This is a small epic of youth of the "post-50s", where their rural youth slowly unfolds.
On July 4th, zhang Ning, a famous writer and critic, walked into the Shanghai Sinan Reading Club to bring readers the creation and sharing of the new book "Ballad of Spring Mountain", and together with scholars and writers Wang Hongsheng, Zhang Sheng and Xiang Jing, launched a literary dialogue around "Urban-Rural Confrontation and Dialogue: New Topics for Old and Young People".
The novel "Ballads of Spring Mountain", published by the People's Literature Publishing House in March this year, tells the story of a group of young people in Shanghai who were under the age of 20 in the last century and came to a village called Chunshanling in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River.
The new environment shocks the youth, and the new life tests them all the time. At the same time, a series of subtle changes have also taken place in the originally quiet mountain villages and small towns. It is a dynamic picture, and the earlier urban-rural collision increases the tension within literature.
"Ballad of Spring Mountain" is the second part of Zhang Ming's long novel trilogy, which, together with the "Tale of Three Cities" published in 2019, writes the very different youth stories of father and son.
"Three Cities" is the urban youth of the "post-80s", and "The Ballad of Spring Mountain" is the rural youth of the "post-50s".
As a "post-50s youth epic", rural life sets the tone of the entire novel: solid, vast, tenacious vitality and endless sighs.
The collision and integration of urban culture and rural culture and the changes in the relationship between urban and rural areas are the manifestations of social development, the theme of literature, and the practical problems faced by generations of young people in their growth.
■ "Ballad of Spring Mountain" new book sharing meeting site
At the event site, the four guests took Shanghai culture as a typical topic of urban culture, sorted out people's imaginations of cities and villages in different eras, and thus also showed the different aspirations, situations and choices of young people in different eras.
In the eyes of the guests, the special feature of "Ballad of Spring Mountain" is its multiple perspectives and broad vision. Wang Liliang, a primary school student as a local, and Gu Qiulin, the protagonist as an outsider, look at each other in the novel, test each other, understand each other, and become an invisible clue throughout. Through their vision, the novel shows not just which group, but the cross-section of life.
When the author Zhang Ming told the original intention of his creation, he said: "'The Ballad of Spring Mountain' can be said to be the growth story of young people, the fate story of small intellectuals in townships and towns, and it is also the story of peasants encountering strangers and accepting strange cultures in traditional local acquaintance society. ”
The novel was selected into the key works support project of the China Writers Association and the Beijing Writers Association, and has been reprinted by the China Writers Association's "Selected Novels" and "Writers' Digest" newspapers and periodicals, which has aroused the attention of the literary circles.
Source: Thoughtful