In recent years, many young writers have emerged in the contemporary literary world. With a new and sharp writing attitude, they have created works one after another with mature and sophisticated writing, bringing a vibrant new atmosphere to contemporary novels. Xiao Ke, who once won the "Zijin People's Literature Star" Literary Award, is one of them, and she is committed to writing about the bizarre in the city, and is a representative writer of the new generation of urban literature.
Xiao Ke, a young writer, began writing short stories in 2018. His novels have been scattered in "Harvest", "October", "Tianya", "West Lake", "Yangtze River Literature and Art", etc., and some works have been selected into "Selected Novels", "Selected Chinese Literature", "Selected Novellas", etc. The novella "The Lobster" won the 2023 "Star of Zhongshan" Literature Award for Young Writer of the Year. "Lobster, Lobster!" is a collection of novellas by Xiao Ke, which includes eight novels including "The Inquisitor", "The Lobster", "The Pianist", "Bureau", "Conspiracy", etc. These are eight heterogeneous stories that drill into the marrow, and the title of the book is "Lobster", which implies that we live in the city just like a lobster lives in a water tank.
Kafka is the writer who has had the greatest influence on Xiao Ke, and her novels also have a strong Kafka allegory. A middle-aged man with no ability, who seems to have been possessed by the soul of a lobster after a lobster feast, city life is a wasteland for Siming, and he travels to the Slovenian town with suspicion in search of the legendary "Light of Piran". But the real darkness has no direction and no time, and the young journalist who has just graduated accepts an investigative assignment, and in the social arena, he repeatedly distributes the same question: "How did Mr. Zheng die?" and hears the answer repeatedly: "His death is a conspiracy ......" The people trapped in the city written in the novel are pianists, arsonists, conspirators, autistic children, and also the judges, light chasers, and inductors in the city.
Looping time and space, a modern version of Don Quixote, magical reality...... Xiao Ke's pen weaves a cold and allegorical story world.
When I got the book "Lobster, Lobster!", the first thing I read was "Lobster". Whether it is from the story or the style of writing, I feel the new and old urban literary atmosphere of young writers. Can you tell us about the idea and writing process of this novel?
Xiaoka:The inspiration for this novel came from a trip to Qingdao with my family, and I saw water tanks outside restaurants in the streets and alleys, and there were all kinds of aquatic products in them. Among them, lobsters caught my attention the most. It was my first time eating lobster, and I wasn't very impressed by the texture, but the way it struggled was shocking. After returning from Qingdao, I have been thinking about the question: are people qualified to keep lobsters in captivity in water tanks, and then kill them and put them on the table?
The novel does not give an answer, but only describes a series of states in a magical way: a person, after eating a lobster, seems to share his fate with the lobster, and becomes the saddest "lobster" who is fooled by fate. I use this sympathetic witchcraft plot to compare the ecological chain of nature - we think we are at the top of the food chain, but we are also manipulated and unfree.
Reporter: After reading the novels included in "Lobster, Lobster!", I found that the protagonists of the novels are basically the same kind of people: middle-aged men, who have a bad career, are not in love or marriage, have average ability, have no clear understanding or planning for themselves, and do not even have a name. There is confusion and anxiety in them. Why are you so persistent in writing about such "urban patients"?
Xiaoka:I like to compare the city to a huge machine, each of us is a small part of the machine, and the machine will always rust after a long time, so there are all kinds of urban diseases. In today's society, people in the city have some urban diseases, such as insomnia, depression, social fear, etc., and the "urban patients" I write about are very universal, and there are their shadows around me and even in myself. Because I am also a member of the city, I can empathize with the confusion and anxiety that is unique to this kind of city. Cities are also like cages, forcing us to be separated from our mother-like nature, so urban sickness may be another kind of homesickness.
Reporter:I know from the sources that you only started writing short stories in 2018. However, the novels included in this "Lobster, Lobster!" are very mature and sophisticated, both in terms of writing style and rhythm control. Before starting literary creation, what are the effective accumulations of writing?
Xiaoka:I have a lot of books at home, and when I was a child, I always used the excuse of reviewing my homework as an excuse to secretly read novels. Maybe it's fate, but when I first read novels, I was exposed to modernist literature, so this has also had a deep impact on my current creative style. I read a lot of books, and I always had a lot of ideas, and I started trying to write novels when I was in middle school, but at that time, I wrote novels to please myself, and I never thought about publishing them. At the end of 2017, I decided to write some short and medium-length stories seriously, and then I started to submit them in 2018.
In 2018, I published the novella "The Inquisitor" in Westlake magazine, which tells the story of a man who abused others online for the sake of justice, and was finally punished by a trial that crossed the law. As soon as "The Inquisitor" was published, it was selected in a publication, and some critics paid attention to me, and my literary path broadened a little.
I continue to write about the city, and the "Bureau" was published on the special issue of young writers in the 2020 harvest magazine, and more people have paid attention to me, and I have more confidence to write about the city. Then I wrote "The Conspiracy", the conspiracy of a public figure's death, "The Light Chaser", in which a man tired of the city goes to Slovenia in search of the legendary light of Piran, and "The Pianist", the story of a depressed poet who interacts with the sound of a neighbor's piano. It wasn't until I wrote eight short stories that I wanted to come up with a collection of novels, and I had this book "Lobster, Lobster!".
As the editor puts it, these are eight heterogeneous stories that drill into the bone marrow. Do these novels deeply invest in your feelings about the city, and what specific influence does the city of Beijing have on your writing?
Xiaoka:I was born and raised in Beijing and have never left for more than 30 years. There is a saying that writers are always writing about their childhood, and my childhood was Beijing. What I am most willing to write, and can only write about, is the city of Beijing.
There are two faces of Beijing in my heart, one is the old Beijing when I was a child, and the old Beijing in my memory is yellow, unclear, but also extremely warm. The other is the new Beijing, which has developed into an international metropolis. Both of these scenes of Beijing were written by writers, and I chose to write about the new Beijing. The new Beijing is extremely tolerant and relatively indifferent, its embrace is cold, but it makes people linger – I want to write about this sense of contradiction.
Reporter:Your novel has a strong allegorical style, which has also been called "Kafkaesque contemporary allegory" by some critics. Tell us about Kafka's influence on your writing.
Xiaoka:Franz Kafka was one of the most influential writers on my writing. Franz Kafka once said, "I only read what I could reach." This resonates with me. For me, Kafka's novels are my "books". Actually, I hadn't read Kafka when I first started writing short and medium stories, but I wrote "The Inquisitor" (also included in "Lobster, Lobster!") and showed it to a friend, and he said that it was a bit of Kafka's style, and I read Kafka's novels. After reading it, I feel that "the last piece of the puzzle has finally returned to its place", which is a very magical feeling, and it is a real "effective communication", and the communication of the soul is cross-domain and life and death.
Reporter:Unlike many female writers, who have a distinctly female perspective and writing style, if you don't know you're a female writer in advance, you won't feel that these works are written by women just from the text. Is there any deliberate "de-gendering" writing?
Xiaoka:In fact, as a writer, I don't deliberately consider the gender perspective. Before I decide to write a novel, I have a habit of identifying the ideas I want to express, and then I construct the story based on that central idea, and the gender perspective is in the service of expressing the thoughts.
I've also wondered why my novels always like to be male-first, and I think there are two reasons. One is that I studied science, which cultivated my more rational character, and from the artistic level, generally speaking, the male perspective is rational, and the female perspective is emotional (which cannot be distinguished in real life);
Compared with the urban literature of the 90s of the 20th century, what do you think are the obvious changes in the current urban writing, including your works?
Xiaoka:Because cities are constantly evolving, urban literature is certainly evolving. The old-school Beijing-style children's literature is dedicated to describing the lively old Beijing city, which is the urban literature of that era. Later, Beipiao became the main residential group in Beijing, and Beipiao literature became a new and important branch of urban literature. I'm committed to writing about Beijing, which is an international metropolis, so I'm very concerned about social issues. For example, when I opened up my second child, I wrote a novel on the topic of marriage and childbirth.
Reporter:What are your plans for writing novels in the future, will you continue to write about "City Patients", or will there be other genre expansions?
Xiaoka:I should continue to write about cities, but I don't necessarily focus on "urban patients". In the future, I still want to be more free and avant-garde, and I want to focus on a wide range of topics such as environmental protection and the spiritual life of people in the city.
Reporter: Xu Min Editor: Xu Zheng Proofreader: Yang Hefang