[United States] Dan Muroshi / Wen Chen Jingzhi / Translation
Professor Dan Muroshi's "Eighty Books Around the World" is both a reconstruction of the territory of world literature and the establishment of a palace of memory on paper for human culture. When the virus was circulating, some people read and wrote at their desks, lit lamps for heaven and earth, and gave the world a hope.
Book Eighty-one
So we are finally back at the Improvement Club, where Verne's novel began, and the time is just up to the point. The discussion of this plan begins with "Around the World in Eighty Days" in the opening statement, and of course the name of the plan comes from this book, and with that in mind, you protest that I have exceeded the limit of eighty copies. But, not always, the situation was no more excessive than that of Feria Falk: he arrived in London at eight and fifty minutes later than he should have appeared at the club because of last-minute delays, fear of something coming, a bet that failed. He simply turned around and went home, unpacking the next day. However, that night, Lu Lutong bought a newspaper and was shocked to find that it was still the appointed day. The truth is that since they are circling the earth from east to west, they have caught an extra day when they cross the International Date Line. And here I am, in the opening statement, I include the hot air balloon in the various means of transportation for Fokker and Lulutong. However, there are no hot air balloons in Verne's novels. The hot air balloon was added by film director David Lean to take advantage of the panoramic effect it brings; this is the film I watched in my early years. If Verne was saved by a meridian, I was saved by a media.
So, where can we go from here? Now that we've come back to the well-decorated library of the Improvement Club, we might be able to pick another one from their shelves. In 1884, the Improvement Club published a bibliography of 75,000 books. Many of them were concerned with social and political issues, which was also in keeping with the nature of the club, which was founded in 1836 as a place for gentlemen to smoke, play cards, and discuss issues related to government reforms. But their literary bibliography is also well chosen.
One possibility that always exists is to continue reading an author who has already caught our eye. If we have read the translation of The Honest Man and now want to read the original French version, the club has a sixty-two-volume collection of works by the author, and we can pick up a volume and sit in an armchair. The Honest Man also shows how tastes change over time, belonging to the thirty-first and thirty-second volumes of the Romans philosophiques—far less than the eminent epic Henriade and his nine now-forgotten plays.
Or, turn to my life-changing work in ninth grade, Stern's Biography of Xiang Di, which the club has in four of his ten volumes. We can then read Stern's heart-warming Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (I read it after reading Xiang Di's biography), and maybe — maybe not — continue reading his sermons. We can also follow Stern and read his favorite writers, Cervantes and Rabelais (the latter in this library contains both the original French version and the earlier Urquhart translation, the version that Stern read). Then, in the way That Dr. Doolittle carelessly pokes at new targets, let us draw on it, perhaps in the case of Edmond About, the now largely forgotten French reformist writer of the nineteenth century, whose ten novels the club has, and we can pick one of Dr. Doolittle's methods; or, to choose a timeless classic, we can choose Virgil's work, whether in the original Latin or in English.
Looking beyond the library of the Improvement Club, my own tendency was probably to return to a book that I had hoped to include in the sixteen locations. There were a lot of works that were squeezed out because of other locations I ended up choosing or other works in the same location: maybe the Epic of Gilgamesh, the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, the buru Quartet by the great Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer. To measure the greatness of a book, there is a measure by which it can grow greater and greater in a new round of reading, or even in a new round of reading. But new possibilities always exist, and we can explore remote islands that Judith Saransky has never seen before, and although unlike her, I have chosen what I ultimately want to read—Dostoevsky's "The Dual Personality," Muzier's The Man Without Personality, George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss River, Andiro Tanizaki's "Fine Snow," all of which have been on my bookshelf for years, in silent reproach, waiting for their chances.
After much painstaking return to London, we can read works that reflect the changes in the city, from the time of Felia Falk, and even from the time of Virginia Woolf, the city has been turned upside down. London is now one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world, with a steady stream of residents from all over the world, especially the former colonies. Forty percent of the population within the London Ring Road today was born outside the Commonwealth, and more than three hundred languages are spoken in the city. This change is often associated with the "Blaster Generation", when a large number of people from the West Indies settled in England after the war. The concept derives from the steamship's name, the MV Empire Windrush, which brought in its first workers from the former British islands of the Caribbean in 1948 to alleviate Post-War Labor Shortage in Great Britain.
Several important writers emerged from the labor migration movement, including George Lamming (The Emigrants, 1954) and Samuel Selvon, whose work The Lonely Londoners (also published in 1954) was a key depiction of postwar London from the perspective of Caribbean immigrants. More recently, Andrea Levy's Small Island (2004) recalls her father's experience, who arrived on the Storm. We can also extend our reading to Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, whose memoir Finding the Centre brilliantly evokes the past of a young writer struggling with displacement, both in search of himself in the center of the old empire and in his writing.
Among contemporary writers, we can turn to another Nobel laureate, Kazuo Ishiguro, or the novelist and film director Hanif Khureishi, or zadie Smith, whose award-winning debut novel, White Teeth (2000), revolves around a family similar to Smith's own (mother Jamaican, father English), telling the story of them and the Iqbal family from Bangladesh. There are also contacts between the Sheriffin family of some Jewish ancestry. Even in the heart of London, we are now a long way from Bloomsbury.
As far as this plan is concerned, for me, the real eighty-first book will be "Eighty Books Around the World." For a certain period of time, I will turn the blog into a printed book, with weekly updates becoming one of the chapters; I will also have to decide the multiple pictures I use in the blog, which ones have to be abandoned and which will have to be desperately kept; and the patches here and there, many times these revisions are based on comments received in the past sixteen weeks, for which I am deeply grateful (about the comments, there is a note: my ability to reply to comments has been eerily halted in the past few weeks, although I am still able to read the comments and always have a lot of interest). I'm trying to fix this).
There is no end to the list of books other than the finished manuscript of the "Eighty Books", and I believe that you are the same. My personal wish to read the book has been expanded, and intriguing suggestions have appeared in various reviews, in this feedback loop generated online. The world is falling apart in many ways, and effective COVID-19 treatments are seen by the big guys as merely a dim glimmer; in this case, what makes sense is that we connect with each other in a feasible way to do what is important to us, just as we practice le tour du monde dans nos chambres.
Giorgio de Chirico, "The Return of Ulysses" (1968)
Editor-in-Charge: Zheng Shiliang
Proofreader: Yan Zhang