"The space of Li Fan's novels is relaxed, and it is more meaningful because of the daily life." This is the reading recommendation given by the famous writer Jia Pingwa to the collection of short stories "Hustle and Bustle Day" by the famous Nanjing novelist Li Fan. After Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House recently published this book "Hustle day", Chu Fujin, Yu Yiming and other literary masters also followed up with the reading quick review in a timely manner.
Chu Fujin said that when reading Li Fan's novel, you may wish to start with the word "fun." "If writing is not fun, there won't be so many people flocking to it; if the novel itself is not fun, as a writer, can we judge that he has deviated from some kind of 'accurate pursuit' of the attributes of the text?"
Yu Yiming believes that Li Fan's novel is solid in strength, the language is either dense or empty, the details are landscapes and landscapes, and the picture is new. "The goodness of short stories lies not only in the tension of the written text, behind which is the accumulation of life, and this is Li Fan's strength."
Zhang Xuexin, professor and doctoral supervisor of the College of Literature of Liaoning Normal University and a well-known literary critic, wrote an in-depth reading review, trying to uncover the code for Li Fan's creation of short and medium stories.
What good books to read on weekends? Red Star News "Red Star Book Review" recommends Li Fan and his "Hustle Day" today.
【Red Star Book Review】
Touch on the heartwarming lifescapes of our lives
——Reading notes of Li Fan's "Hustle and Bustle Day"
◎ Zhang Xuexin
How much narrative space can a short story leave for details or details? Can details constitute a rich subject or propeller of a short story narrative, strongly promoting the progress of the narrative and bringing out changes in story, characters, meaning, including language, etc.?
In a very limited narrative space, it is extremely difficult to discover or excavate the vitality and mysteries of life, and to present possibilities. But in Li Fan's texts, I always see the most sensitive and heart-palpitating human, spiritual, and psychological life phases of life in our time, and of course I never expected that he would behave so delicately, pervasively, and diligently into the fabric of life, free and free to do whatever he wanted.
I've always admired Carver's theory of fiction, what exactly could create the tension of a novel? That is: "To a certain extent, thanks to the way the specific sentences are connected together, this forms the visible part of the novel." But equally important are those parts that are omitted, those parts that are implied, the landscapes that are under the calm smooth surface of things. I weeded out unnecessary movement, and I wanted to write novels that had low visibility. (Quoted from Raymond Carver's The Cathedral)
Here, "visibility" mainly emphasizes the subtlety, ambiguity and complexity of the writer's presentation of the living world, that is, to emphasize the inherent tension of the text narrative. It is not only an examination of the reader's aesthetic ability, but also one of the highest levels for measuring the expressiveness of the writer. Only by presenting the complexity and necessary depth of life and human nature can it be possible to establish a textual structure of "one eighth" and "seven eighths" above and below sea level, as metaphorically used in the "iceberg theory".
Li Fan has always explored the spiritual "difficulty" and the "difficulty" of reality that human nature must face. "Since the collapse of the world begins simultaneously from the outside and the inside, any form of external reconciliation is meaningless." From this point of view, if the loss in the depths of human nature is due to the loss of spirit and faith, and the absence of the soul, then everything should not be blamed on the times and reality.
Here, there may be a strong basis for pessimism. Of course, the times and reality have brought burdens, heaviness and confusion to people's psychology, spirit and human nature to a certain extent, but if we look at it from another perspective of seeking the safety of the soul, they also bear too many "crimes" and responsibilities for people's hearts that do not belong to them. Therefore, human happiness is not taken for granted, and we must always ask ourselves. Perhaps, with the development of modern human society, we have to ask again, "Who am I?" The ultimate question, because everyone needs to look for life and the spirit of existence "upstream", to solve the most fundamental question of "why exists".
And Li Fan's "What to Do on Friday Night" presents the loneliness after the fleeting of adolescence, and the increasing pressure of psychological space triggers a spiritual void. The anxiety of a generation still continues to germinate the illusion that the soul has nowhere to rest under the crushing of reality. When the weekend comes, what kind of rest should there be in the context of modern life, or a temporary adjustment of mood? The "he" in the story in the past inertia and "routine", after dating the cohabiting girlfriend failed, hallucinations and emptiness flocked to it. The chaotic taste of life is unable to pick up the old dreams that have been there. That winter night, he hadn't felt lonely. At that time he still had a little love, a little fantasy. Five years later, in the winter, he had become nothing, love had long since passed, and fantasies had been squeezed into the abyss by vulgar life. Now he had become a man like the wind of a winter night, wandering the streets of the city. ”
When "he" meets his former girlfriend, the common helplessness and re-confronting the confusion cannot get the slightest emotional and psychological supplement and relief, and a trace of memory immediately triggers the infinite emotions of the two: Why can love and marriage be scattered with the wind? Perhaps, even the slightest misalignment in life can create great damage to the fragile soul. Maybe we will rethink for them, and it is faith that determines the value and meaning of their existence, not the loneliness of the moment.
I still can't understand, we are good together, never mixed mouth, you said break up, it seems not sad at all, not at all attached.
There's nothing to be sad about, to be attached to. When I woke up one morning, a voice in the darkness said to me that our fate was over, so I decided to break up with you. I believe in fate, and everything we have decided in our previous lives has already been decided.
If a person is extremely bored and extremely embarrassed on the weekend, especially "listening" to such a frank, fatalistic confession from his ex-girlfriend, how should we judge and understand life? Negative, downward, low-key life situations and atmospheres breed an undisguised desolation. And when they talk about such a situation, they are so relaxed that they don't think so. Li Fan's novel, intentionally or unintentionally, reveals the darkness of human nature hidden in life, and insights into the dangerous areas that may be faced during the critical period of life.
The human nature and the world of life that the writer wants to present will inevitably have the imprint of the writer's "personality", and it is still impossible to get rid of the willfulness of self, self-confidence, and "self-righteousness". But this "individuality" should be the embodiment of the writer's heterogeneous experience of self-"invisibility" and "forgetfulness", because we cannot confirm that the experience of individuality is the transcendent aesthetic experience of human experience.
Looking at Li Fan's short and medium stories, although we cannot avoid the "invisible" existence of the writer's personality tendencies, Li Fan's novels have a strange broadness, which contains the subtlety and richness of human nature and life. Because one's own experience, only when it is embedded in another personality, human nature, breeding a "selfless" reconstruction of life, can we enter the level of transcending the self.
To tell the truth, Li Fan's novel is not meticulous and delicate at the narrative level, but it relies on the synergy of the whole and the impact of the individual to obtain the penetrating power of life and human nature. I feel that the narrative at the end of "Hustle and Bustle Day" seems to be a metaphor for the spiritual qualities of the characters, stories, memories, time and human nature in Li Fan's novel creation on the basis of philosophical speculation:
The screams were like shooting stars in the night sky, illuminating many of the scenes in the depths of Xie Dongmin's mind. This scene is a light-sensitive negative, and Xie Dongmin's mind is a dark room. Those negatives were piled together, and it flashed in Dongmin's mind, and it was difficult for him to sort out an order of events or plots. He can only rely on memory, subconsciously grasp a handful out of thin air, and simply and quickly recall some unforgettable things. It should be noted that in these negative-like memories, Dongmin saw white hair, white eyeballs, and black faces. Once the original facts fall into memory, they are both identical to it and maintain an opposite.
In particular, the last sentence, "Once the original facts fall into memory, they will have both identity with it and maintain an opposite", which is like a fatalistic description and judgment of Li Fan's novel writing. The "original facts" become the erratic factor in the overall physical appearance of his novels and short stories, and although they cannot be gathered, they can become the solid hard core of the narrative.
I feel that Li Fan is a skeptic, a novelist full of romantic feelings and a good realm, he dares to keenly express the extremes of spiritual experience, and there is not much ordinary scruples, and I firmly believe that there must be a youth "negative" in those stories that he once immersed himself in. Although the "precision" of the text presented by the interest, meaning and examination of reality will inevitably be deviated from time to time, Li Fan's pattern is by no means narrow, he has his own way of imagination, but also has narrative patience and endurance, he will not cover the secret of life, reality and the bottom of human nature, but can filter, meditate and "salvage" the past that "fell into memory". (The author is a professor and doctoral supervisor of the College of Literature of Liaoning Normal University, and a famous literary critic)
Lee
【Writer Profile】
Li Fan, a native of Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, is a poet, novelist, film and television screenwriter, and editor-in-chief of Youth Magazine. He has published nearly one million words of novels and more than 200 poems. He has published three novels, including the novel collection "Hustle Day", the poetry collection "Picking The Lamp and Walking at Night", and a collection of English novels with Lu Yang. He has won the Nanjing Literature and Art Award and the Purple Mountain Literature Award.
Edited by Qiao Xueyang
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