Have you ever noticed that every time you take a long vacation, the time is the most efficient time to read?
Especially in traffic jams, waiting for planes, driving to the next attraction, transferring, waiting for meals... There is always a feeling of sneaking around and earning time.
National Day holiday, these 5 high-scoring short story collections quickly live! On average, you can read a high-energy story in an average of one or two hours, perfectly matching the fragment time of your journey
01
Life is supposed to be a miracle day after day
This is an outstanding novelist who has been praised by many discerning literary circles.
Márquez, Neruda, Saramago, Llosa, and Mo Yan all openly admired him, and Borges and Bolaño also had a lot of ties to him.
It is not difficult to imagine the weight of Cortázar's pen, and it is difficult to imagine what kind of work it is that has conquered so many literary people.
Cortázar is a literary master with a very characteristic creative style, in his novels reality and fantasy are often intertwined, but behind it is the opposition between longing for change and being willing to the status quo, showing the indifference that cannot be connected between people.
"Southern Expressway" is a novel that profoundly embodies this indifference, and the material selected is the most common traffic jam, but the difference is that this traffic jam lasts for many days, almost isolated from the outside world, forming a miniature society on the highway.
Source Film: No Man's Land
In the new society, people elect leaders, distribute food, and set up special teams to deal with emergencies. Even fell in love, got married, and lived a daily life.
But when the road is clear, the small group of the past instantly falls apart, and people begin to live aimlessly in the normal world again.
In Cortázar's pen, reality and fantasy are intertwined, the order of time and space is like a kaleidoscope full of changes, and there are strange, mysterious and absurd connections in the underworld.
Every encounter with Cortázar is a one-of-a-kind gallop, a gorgeous and free adventure.
02
Yan Geling: I was also an unkind little girl
The "Spike" series is a collection of Yan Geling Impressionist autobiographical novels, connecting Spike's childhood, girlhood and youth through 12 scattered stories.
As a child, she was put in her grandmother's house by her parents, lonely, but not too restricted and concerned. Returning to the compound of his parents' life as a teenager, there is not much family affection, and behind the girls in the compound, he is still marginalized, lonely and lonely.
Observing a lot of extremely bad and cruel human nature, she did not have the theoretical goodness and morality to compete with it.
Later, when he was young, he desperately went to join the army, and suffered a huge blow because of love in the literary troupe, and found that he was a love that could not be nourished by love. In his youth, he was still like a genie who was not limited by mortal reason. Later went abroad and so on.
Stills from "Fanghua"
In the process of reading, you can't help but feel that Hotaru's life is too gray, she is not at all like the little girl we think she is.
She learned from the people around her to observe the colors and see the wind and rudder, and her cold parents and savage companions were always teaching her how to "fight with the sky, with the earth, and with people" the philosophy of survival.
She was abandoned, she was betrayed, she was betrayed, she was betrayed, she was betrayed, she was betrayed, and she failed others. Here, no one is "clean", not even children, and I firmly remember a sentence in the text:
"How cruel the child is, how he knows how to take advantage of the pain of others. She was too lazy to meet with adults, who were often stupid and self-righteous. All old creatures are untrustworthy. ”
This "Spike" is more like Yan Geling's ritual of redeeming herself through words many years later, there is no emotion released arbitrarily, she fiercely uses a scalpel to peel off the cocoon for you to reach the essence, which is to distort and complex human nature.
03
Nightmares on Christmas Eve
British author Mark Harden has been a frequent hit on the best-seller list since his feature-length debut, The Mystery of the Late Night Puppy, took the world by storm in 2003.
As Mark Harden's first collection of short stories, this "Time for Me to Shoot" has once again become a hot topic and has been praised by major media.
The book contains nine stories based on history, mythology, folktales and real life, presenting nine unique situations in different forms. But whether it is the gloom of everyday life or the absurd imagination, it conveys a deep loneliness: an eternal loneliness that is both longing and alienating from others and the world.
The story of the book's namesake begins with a grotesque invasion on Christmas Eve:
A family of three adult children, each reunited on Christmas Eve with their spouse and children. Like all families, they have strained relationships. The most concerned of this is the second son, Gavin, who is a famous TV presenter who has a high opinion of himself and is only good to himself.
Then a mysterious intruder arrived, and he put the gun on the table. Gavin shot him! Life is out of control– especially Gavin.
Stills from Hurricane Rescue 2
Like the other eight stories in the book, the details of "It's Time for Me to Shoot" are meticulously crafted and therefore extremely vivid.
Whether it's the portrayal of a warm and comfortable middle-class home on the surface, the record of The Adventures Gavin went through after that fateful Christmas, or the horrific physical reactions after the shooting and the final consequences of Gavin' death. The beauty of this detail comes from the author's literary mastery.
The details themselves are very meaningful and fascinating, but they are like oblique rays of light, touching people in an unobtrusive way.
04
Everyone has a black box in their heart
This short and concise collection of stories allows you to experience the unique charm of Haruki Murakami effortlessly.
There are 5 short stories in the book, stones that move at any time, monkeys that can steal people's names, corridors that make people disappear bizarrely... Each one seems to be imaginative and boundless, but Murakami only uses these images to explore the emotions common to humans in the real world.
The estrangement and reconciliation between relatives, the estrangement between lovers, the search for love, and the reflection on existence. In the slightly fantastic atmosphere of the book, people are more open to their real, not so beautiful life.
Stills from Kamakura Monogatari
In the opening chapter of "Accidental Traveler", Mr. Murakami first listed two very coincidental events that had actually happened in his life. They are all very everyday little events, but they are very real.
Everyone in life has more or less such moments, lamenting the magic of fate because of various coincidences.
After reading these 5 stories, as the translator Lin Shaohua wrote in the preface to the translation:
"For Murakami, contingency seems to be one glass glue, used to bridge the gap between the real world and the supernatural world, the second is a slide, used to further infiltrate the basement of the soul to explore the hidden treasure, and the third is the endoscope, used to spy on the chain of fate and the mystery of the cosmic order."
The realistic portrayal behind these accidents is more worthy of our deep thinking.
Readers who are familiar with Haruki Murakami may have summed up the writer's "routine", and one of his short stories will often become the introduction to a future novel.
We might as well venture to imagine that these 5 accidental stories will be the prototype of Haruki Murakami's future masterpieces? If you could, which story would you most look forward to seeing?
05
A polish genius writer on par with Kafka
Polish writer Bruno. Schultz, who was unknown throughout his life, earned great fame with two short story collections, "The Sanatorium Where the Hourglass Made the Signature" and "The Cinnamon Shop and Other Stories," and was even hailed as "a genius on a par with Kafka."
If the former is likened to a miniature version of a palace full of flowers, then the Cinnamon Shop is a secret and rare treasure treasure treasured in the palace.
In fact, before that, Schultz's works had entered Chinese literature, and in the third issue of Foreign Literature and Art in 1992, Yu Mo translated several of his short stories.
It was also that time that Yu Hua and Schultz met for the first time, and Yu Hua was fascinated at first sight when he saw Schultz's words!
Bruno Schultz self-portrait
The 15 stories in the book are based on the author's childhood and family, and they add a large number of strange imaginations, magnificent images and obscure metaphors, making reality and dreams inseparable.
Schultz is like a bad boy who clings to childhood memories, he chooses to deviate from reality after witnessing the ugliness of the truth, and uses his childish and overriding imagination to create a magnificent and strange picture that confuses adults.
You may feel like you're in a movie, with the absurdity of things changing at the speed of light, and the lightning switches of the camera to make the whole story confusing.
His words are like a time bomb hidden in the heart, and the tense picture makes me involuntarily nervous, and the organ hairs are always on guard against every move of the story in the book.
You don't have to turn your head at all, you just need to abandon all serious thinking, and you can enter the dreamland that Schultz has built for you!