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Post-85 best-selling author Li Yudong
At the end of January this year, a new historical novel "Three Thousand Years of PenFall" was successively listed on jd.com, Dangdang.com, Taobao.com, and Xinhua bookstores across the country, and was favored by the market. Since the book was listed, it has been ranked in the top ten of the JD.com novel list. Readers received the book and received rave reviews.
This book is another masterpiece by Li Yudong, a post-85 best-selling author and winner of the "Zijin People's Literature Star Award", after novels such as "Human Dog Barking" and "Out of Focus".
If you read this book carefully, you will find that this book takes the defeat of the Sino-Japanese War as the main axis, takes the humiliating and sentimental diplomatic career of the controversial Li Hongzhang as the core, and looks at China from the overall situation of the world. Its plot is well-opened and closed, and the characters are very typical.
Taking history as a mirror, you can wear a crown. Today, when people have lost their way and slackened in the unprecedented prosperity of material civilization, this historical novel can take you to recreate the difficult years, so that readers can find a driving force for today's self in the shuttle of time and space - to think, to explore, to recall, to re-understand the meaning of today's struggle in the new era.
Reporter: First of all, congratulations on the publication of your new work "Three Thousand Years of Pen Fall". Please briefly introduce the content of the new book, right?
Li Yudong: To put it simply, it is a period of mental journey of Li Hongzhang, a major minister in the late Qing Dynasty, before and after the Sino-Japanese Sino-Japanese War. Of course, the derivation from this is much more than that.
Reporter: Speaking of Li Hongzhang, what do you think of this historical figure? In your pen, is there any difference between Li Hongzhang, as the protagonist of the novel, and the characters in the history books?
Li Yudong: In essence, there is no difference. Although someone once asked me, is Li Hongzhang in your novel meant to subvert the original image of Li Hongzhang as a traitor? But it's not. From a macroscopic point of view, Li Hongzhang is a backward element, a backward feudal scholar. His progress was only fifty steps and a hundred steps. The reason why the late Qing Dynasty did not develop to a state like the later Meiji Restoration in Japan was mainly because the feudal class was unwilling to stimulate the development of the commodity economy and the progress of industrial civilization through decentralization. Including the Western affairs movement, in fact, the entire Westerners were a feudal scholar-doctor class, still firmly holding the resources in their own hands, and there was no reform like Japan's, and finally embarked on the capitalist road. Therefore, Li Hongzhang's foreign affairs movement is just to maintain this feudal system, so in fact, there is not much difference between the character of Li Hongzhang in the novel and the historical data, although it talks about a lot of his sentimental elements, but it is definitely not to help him whitewash, absolutely not to turn him into a "hero", absolutely not like this.
Reporter: It seems that in this historical novel, you take Li Hongzhang's personal fate as an incision and look at China from the overall situation of the world situation. The creation of such a subject requires the writer to "have kung fu" and must also "work hard", what homework have you done for this book?
Li Yudong: I have done a lot of homework. At the time of writing, the book on the desk was placed on the old high, which, in addition to the research of some professional historians on this historical fact, also included a variety of social science works that evaluated this history from different angles, evaluated the character of Li Hongzhang, and evaluated the rise and fall of Chinese civilization. The main lessons I have done are, first, to grasp the historical facts more delicately and comprehensively, and second, to use my own gradually perfected system of ideological logic to interpret this history, and to explore the essence of our civilization through the context of history. Of course, it is impossible to describe all of this in a novel, but it is very important as a basis for creating a work.
Reporter: Why is the title of the book "Three Thousand Years of Pen Fall"?
Li Yudong: The name comes from a sentence that Li Hongzhang said when he was doing the foreign affairs movement. Seeing the industrial civilization of the West, he sighed at the time and said that China had caught up with the "great changes that have not occurred in three thousand years." What hasn't happened in three thousand years? In the five thousand years of Chinese civilization, some people in the academic circles believe that in these five thousand years, at least three thousand years, including economic, scientific and technological, military, we are the leaders of the world. But after 1840, with the invasion of western ships and guns, all these glories were gone.
Why is it "pen down" for three thousand years? This pen is the diplomat's pen and Li Hongzhang's pen. After the signing of the traitorous treaty, the glory of three thousand years is no longer mentioned, but has become the most sentimental background wall. So, the name itself carries a strong sentimentality.
Reporter: Does the translation of the cover title as "The End A Start" reflect the original intention of your book?
Li Yudong: I translated the name myself. The book was selected as a gift from a UNESCO "Chinese Labourers of world war I" campaign, along with a commemorative book I Wrote, "Dancers on corpses: 100 Years of Chinese Workers in World War I". The participants came from all over the world, with high specifications, and even heavyweights such as former French Prime Minister Raffarin. They don't necessarily all understand Chinese, and I translate this title this way to illustrate that although modern China had such a humiliating history, now we are back. I also want to tell the world that no difficulty can defeat us, and when we seem to be the weakest, it is precisely the beginning of our strength again.
Reporter: Taking history as a mirror, you can wear a crown. You also said that works should first play a positive role in society. As a historical novel, what do you want readers to get out of this book?
Li Yudong: I simplified this sentence in the preface, and Li Shimin's original words should be more detailed, which should be "with copper as a mirror, you can wear a crown; with history as a mirror, you can know the rise and fall; with people as a mirror, you can see the gains and losses." "In fact Chinese are natural history buffs, and everyone wants to make themselves look a little cultured. But everyday life is too tiring, and people don't have much energy to calm down and read a real historiography, because things that are too rigorous tend to seem too boring. Therefore, many people will read historical novels or watch those court dramas as a way to seek knowledge. Novels and TV dramas are art, and since they are art, in order to look good, it is understandable to fabricate and fabricate some content in itself, but I personally believe that in such a special state, as an author, I have the responsibility to maintain a kind of authenticity in historical content. Therefore, one of the characteristics of this book, the time, place, people, events, and the nature of events, I have taken as the basis of the facts recognized by the existing historians, and have not made any fabrications. Different from the historical data, only in terms of the artistic technique of expression, as well as the analysis of the characters' hearts, you can see all kinds of streams of consciousness, all kinds of inner monologues, and all kinds of contradiction entry points, all of which are to make it look better on the basis of not violating my principles. If after reading my book, the busy reader suddenly has some desire to think about history, the present, and the future, then it can be said that I have achieved my goal of creating this book.
Reporter: Your previous novels were mostly based on detective suspense, what prompted you to set your sights on the field of diplomacy in history?
Li Yudong: When I wrote detective novels, I was very young. At that time, writing things was more like the excitement of the story itself. By the time I was writing my last book, Out of Focus, my attitude had shifted. Suspense is just a tool for me, and this tool is to better disseminate some of my thoughts on society. Don't forget, when I was in School in England, one of my majors was called sociology, and diplomacy, history, and so on were all closely related to sociology. So I didn't just look to history today, and if I go down my normal path, it will be touched sooner or later.
Reporter: In recent years, there have not been many of your works on the road of literary creation, but every step has been very solid. From "Out of Focus" to "Dancer on the Corpse" to "Three Thousand Years of Pen Fall", it can be said that you are less and less like a "writer" and more like a sociologist.
Li Yudong: My understanding of classic novels is a story composed of contradictions. What kind of contradiction? In social groups, the most fundamental role, producer and consumer, producer is also a consumer, consumer is also a producer, the two are interrelated, derived from countless occupations. As productivity and social needs change, some of these occupations will be eliminated and new occupations will take their place. So we see that as a human being, you have to play many roles, you will have contradictions with other individuals, you will have contradictions with the profession you are engaged in, and your profession has to change when the times change, so your profession and the times will also have contradictions. In addition, your profession and someone else's profession will also contradict each other. All these contradictions are superimposed, which is the contradiction of society. Writing novels, in my opinion, no matter what you write, whether you write history or science fiction, write martial arts or write suspense, the essence of what we want to express is the same.
What sociology explores is nothing more than these problems, but the way they are expressed is different, the novelist is telling the story, and the sociologist is telling the point. The two can be mutually reinforcing, not conflicting.
Reporter: Can this also be understood as your successful transformation?
Li Yudong: Whether it is transformation or not, the benevolent person sees the benevolent. Success or failure has to be judged by others.
Reporter: After the publication of "Three Thousand Years of Pen Fall", the response was good and the hot comments were overwhelming. This is your first historical novel, this "small test of the bull knife", what experience or gain?
Li Yudong: This novel is my first historical novel, this historical novel is a way for me to explore the way, when this book was created, one of the methods I originally wanted to use was to take the Sino-Japanese War as the core, around Li Hongzhang's inner monologue, extending to both sides, and then involving the historical development of China, until finally he left sentimentally - I wanted to show the suppressed tone of this story in this way, and then string it together in some stream-of-consciousness way. After all, it is the first time to create a historical novel, and now it seems that this book also has some shortcomings, that is, there are some frameworks in it that are relatively more flexible than the realist novels I originally created, and some things and some places still need to be improved. If the next book writes a historical novel, this will definitely have a bigger breakthrough.
After writing this book, I also wrote two historical theories, one is "Dancers on the Corpse", and the other is "The Game of the Overdraft World: The Past and Present Life of dollar hegemony", which also summed up a lot of experience for me, and the next step will be to raise the story to a higher level under the premise of respecting history, so that people can be directly brought into the environment of the story.
Reporter: What are your plans for your future creations?
Li Yudong: Speaking of future creation, a few days ago I just completed a series of special articles, that is, the "Game of the Overdraft World: The Past and Present Life of dollar hegemony" just said, originally just wanted to popularize some knowledge about US finance to people in the context of the Sino-US game, originally planned to solve it in 40,000 or 50,000 words, but I did not expect to write more than 100,000 words at once, whether it is to be serialized on the Internet or published into a book, there is still no conclusion.
As for further planning, I feel that I am first of all a Shanxi native, and five thousand years of history look at Shanxi. The history of Shanxi, in The Chinese civilization, has a strong representation. Therefore, at present, there is a preliminary idea, that is, to dig something out of the history of our Shanxi, as for what to dig, in fact, I already have a goal in my mind, but it is only temporarily kept secret.
Reporter: Then let's wait for the masterpiece.
Editor-in-charge: Tong Xin