"'Folk Song' is like the modern pyramid that I.M. Pei erected at the Louvre, the entrance to tradition and the exit to modernity, and everyone who enters and exits from that entrance and exit, love or not, will have to stop there and watch for a while." The famous scholar Wang Yao's debut novel "Folk Songs" is a hardcover single edition, which was recently launched by Yilin Publishing House. Critics regard it as "an important harvest of novels in recent years", and the famous writer Yan Lianke wrote a 10,000-word recommendation for "Folk Songs", saying that it "rebuilt the foundation of the novel".
In October last year, at the judging meeting of the Yu Dafu Literary Prize, Wang Yao put forward the proposition of a new "novel revolution", which triggered an echo in the literary circles. In December, "Folk Songs" was published, which may be seen as Wang Yao's creative practice of this proposition. After its release, "Folk Songs" has been praised by many writers and critics such as Mo Yan, Yan Lianke, Su Tong, Mai Jia, Cheng Yongxin, Cheng Depei, Wang Chunlin, Zhang Xuexin, etc., and has been selected into the 2020 Harvest Literature List Novel List, Yangzijiang Literary Review 2020 Annual Literary Ranking and other professional lists. At the same time, "Folk Songs" has also aroused heated discussion in the critics' circles, and a number of academic journals such as "Contemporary Writers Review" and "Yangtze River Literary Review" have launched commentary albums, which have fully tested the literary quality of "Folk Songs".
"Everyone spends their whole life trying to rediscover the era of folk song acquisition, which is the origin of memory." Wang Yao uses sadness, warmth and desolation, fictional memory, to lay out the spiritual history of a teenager's growth, the history of the change and development of a village, and the history of a nation's self-renewal. As a dual identity as a person in the story and a viewer of the story, he mixed comments and lyrical criticisms, and thus fulfilled his long-cherished wish to reconstruct the connection between the individual and history.
Twenty years of grinding a sword, Wang Yao turned from a Yangtze River scholar to a "son of Chinese" gorgeously
Before the novel came out, Wang Yao had already navigated between multiple identities: as a scholar, he was a professor at Soochow University and a Jiang Scholar Distinguished Professor of the Ministry of Education, mainly engaged in the study of modern and contemporary Chinese literature, winning the Lu Xun Literature Award, the Chinese Literature Media Award, and so on. As an essayist, he has devoted himself to prose creation for decades, published columns in various newspapers and periodicals, published a variety of prose essay collections such as "A Man's Eighties" and "Intellectuals on Paper", and won the Seventh Lu Xun Literary Award literary theory criticism award with "Rereading Wang Zengqi and On Contemporary Literature Related Issues".
Although there is no lack of academic support and literary practice, Wang Yao, who has great respect for novels, has been painstakingly looking for an ideal way to run his own business. From the beginning of a well-known novel many years ago, to the appearance of a book that has now aroused the amazement of the literary circle, Wang Yao has used twenty years of patience to cast and sharpen a sword, and finally became a masterpiece of 200,000 words. He incorporated his literary ideals, literary pursuits, and literary practices into The Folk Songs.
Wang Yao, who has been preparing "Folk Songs" for more than twenty years, admits that "this is almost a marathon of writing." Until one day last year, he suddenly revived his long-lost impulse to write, and felt that he should make up his mind to put down other writing and complete his "rotten tail building": "Gengzi has come, and I have experienced a feeling of resurrection from the dead. Like many of our friends, the spiritual history of this time may be an important part of our re-understanding of the world and our understanding of ourselves. "So, during the months that the epidemic persisted, he concentrated on creating and completing the work." Resurrect yesterday's words, perhaps for the regeneration of today. Wang Yao said.
"Folk songs" are a melody, a sound, about the history of the countryside
In the melodious afterglow of "water towns and folk songs", everyone has spent their whole lives trying to rediscover the era of folk song acquisition, which is the origin of memory. "'Folk' is a melody, a sound, about the history of the countryside." Wang Yao explained why the feature debut was named "Folk Songs". The critic also gave her interpretation of the novel's title "Folk Song": "It should be to tell a cold era through the character and fate, opportunity and action, thoughts and feelings of countless people born on the land and raised on the river... At the same time, because the folk song mainly records the ordinary life of the people, it is also spread through the people, and it can be passed down. ”
Wang Yao has pondered for many years into the first sentence at the beginning of the novel: "I sit on the dock, the sun is like a thin paper cushion under the ass", just like the feathers that flutter with the wind at the beginning of the movie "Forrest Gump", taking the reader into the soft memories of the protagonist, and also laying the tone of the entire novel's watery poetry narrative. In May 1972, at the dock of the Jiangnan Brigade, a fourteen-year-old boy waited to learn about the historical problems of his grandfather, and the people of the Jiangnan Brigade waited for the big ship of the oil drilling team, but life finally ran out of people's expectations and control. In a narrative in which memories are constantly flashing back and memories are constantly reconstructed, the story unfolds.
In order to present the poetic and avant-garde literary character of "Folk Songs", Yilin Publishing House invited Zhou Weiwei, a designer who has won the reputation of "China's Most Beautiful Book", to create the visual effects of the book as a whole. As Wang Yao's "northern Jiangsu" hometown, Zhou Weiwei has an innate affinity for the water town atmosphere laid out in the novel "Folk Songs". The cover is dominated by black and gold, which is far away, and the collision of black and gold colors brings a sense of golden age. The sparkling water of the river, the back of a sensitive and thoughtful teenager stands in the distance, leading us to retrace the long river of memory. It is worth mentioning that the title of "Folk Song" is personally inscribed by the writer Mo Yan, with strong ink color, elegant and solemn, which complements the entire cover design. Yangzi Evening News/Purple Cow News reporter Huang Yanwen
Proofread by Xu Heng
Source: Purple Cow News