The Paper's reporter Gao Dan
Divorce rates have reportedly increased significantly in all countries during the pandemic. Many families have staged scenes like those in the American movie "Marriage Story": when they love each other, they are like glue, they are at peace in their daily lives, and when they divorce, they talk badly and resent each other. Which is the real us? Married because of love, what about divorce?
The People's Literature Publishing House recently published a new book by writer Zhou Daxin, "The Flowers of Los Angeles," a novel about the Chinese version of "Marriage Story." Zhou Daxin uses the technique of "quasi-documentary", from the perspective of a matchmaker, using the records of four divorce trials to tell the love story of a marriage story and the last chicken feathers.
Zhou Daxin
The hero and heroine in "Los Angeles Flowers" are from Shandong and one from Henan, both graduated from 985, and through blind dates, the two fell in love in Beijing and Fengzi got married. Work pressure, pressure to buy a house, child education, elderly support... All the problems that marriage needs to face suddenly rush to the front of two people, who are constantly overcoming the difficulties of life while also feeling the pressure of reality.
Critic Li Jingze said: "Los Angeles Flowers Fall" reminds people of Flaubert's "Emotional Education", which is an emotional education novel Chinese. It is not the novelist who wants to educate you, but the novelist uses a story to take each of us to emotional self-education. In this age of pluralistic and conflicting concepts of marriage, this emotional self-education is very important.
"Los Angeles Flowers"
Under the appearance of "trial marriage", Zhou Daxin wants to explore the emotional ability brought by the original family, and explore the problem of "marriage quotient" in addition to IQ, emotional intelligence, and financial quotient. Unlike previous writings, which focused more on the reality of the dilemma, Zhou Daxin's focus in "Los Angeles Flowers" is the change of feelings, and for a marriage, life is far more difficult than mutual suspicion. Zhou Daxin believes that the so-called love needs romance, and marriage needs to be inclusive, which are all manifestations of learning, and are all ways to improve "love quotient" and "marriage quotient". Don't go to the divorce court and find that you are not doing well enough in many places... In this book, Zhou Daxin hopes to integrate law and human feelings, prejudices and understanding, and write a "guide to rational marriage".
"Los Angeles Flowers Fall", the title image is derived from Ouyang Xiu's poem titled "Yulou Chun". More people are familiar with the sentence "Life is a love obsession, this hatred is not related to the wind and the moon", in fact, the next few sentences are more sad: "Away from the song and Do not renew the que, a song can teach the intestines to knot." Straight to see all the flowers of Los Angeles, the beginning of the spring breeze is easy to say goodbye. The title of the book with such an image structure has the tragic meaning of the withering of love, and also implies the cost of women's growth.
The heroine of the novel is a Shandong girl, beautiful and gentle, she is a well-behaved girl in the family, and she is also a bully and school flower in the school. After going to college, she had her first love and contact with society, she did not want to let her parents control everything, she wanted to dominate her own life. In love with the hero, she is not materialistic or vulgar. However, after getting married, she could not stand her husband's sudden coldness, and she began to suspect until she went to divorce court...
Through the marriage of two people, Zhou Daxin extended his pen and ink to the old issues of women's growth and gender equality in marriage in history. However, stimulated by new stories and new characters, these old questions have taken on new meanings. When Zhou Daxin wrote that in ancient times, women divorced because they wanted their husbands to be loyal and were blocked by family ancestral halls; he wrote that during the Republic of China, women were difficult to divorce by domestic violence, and at the same time, they were thinking about the complexity of the patriarchal, cultural and legal laws carried by the marriage system in China, and also thinking about the extent to which the "New Marriage Law", which was promulgated and implemented in the 1950s, escorted women's independence and women's right to choose.
Nowadays, the "cooling off period for divorce" has also become a hot search term, which has put forward new topics for the current marriage system and how women can establish their position in marriage. Zhou Daxin said that the family is not a workplace, should not act according to the law of the jungle, but should be full of love and security everywhere, which is the most natural appeal of women.
Zhou Daxin has always been a penman, he likes history, but also pays attention to reality, writes about his hometown, and writes about the times. Starting from "Lake Light and Mountain Color", which won the Mao Dun Literature Prize, he solidly fulfilled the responsibility of a writer who was committed to the status of "secretary of the times" with the rhythm of a novel every three years.
By the time of this "Los Angeles Flowers", Zhou Daxin happened to have completed ten (thirteen volumes) of novels. Among them, "Out of the Basin", "Twentieth Act", "Legend of War" and so on, have received a lot of attention. In recent years, "Qu Finally Man" and "Dark Is Slow" have also been constantly groping and pioneering between "fiction" and "non-fiction".
Zhou Daxin said that he used "Los Angeles Flowers" as a novel to write "seal the pen", in this farewell to the long novel writing, Zhou Daxin chose the world's most common and most complex "marriage" as a story carrier, but also used the "family" as a social cell to show the strangeness of life.
Li Jingze said: "A writer's writing accompanies his own life course, which is easier said than done, and especially difficult for Zhou Daxin. As his son died young, he wrote Requiem; as he grew older, he wrote Slowly Dark; and now, with a copy of "The Flowers of Los Angeles," he announces the closure of his long-form writing and returns to love itself. I think he's not writing fiction, he's writing about himself, writing about life. ”
Editor-in-Charge: Liang Jia
Proofreader: Shi Gong