Dreams are so long that they float behind every dream
An extremely long white line, like a kite.
In 1986, a small tailor knocked on the door of literature with a novel she wrote at night, thus laying the foundation for her avant-garde writer's path.
The writers who have followed the avant-garde route with her for nearly three decades have "returned to tradition", and she is still obsessed with this way of writing, and she firmly believes that the young people of the future will love their work.
This person is Remnant Xue, an obscure, well-known and unknown Chinese avant-garde female writer. In China, no one who graduated from Chinese department may not know her, but she is one of the Chinese writers whose works are translated and published the most abroad.
The domestic fire is also because in 2019, she was on the odds list of Nobel Prize nominations, tied for fourth with Haruki Murakami, from obscurity to everyone's knowledge, she spent 30 years.
The reason why it takes so long is because she has set a "threshold" for her works, she is good at using poetic language to depict dreams and mysterious abstract momentary worlds, and pays more attention to discovering the inner world, which is a typical avant-garde literary feature. One of them is "Apple Tree Planted in the Corridor".
"Apple Tree Planted in the Corridor" is a masterpiece of novella published by Remnant Snow for the first time in China, which describes nightmarish scenes and strange stories based on the secrets of our family, the third sister telling her heart, the doctor's long and tedious story, the mother's whispers, and my five dreams.
This book breaks away from traditional Chinese realist writing, and uses nightmares and strange stories to construct an absurd world like Kafka's, in which the various characters have absurd personalities and vague backgrounds, as if they are fighting against the real world in a determined, self-reliant way.
This work of The Remnant Snow is completely detached from the progressive structure of conventional literary works, allowing unrelated events to form a multi-hierarchical structure that goes hand in hand. This requires careful consideration by the reader as they read.
However, for the avant-garde literature and the remnants of snow, "The Apple Tree Planted in the Corridor" is a good book. It will refresh your previous reading experience and elevate the reading process to a process of scrutiny.
A story of seeing human nature through secrets
The story begins with a dream, revealing the secrets hidden in this home from the perspective of "me".
"I" have a father, "my" father does not like to stay at home, likes to drill in the mountains, and his body always smells of grass.
"I" have a mother who always wants to abandon "me" and evades her responsibilities, such as pretending to forget to bury my dead father because she is afraid.
"I" also have a younger sister who is harsh and mean, looks down on "me", and always has to do something absurd and bizarre. She also has a fiancé who pretends to be a doctor, who thinks everyone in the family has a complex syndrome, who lives in a pool like a hippopotamus and thinks he's coming to save us.
In "I"'s view, each of them has their own secrets, and those secrets must be very frightening.
But when they began to tell their secrets, "I" found that they seemed to be using absurd behavior to disguise their sober minds. I realized from the beginning that bright sunlight was only a superficial phenomenon, and what I saw might be only appearances.
The story progresses step by step, "I" listen to everyone's secrets, watch their strange behavior feel ridiculous, but when I look back carefully, I find that I seem to see their stripped humanity, and also see the contradictions of their humanity and inner conflicts.
"I" seem to have experienced the ugliness of human nature, but also seen the brilliance of human nature.
At this time, the feeling of "I" may be the feeling of holding a book and reading.
Some people say that the biggest feature of Remnant Snow's works is language, those that are poetic and condensed, like nightmare whispers, both poetic enthusiasm and romance, but also philosophical profundity and rationality, both the simplicity and vividness of rural slang, and the clown-style jokes and funny, which are remnants of Xue's subversion and innovation of traditional language.
Very deep, very residual snow.
Remnant Xue often said: It is useless to read my book once or twice, just like a philosophy book, read it more than a dozen times to have a feeling.
Indeed, reading her book is like looking at people, just by looking at it or an exchange, it is difficult to distinguish between good and bad and see depth. Only deep intercourse can make divine intercourse.
How to read this book?
Why is the book of residual snow so difficult to understand?
The Russian writer Sergei Toloptsev once said that the work of Remnant Snow had reached a realm of complete freedom, and in her work, there were only people.
Because it is disorganized, it is obscure.
But her work is actually regular.
Like the book Apple Tree Planted in the Corridor, if you focus only on the storyline, it may disappoint you. Because the absurd plot will make you feel nonsensical and miss the process of looking at the "truth".
The biggest feature of this book is people.
Every character in the book is a strange person, doing strange things. But if you look at the essence through the phenomena, you will find that their inner spiritual and external manifestations are different.
My father seemed to be an irresponsible father, but he could also talk excitedly about his free spirit and beautiful ideals. It's not like the person who is put in a "condom", he doesn't think about what his father's identity should be, but he uses passivity to fight against external pressure.
The brother-in-law constantly changed his identity, he felt that the identity of the doctor was more suitable for him, but in the end he understood that he could only be a collector who sold old fountain pens. Everyone's ideas and reality are different, what is the difference between us and him?
Reading through this book, you will find that their absurdity is just a symptom, and they seem absurd but they are awake. As for why it is hidden, thousands of faces, readers and friends can play on their own.
Some people say that people in The works of Residual Snow have a common feature, that is, "can't guess thoroughly".
But just because it can't guess thoroughly, it gives the reader more space to think, and the reader can give them a definition according to what they see. Just like philosophical speculation, the deduction from the characters in the book to the objective existence of the real world.
Book Highlights
It's a book that glows at night
The cover of the book is designed with a luminous version, in the dark of the night, you can see the faint light emitted by the book cover, and a few apples are like a small night lamp in the night, guiding you in the direction.
New experimental writing, from literature to philosophy
One of the things that Xue Xue has been doing is to inject a philosophical soul into the body of literature and construct a new type of literary theory. She believes that it is very important for a creator to make his work more profound and meaningful.
So in this work, you can see her results directly.
The plot is bizarre, and the novel is surprising
Literary critic Ge Hongbing once said that the literary world of Remnant Snow is more like a forest of thorns. The enigmatic sentences show a cruel and grotesque beauty like a forest of thorns.
There is no shortage of such enigmatic sentences in the book "Apple Tree Planted in the Corridor", which is gently tapped to make you understand.
All along, Remnant Snow has been labeled with many labels that seem to be very "lonely", such as "representative of avant-garde writers", "the most anti-traditional and modern Chinese female writers", "Kafka of China", "a lonely person who really entered the state of literature" and so on.
But no matter how the outside world labels it, she has always been immersed in her own creative path, as she explains her pen name: "residual snow" is the kind of residual snow that is left behind after most of the snow has melted, but it is not intended to fade. At the same time, she also hopes that young readers will have more "wise people" who can see the structure of this story clearly.
And are you willing to start with "The Apple Tree Planted in the Corridor" and be such a "wise man"?
"Apple Trees Planted in the Corridor"
Written by Zanyuki
Produced by Gao Gao International
About the Author:
Remnant Xue, whose real name is Deng Xiaohua, was born in 1953. Contemporary Chinese writers are known as representatives of avant-garde literature. Among contemporary Chinese writers around the world, there are "three more": the works are translated the most, the works are selected into the textbooks of foreign universities the most, and the specialized research institutions that study their works are the most. He was nominated for the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 2021, he was again selected for the Booker International Literature Prize, and was the only Chinese writer to be selected.
Since 1985, He has published works, and his novels express tempting and solid ideas with individual language and structure, which has greatly enriched the creation of Chinese language and literature, and is known as one of the most creative writers in the Chinese literary circle since the middle of the 20th century. In recent years, through re-reading the works of Western writers such as Kafka and Calvino and Western philosophers such as Kant and Hegel, Xue Xue has tried to use philosophy to expand the depth and breadth of the literary spiritual world. Representative works include "Apple Tree Planted in the Corridor", "Old Floating Clouds", "Seeing the Abyss in the Sky", "The Cottage on the Mountain", "Yellow Mud Street", "Five Spice Street", "The Last Lover" and so on.