,It's the female classmate who hasn't been in contact with the hero for many years.,Some of the thoughts of middle-aged people burst out......
As stated in the promotional copy of "Night Tour", the 14 short stories on the theme of the night take the characters as the center and the night as the radius, outlining a broken circle of marriage, illness, friendship, love and career. People have joys and sorrows, and the moon is cloudy and sunny. All of us, including Li Li himself, are in this mutilated circle. When we talk about his personal motivation for writing novels, he confesses that one of his implicit ideas is to balance his unbalanced life through creation. There are times when each of us has imbalances in our lives, and these imbalances are hidden behind our bustle and glamour. Li Li concentrates on these imbalances in "Night Tour", he does not think that imbalance is failure, or tragedy, such as the lost driver in "Night in the Sun", he left his post that runs like a screw, who said that he is about to start a life that is not more worthy of his investment?
dialogue
"Our nights carry more than our fathers"
Xiaoxiang Morning News: Many of the more than a dozen novels in "Night Tour" have written about some accidents and imbalances in life. In your opinion, is accident or imbalance a normal part of life?
Li Li: How can I say it? It can't be said to be the norm, the proportion of it happening in our lives is actually not high, whether it happens to ourselves, relatives and friends, or hearsay, the frequency is not high, but because there are too many people and life is too long, the total number is indeed quite a lot. However, accidents, or imbalances, do not happen as quickly and quickly as written in the novel. As a novel, it may be relatively concentrated, which is equivalent to purifying it, and then compressing it into a specific time and space as much as possible, showing a state of explosion.
Xiaoxiang Morning News: I see, you said that it was purified in the novel, so it seems that there are more accidents and imbalances.
Li Li: Well, yes. The book is all about what happens at night, and in the preface to the book and in the book sharing session, I explained the relationship between the present and the night, which also has a purifying effect. For example, I will go to Wuhan one afternoon next week to share this book with Li Xiuwen and Zhang Zhihao, and when I share them, they are my friends and guests at the sharing meeting, and they all have social identities. At night, when we are in a tavern, they may lose a lot of their social attributes and become relatively pure, just because everyone is friends to get together, and the peripheral attributes of each other and the work that each of us thinks about in our minds may be blocked out a little. So, at night it originally had a purifying effect.
Xiaoxiang Morning News: In the preface of your book, you say that night is a concentrated embodiment and typical landscape of modern society. What do you mean by that?
Li Li: Night, including the so-called nightlife, night tours, and night economy that we talked about, should only exist now, and there was no such concept in ancient times. These are all things that are only available now. It is actually different from the daytime, it is not an extension or expansion of the day, in a sense, it is a supplement and compensation for the day.
It's true that many people are trapped in various relationships during the day, for work, for a living, and so on, some of which are inextricably linked, and they may not like these relationships. However, in the evening, there may be a little more time to think about yourself. Of course, there are many people who are still in some relationships at night, but these relationships are not on the table, it may be a little more profound.
Xiaoxiang Morning News: Do you think that some changes in the night in modern and contemporary society will definitely have some impact on people's physiology and psychology, thus affecting people's emotions and thinking, so that many stories happen at night?
Li Li: There will definitely be this. I always remember some conversations my mom had with me many years ago. Every time I went home, she would tell me that I had to have a regular life, that I had to eat a good breakfast, that I ate as well as the emperor, that I had enough food at noon and that I had to eat less at night. At one point, I blurted out that eating less at night was some of the experience of the ancients. The ancients went to bed at eight or nine o'clock in the evening, and when they had dinner at six o'clock, they must eat less. Now it's different, many people still have to work at night, socialize or exercise, eat less, how do they stick to sleep until eleven or twelve o'clock? On the whole, after the night changes, many things have to be matched with it. For example, now there are words like two games and supper. There are a lot of things that can't be said, like people in the second or third game, they are vaguely expecting something to happen. Whether it happens by chance, or something that has been accumulated for a long time suddenly explodes, plus the kind of light at night and all kinds of artificial scenes, the whole thing will have a sense of stage - someone at a recent sharing meeting praised me, saying that this batch of novels is very much like a stage, with close and long shots.
Xiaoxiang Morning News: The sense of stage you mentioned makes me better understand these novels of yours - it is precisely because the night time that originally belongs to us is also occupied by us due to social attributes, but we also have to express and find a gap in ourselves, so there is a sense of explosion, stage, or drama when expressed.
Li Li: Let's put it this way, if we compare the ancients - of course, it is difficult for us to verify in such detail, for example, his identity is an official during the day and reading under the lamp at night, there is also a kind of separation between the two, but this separation can also be a kind of complementarity. What is the division of our people now? one identity, one set of words; One set of identities, one set of words at night. The two sets of identities and discourses are actually social levels, and there is little time to concentrate on thinking about what is going on with themselves, but to think about it at this point in time, and think about it at that point in time. His time was shredded. But thinking about oneself is actually very important, and it must be there.
Li Jingze has published a book, "Meeting Room and Hill". He would have a lot of things, and occasionally he would look out the window at the hills, and when he looked at the hills, his self might emerge a little more clearly, dragging him out of the context of the conference room - speaking of which, the buddy I wrote about in "Night on the Mountaintop", he often moved his chair back a little bit and leaned back in the middle of a meal, a kind of overlooking the front of him, jumping out of front of him. Once chatted with Cao Kou, he also said that sometimes he was in a trance while eating, looking at the dick in front of him, and saying what the hell is going on? The night it carries much more things than the ancients now, not to mention the ancients, let's just say that compared to our parents, our night carries much more than our fathers. In our fathers' evenings, at most, we would square dance, watch TV, occasionally read a book, and go to bed at 90 o'clock in the evening.
Xiaoxiang Morning News: I feel that people are quite pitiful now, especially when I see "Night View of the Study", Cheng Lizhi and Mr. Gu's feelings about their lack of emotion may resonate with many readers.
Li Li: This topic is another way of saying - I understand it this way, because the night has different attributes than the day, and there is a sense of stage, so it will magnify a lot of things, so that the poor person feels more pitiful, the proud person feels more proud, the crazy person is more crazy, and the person who enjoys it feels really enjoyable...... It magnifies a lot of things.