"Eight and a Half" is Huang Yuning's first collection of novels, a total of 8 and 1/2 works, "Call Transfer", "Three Forks", "Water", "You or Plants", "Happiness within Reach", "Mercury is Busy" and other 6 realistic theme works focus on the emotions of the new middle class and new immigrants in the new media era, "A Thousand Miles To Ride Alone" and "Literary Patient" 2 science fiction works, imagining a fantasy future of symbiosis with artificial intelligence, and the non-fiction work "Overseas Relations" is the author's family history. A collection of novels connects Shanghai's past, present, and future.
On the evening of August 18, Sinan Literature House, "Eight and a Half Parts" sharing meeting
First, the emotional charm of middle-class men and women
In the fictional story kingdom of "Eight and a Half Parts", the author reborn the most requisitioned and nearly depleted love type. There is nothing new under the sun, and in the old story the new man and woman are seriously struggling.
"Call Transfer" is a telecommunications fraud story full of wonderful ideas, male director Feng Shu took advantage of his wife sitting in the United States to sit in the "immigration prison" and student Xiao Xiao had an extramarital affair, and when his wife returned, Feng Shu blacked Out Xiao Xiao. "Cheaters" act as a medium for "vanished lovers" to "restore" contact. Xiao Xiao swallowed the poison of literature and art, blinded by love, Feng Shu has knowledge and power, is the number one player, and victory or defeat is self-evident. Xiao Xiao is pregnant, and Feng Shu hopes that she will prescribe conditions, and after beating up the child, the bridge will return to the bridge road. However, when turning to the family, due to the economic and material level of "sending a wife under the fence" and their own chaotic emotional relationship, in the face of the flirting between wives and investors, they can only explode in anger and anger. In this complex emotional relationship, everyone gains and loses, but there is no winner.
"Three Forks" describes a middle-class couple, wife J is an emotional columnist, and husband K is afraid of J's scrutiny and analysis, rejecting that "can't hand over homework". Hero K saves L, falls into the trap of the company, and is politely dissuaded. L follows the rules of the game of not procrastinating and not owing, and wants to compensate by sexual means. After K lost his job, he behaved abnormally, and J suspected that he was cheating on his colleagues, and he investigated step by step, looking for evidence. She followed her husband to the hotel and took "incriminating evidence." When K receives a picture from J of his hotel room with L, it erupts into irresistible rebellion in the calm — K "jumps up" and carries L to the balcony within J's line of sight, allowing her to "see clearly", and the life of the template suddenly gets out of control. On the big stage of the balcony, K is an actor who performs hard. I applaud first!
In "Happiness Within Reach", Xiao Yong and Qian Jiayi are lovers who are about to enter the palace of marriage, and there is a distance between them that is not enough to bridge the gap between her hard work and his benevolence and righteousness, and she is lonely. The happiness within reach of advertising forced brainwashing is also divided into seller shows and buyer shows. Tan Luzhou, whom Xiao Yong met in the national exhibition division training group, is a person who is willing to fake it, and cooking instant noodles must be accompanied by the same dishes as the packaging. The two spent a magical afternoon together on an exotic subway, but between measurement hesitations, the magic vanished. Coupled with the mistakes such as sending wrong messages, the two did not realize their desire to live another life, and performed a new era of "Blockade" (Zhang Ailing).
But when the magic is gone, Tan Luzhou is Qian Jiayi. Huang Yuning's novel is like a knife, portraying the emotional relationship between men and women in the new media era. Love is enchanted, falling from the altar of faith into a legacy problem that needs to be solved, a psychological war without smoke, a hilarious false advertisement. In this war without heroes and victories, there are only humility and ugliness, measurement and comparison, love and wear. Take the Desire first, then change to the Cemetery.
Second, homelessness in the spiritual world
Many of the characters in "Eight and a Half" are in some kind of dilemma, besieged by love, marriage, career, and even crushed by loneliness and technology. In the novel, the dilemma is not only the identification of specific practical problems, but also the portrayal of the characters' spiritual wandering. Spiritual homelessness not only plagues urban newcomers who eat instant noodles and rent houses, but also belong to the middle class who drink martinis and live in villas.
The "liar" in "Call Transfer" is a substitute driver, a nameless man in an international metropolis, with a rebellious prehistory of life, a hometown that can never really go back to, and a current place of residence that is always free from the barrier, which is a double homelessness in both the material and spiritual senses. He was originally in parallel with the literary and artistic circles, because of the design of telecommunications fraud, he broke into the chaotic world of the latter, and watched the "street car of desire" of the professors of the drama academy (theater directors) and female students (female editors of literary magazines and actresses). When Xiao Xiao was still immersed in the movie "Desire StreetCar" that he had watched with Feng Shu, he was writing a drama "Desire StreetCar" with "The Next Xiao Xiao". Xiao Xiao followed in and volunteered to become "damaged" people, becoming smashed bottles.
Many of the characters in the novel's collection are like fragile glass bottles. The male neighbor in "Water", Qian Sumei in "You or Plants", died unexpectedly; the "I" of "A Thousand Miles and a Single Ride", under the sun, will hurt my skin. In "The Literary Patient", even literature is vain and fragile, and it is a thesaurus that big data can dispatch. Fragility is an important symbol of the novel's characters, who have fragile bodies, lives, unstable emotional relationships, and identities and statuses that instantly return to zero.
K in "Three Forks" was originally full of confidence in the future, and when he had fun, he gave his wife J a promise of "I can do whatever I want, I can hold on"; J, Chinese a double degree in psychology, and has countless emotional columnists. But living a delicate life of living as a template and living as a religious reference is only a virtual mountaintop. K spent six years in the position of sales manager and was dissuaded by the workplace conspiracy of his new boss, and his fragile identity and status were immediately dissolved, immersed in "The Pilot's Song" at night to create a ground-to-air missile alone, pretending to work during the day, and being a lone wanderer in the zoo, a spiritual refuge. Seven years of conjugal relations have reached a three-point fork in the control of control, can a pre-publicized extramarital affair grasp the right sense of proportion?
But in the darkness of the night, the stars in the sky are still warmly soothing people's hearts. In "Call Transfer", it is the "liar" who "accompanies" Xiao Xiao through her suffering, and it is also the "liar" who does justice for Xiao Xiao, which is the most brilliant sunshine in the novel. Xiao Xiao saw his emotions clearly because of a fraud, and his money was two loves, which was the starting point for coming out. Just like the squatter in "A Thousand Miles and a Single Ride", in order to find the red rabbit, the sun is exposed to the sun, the skin is injured, but after the wound is scabed, it will become armor. Love is poison and antidote, depravity and flight.
The author's depiction of the intellectual middle class is so true and thorough that it is shocking, but the depiction of new immigrants in the city is slightly alienated, and the "crumpled banknotes" appear twice in "Call Transfer", and the narrator's way of paying rent in the international metropolis seems ungrounded. In order to create a sense of contrast between nurse Mu Ne and the Reiki poet in "You or Plants", Qian Sumei's description of dryness is too much, and the "half-cut gray teeth" are slightly deliberate.
3. Narrative rules and cultural symbols
The author has precise control over the narrative, a sense of ingenious design, and the narrative rules make the story full of form. The free narrative speed and unexpected coincidences and sudden changes allow readers to have a roller coaster-like reading experience.
"Call Transfer" switches freely between first- and second-person, with a total of nine chapters, and the multiple chapters of three use a second-person observation narrative, and the "liar" calmly observes the various performances on the world stage.
Through the flow of consciousness technique, "Three Forks" shows the mental journey of the three people in turn in sequence, using a limited perspective to peel off the cocoon and gradually reveal the whole story. J, the fraudster in "Call Transfer", and the horoscope columnist in "Mercury is Busy", are all characters who have opened gold fingers and can spy, intervene, and hook up with the lives of others. JKL is three consecutive letters in the 26 English alphabets, K is besieged by J and L, and placed in a transitional sequence of J (teacher)-K-L (student). J silently observes K, while unknowingly guiding L through the emotional column on how to deal with K. After three rounds of narration, the emotional path of the three characters reaches the three forks.
In "Literary Patient", artificial intelligence and novelists have to compete, the reader is a blind judge, the writer is in the west egg, the reader is in the east egg, the metaphor is obvious, the reader seems to be the author can not embrace and do not hesitate to cater to the former lovers. The story has been reversed many times, and the novelist wins in the case of three consecutive games of artificial intelligence, and the novelist's final victory is the artificial intelligence's need to obtain literary raw materials.
The author assigns the cultural needs of each class to the needs of each class, with Albert Camus's "Between Suffering and Sunshine", Dahir Hammit's "Malta Black Hawk"; "The StreetCar of Desire" and "House of Cards"; Tchaikovsky, Richard Clayderman, etc. becoming important symbols in shaping the intellectual middle class. For example, "Three Forks" relies on material brands and cultural symbols such as the Bruce Brothers, Chanel, Red Bean Coix Lily Porridge, Avocado Salad, House of Cards, and Haruki Murakami to build an orderly life for the middle class.
Fourth, when literature embraces film and television
The author's love for movies is first reflected in the naming of novels and titles. "Eight and a Half" is taken from Fellini's film of the same name, and "A Thousand Miles and a Single Ride" also has a movie of the same name. The Literary Patient is a use of the film The English Patient.
The film and television dramas in the novel are also an important way to express the meaning, and "Desire StreetCar" is a play within a play that shows the relationship between the characters and shapes the image in "Call Transfer". Tan Luzhou in "Happiness within Reach" and the protagonist of the movie "Genius Ripley" form a mirror image correspondence. To a certain extent, the author is writing novels in the narrative way of the film, narrating with a language full of picture sense, "Three Forks" cross-shooting "Chinese Patients" through parallel montages, and "A Thousand Miles to Ride Alone" reminds people of the setting of many science fiction movies in the future city. "Eight and a Half" is very cinematic, and there is often a unique experience of "I think I must have seen this shot in some old movie" in the reading.
Huang Yuning once wrote in a film review that the reason for the "tasteless narration" is often the superficiality of knowledge. On the contrary, it can be proved that the reason for the interesting telling is often the wealth of knowledge, and the rich knowledge of the author is not poured out of the brain, and the reader will explore and discover in continuous reading and obtain the pleasure of reading.
Write badly, don't write.
Huang Yuning