Text / Xu Jinjing
New Reviews
Through "Love Tales of Late Spring", we can not only clearly glimpse Han Songluo's longing and worries for freedom, harmony and the blooming of life, but also fully perceive Han Songluo's diverse life journey of integrating literature, music, film, poetry and life.
A year ago, Han Songluo, a northwestern writer who has lived in Lanzhou, Gansu Province, published a collection of novels, "Night Walk in the Spring Mountain", announcing his return to fiction after many years of focusing on film criticism and literary columns. A year later, in early spring, Han Songluo continued to release his second collection of short stories "Late Spring Love Story", for him, who had not written novels for more than 20 years, this achievement was not the so-called "late bloomer", but the accumulation and natural development of this writer who has been with Chinese literature and art since the mid-to-late 1990s.
Reverse of "Spring"
"Naming is meaning", from the titles of Han Songluo's two novels, we can get a glimpse of the main intention of his novel writing. Attentive readers will find that both "Love Tales of Late Spring" and "Night Walk in Spring Mountain" share the keyword "spring". In Han Songluo's own words, only those who have really lived in the northwest can appreciate the warm and short spring and the rich significance to the people of the northwest.
It is the reflexivity of the Northwest Spring, which combines warmth and transience, that gives Han Songluo's novels a consistent kind of internal tearing, backlash and tension. The tension between "spring" and "night", "mountain" and "line" in "Spring Mountain Night Walk", and the contradiction between "late" and "spring", "late spring" and "love words" in "Late Spring Love Story", reveal this characteristic of Han Songluo's novel. Therefore, in this "Late Spring Love Story", we can read the coldness and coldness of the great northwest, and we can feel the gentleness and lyricism of Jiangnan; You can appreciate Han Songluo's delicate and calm narration of the ordinary daily life of ordinary people, and you can also see his genre writing to the extreme with complex imagination and drama, expressing his fierce emotions and imagination "elsewhere" under his calm appearance. In "Lonely Hunter", the lonely woman is born from the imagination of others brought about by repeated strange phone calls, and the man who really has an emotional connection with it is a real existence who has accidentally intersected in real life before and "can't ask for it"; In "My Father's House of Whimsy", the "meta-narrative" composed of the runaway father and the hidden small house, in the layers of similar nested narratives, makes imagination and fiction become real memories and realities, and finally constitutes a stage effect that is both real and illusory in the dramatic narrative of the earthquake drill that evolves into a real earthquake—on the one hand, it is the reality that is about to leave, and on the other hand, it is the memory and imagination that may come true at any time. The state of rebellion in life, which is as clear as water and mysterious as a mystery, is expressed in words that are as plain as water and mysterious as a mystery.
"Elsewhere"
Running away and escaping become recurring images in the novels of "Late Spring Love Story". From Li Zhiliang, Cao Jing and "I" in "Fish Tank and Xiaguang", to the two "fathers" in "My Father's House of Whimsy" and Yilin in "Love Tales of Late Spring", the common feature of these escapes, either from active escape or passive departure, is to stay away from the calm, mediocre, and repetitive native environment on which they depend, and to re-adapt and reconstruct themselves in another world. This contrast, opposition, adaptation, and balance between the two worlds constitute the main logic of the life narrative composed of "Love Tales of Late Spring".
Han Songluo
The so-called growth is to keep the self in tune with the environment and maintain the socialization of the self in an environment that is constantly changing and amplifying. From this perspective of sociology and social psychology, the physical and mental imbalance faced by the characters in the above novels, such as depression, confusion, and struggle, is the inevitable scene caused by the excessive and rapid changes in the external environment, and the inability to keep up with the self-socialization and adjustment in time. The resonance and resonance between these individuals living in the world and the sea and the north and south of the world are the true portrayals of people's physical and mental discomfort in the face of the external environment, as well as the psychological state of seeking spiritual sustenance and resonance with the same kind through cyberspace in this state. If you understand this, you will find that Han Songluo's suspenseful and inferential typological writing techniques are full of concern and compassion for the state of life in the "risk society" (in the words of the German sociologist Ulrich Beck).
Joy and shadow life
Before returning to the creation of novels, Han Songluo's two main labels were film critics and folk singer-songwriters. As for film critics, as early as 20 years ago, he was a columnist for "Watching Movies" magazine, and successively served as a judge for many film awards such as the Pingyao Film Festival and the Macao Film Festival; As for the folk singer-songwriter, he is a contracted musician of the domestic music record company - Star Alien Records, and has launched many original folk albums such as "The Bird That Survives the Winter by Memory" and "Time Machine". The familiarity with music and movies is also fully reflected in the narrative writing of "Late Spring Love Story", so that readers who have the identity of both movie fans and music fans will smile from time to time.
The book's most acclaimed and high-profile opening novel, "The Fishbowl and the Sunset", begins with David Lynch's classic film footage; When talking about the public cultural ecology of the small town in the northwest in the novel, Han Songluo directly cited the movies "Red Sorghum" and "The Red Lantern Hangs High" as important evidence; The metallic noise of "I" in the novel can also be found in Apichatpong's film "Memory". In "The Golden Age of Remiyan", the image of the woman in the classic film directed by Lars von Trier is directly used to portray Yan Luguo's sister, who is one of the protagonists of the novel. Cinematic literary writing is not only reflected in the quotation and borrowing of images from classic film works. Han Songluo's detailed depiction of the characters' clothing and image, as well as the detailed details of the composition of the external environment, is like using a movie camera as a writing pen, which has a sense of movement with the visual effect of a film and the language of a film lens. In many of his novels such as "The Fish Tank and the Sunset", the transitions and scheduling between the stories of different characters also fully absorb the essence of the expression techniques of film montage. If the works of Tang dynasty Wang Wei are "paintings in poems, and poems in paintings", then Han Songluo's writing in this book can also be described as "light and shadow allegories, text illuminates light and shadow", which is very worthy of careful appreciation.
The scene of Han Songluo's work sharing meeting
As for music, in "Fish Tank and Xiaguang", the Kazakh folk song "Samal Mountain" and Han Songluo's self-created folk song "Alatau Mountain" are naturally combined, so that the life state of the music-loving Bortala people in Xinjiang who stick to their nostalgia and seek freedom "elsewhere" in the novel is vividly presented. "A Love Song to Remiyan", a fictional story about the idealized "fossil singer" of the Chinese music scene, is directly derived from Han Song's poetic life experience in the northwest, walking and singing in Guangzhou.
For the reader, his reading history is his life history; As far as the writer is concerned, the writing system of his works is also a direct reflection of his life history. Through this "Late Spring Love Story", we can not only clearly glimpse Han Songluo's longing and worries for freedom, harmony and the blooming of life, but also fully perceive Han Songluo's diverse life journey of integrating literature, music, film, poetry and life. Therefore, this literary masterpiece composed of six novels is naturally beneficial for us who also yearn for freedom, richness and poetry.
New Media Editor: Fu Xiaoping
Pictured: Publication materials
Literary Newspaper
id : iwenxuebao
WeChat public account
@文学报
Sina Weibo
@文艺速效丸
Little Red Book
@41楼编辑部
Microcosm Visitors
The 2024 Literary Newspaper is open for subscription
Postal code 3-22
Weekly / Annual Price: 61.80 RMB