Recently, after reading Mr. Ge Liang's novel "Tile Cat", I love it very much. The story of the Creator is beautiful not only because of beautiful things, but also because of the good fortune of self-esteem.
"Metal, pottery, bird feathers, silent celebration of their victory over time." The poem is from Szymborska's Museum.
Ge Liang was deeply touched by the three images in the poem, and he said that Szymborska's poem is about the strength of things, "things can become the spokesmen of the entire cultural tradition, things can resist forgetting, and help people realize the inheritance of skills." "Thus, the three stories he chooses in the novel correspond to the three things in the verse: the scribe uses the feather, the barber uses sharp scissors, and the clay potter uses clay." Thus, "Tile Cat" is composed of three stories related to the craftsman into one.
The story of the craftsman is beautiful, because the heart and the hand go together, the heart thinks, the hand does something, and the party becomes the "beauty of creation". The famous literary critic James Wood once said: Writing fictional characters is the most difficult, novices often start from static, like copying photos, but the master is starting from dynamics. The writer seems to be born with the advantage of "dynamic", every move is a play, just watching Ge Liang delicately depict the witch's ritual of killing chickens, placing tile cats, repairing a book to slip, stuffy water, inverting pages, ordering paper twisting, qi column, trimming, flattening, lower twisting, skin, punching eye thread... The beauty contained in these movements completes the first level of reading pleasure. The writer must undergo abundant and close observation to gain an understanding of these movements, and to capture the details of creation—down to the warmth, thickness, and thickness of geometry—in order to change the beauty from the rhetoric of words to the senses, and even to the objects of imagination and thought.
Writer Ge Liang
The craftsmen written by Ge Liang are all in the folk, and the skills not only allow them to settle down, but also the cornerstone of their own existence value, which makes the beauty of creation more embedded in the texture of life. The legendary book cultivators in "Bookmakers", Lao Dong and Jane, live in different eras, but whether they are cultivating Western ancient books or ancient Chinese books, they not only pursue excellence, but also adhere to ethics, each with their own principles; several barbers with different origins and different styles of craftsmanship in "FeiFa" are all carried by the ups and downs of Hong Kong's economic waves, using their own craftsmanship to echo the trend of the times, and they have to forget that the service industry is ultimately serving others, and it is difficult to be alone; they are in the city and in the rivers and lakes, competing with each other, but also cherishing each other. Mortal craftsmen, inherently skilled, will eventually carry the waves of the times to hit their own pain, and such as the old Dong, "peacock old man" their pain, just reflect the beauty of creation is how difficult it is. Reading this lament, one has reached the second level of reading.
Ge Liang said, "I want to explore the relationship between people and things through the theme of craftsmen. What is the meaning of things? From the perspective of folk art, the first thing is to use, but the process of use is also the process of recording time. In Szymborska's poetry, it is the triumph of things over time, and the craftsman's creation of things is his trust in time. "In terms of time span, the three novels included in "Tile Cat" are more profound than those of "Northern Iris" and "Suzaku", but what remains unchanged is Ge Liang's lyrical writing of dignity and benevolence. Starting from things and experiencing time, the third level of reading will eventually fall on the beauty of reading human nature.
"Bookmaker" is a piece of the source of Ge Liang's participation in the rescue work of the manuscript of his grandfather Professor Ge Kangyu's book "According to Several Previous Views". Ge Kangyu was a famous art historian who completed his monograph "According to Several Previous Views" in Jiangjin, Sichuan Province, during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and is still regarded as a guideline by researchers of ancient Chinese painting and calligraphy. The manuscript rescue work gave Ge Liang his first contact with the old book cultivators, and also opened up this group of craftsmen's stories that combined non-fiction and fiction. In the late 1930s and mid-1940s, Longquan Town was not only the place where potters made folk sacred beasts tile cats for generations, but also happened to be the residence of many famous scholars of Southwest United University, who restored the location of important research institutes such as the Institute of History and Language of the Academia Sinica, the Tsinghua Institute of Liberal Arts, and the China Construction Society. Ge Liang, with his novelist's keen intuition, made a detailed investigation, and took the tile cat as the clue, shaped the life of the Southwest United Congress of Wen Yiduo, Feng Youlan, Liang Sicheng, Lin Huiyin, Jin Yuelin and other master figures, and the folk creation rich in spiritual support symbols was perfectly integrated with the humanistic intellectual integrity of the special historical period. At the same time, Ge Liang wrote the three-generation story of the rong ruihong family, the heir of the tile cat, coupled with the restoration of the college entrance examination, mountaineering, volunteer education, urban reconstruction, etc., which greatly enriched the people's hearts in the turbulent situation for decades, and the corresponding thing was the tile cat that was cute and persistent.
Even more evocative is Mr. Ge Liang's world of craftsman literature. The novelist is also a creator, as if adding bricks and tiles, "Tile Cat" inherits "Northern Iris", "Suzaku", "Drama Year", or can follow more home country stories, he is building an increasingly dense network between humanistic history and folk craftsmen, just like craftsmen, writers are also polishing their own skills, both in the jianghu, but also yearning for the results of the skills to make humanity transcend time and space. (hence)