The Unusual and the Ordinary: Writing World Literature under the Pandemic

　 The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 is spreading day by day, seeping into everyone's lives, and people are so alienated and so close. In such a year when fear and longing coexist, loneliness and warmth coexist, although the epidemic has pressed the pause button on the world, writers have never stopped thinking. They think about the shortcomings of the times, do things for the times, fulfill their responsibilities, and provide spiritual food for the readers. In the annual "Recommend a Book for You" campaign, Foreign Literature Dynamics Research magazine grandly launched 15 annual masterpieces to the Chinese academic and reading circles, which were carefully selected by 15 foreign literature experts with profound professional qualities (Chen Shihua, Zhong Zhiqing, He Ning, Zhao Danxia, Rui Xiaohe, Chen Li, Wang Yuan, Fan Xing, Li Zheng, Xu Liming, You Mei, Kong Xiawei, Yang Ling, Chen Qi, Zhao Jing), from many works in 11 major languages in the world.

　　The writing and metaphor of the disease

　　Illness and death have always been important motifs of literature. In 2020, writers have also provided readers with many of their own examinations and reflections on epidemics.

　　British writer Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague tells the story of her son Hamnet who contracted the plague and lost his life from the perspective of a mother. Although the story told in the novel takes place in the Middle Ages, the work meticulously portrays the fear and anxiety of people under the plague, traces the source of the plague like a cocoon, and shows the pain of the mother's loss of love, all of which is full of live sense for readers in the context of the new crown pneumonia epidemic. The novel focuses on a mother who has lost her beloved, and the husband in the work is a Latin teacher, who four years later named his play Hamlet after his son.

　　If the plague that killed 1/3 of Europeans was the mortal enemy of medieval people, the 1918 flu was another virus in the 20th century. In 2018, Irish writer Emma Donoghue wrote the novel "The Pull of the Stars" inspired by the Spanish flu centenary festival, which coincided with the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The novel tells the story of women represented by nurses Julia and Dr. Lynn who risk their lives to care for and treat their expectant mothers who are infected with the flu. The story takes place in 1918, when the flu broke out, when it was the First World War, and the seemingly daily scenes in the work were actually a life-and-death test without smoke, showing another kind of heroism in wartime. In the 2020 epidemic, female medical workers have supported more than half of the sky. Rather than saying that "The Gravity of the Stars" is a clever response to the present at the right time, it is rather a proper reflection of the reality of many years in literature.

　　The Russian writer Evgeny Chirov's novel "The Man Who Gathered Heaven" has been called a book of memories. The protagonist Killier's mother is plagued by Alzheimer's disease, and the memory of the individual is gradually being eroded. Determined to help his mother retrieve her memories, Killier, along with followers nicknamed "Pencils," began trying to collect "old objects" to retrieve memories of her mother's past. Mother's Alzheimer's disease has a special connotation, its personal history gradually disappears, and the mark of the "pencil" can be erased at any time, which is a metaphor for belonging to an era and a class, and these people living at the bottom of society are eventually forgotten by the times.

　　Spanish writer Albert Espinosa's short story collection "What Is Lost is Gained" consists of 19 small stories that soothe the soul, most of which involve illness and death, and although they are full of sadness, they are also full of healing, hope and vitality. The protagonists of the first story are a pair of 15-year-old twin brothers, the older brother has cancer, and the night before the operation proposed to swap positions with the healthy brother, so the two brothers each experienced a different life situation and had a different understanding of life. The writer, who has been bedridden for more than ten years due to osteosarcoma, has a more vivid and profound understanding of the disease, which cannot help but remind people of many masterpieces focusing on diseases and writers who are seriously ill in the Spanish literary world in recent years. Accompanying illness is the norm of life, and the writer will tearfully write about the understanding of the disease, so as to explore the philosophy of life, old age, illness and death, and comfort people who are tormented by illness.

　　The protagonist of Israeli writer Ishai Al-Saled's novel Victory is a psychologist who has served in the military camp for many years, and one of his main responsibilities is to provide psychotherapy to traumatized soldiers. By writing about the challenges that the heroine experiences in her professional beliefs and kinship relationships, the writer shows the extraordinary circumstances of existence that ordinary Israelis have to face. In the Twins of italian writer Emanuele Trevi, both protagonists are writers who die of accidents and frostbite, respectively. The writer is friends with the two protagonists, and through their stories, they tell the reader about life itself, show how to face death, and prompt people to reflect on the great challenges facing human beings. It is a dual work by narrator and literary critic, mixing different genres of narrative, biography, and literary criticism in fascinating styles, spanning the vast and complex world of literature, shuttling between the past and the present, the present and the future.

　　Just as more than 600 years ago, when the plague was epidemic in Florence, young men and women each told a story every day, leaving us with a "Decameron", Shakespeare's Hamlet is also the pearl of the plague, and words such as plague and cholera are also closely related to literature. Whether it is an epidemic or other disease, it has never been far away, and these diseases that have brought disaster to countless families have prompted people to think about the relationship between human beings and diseases, human beings and nature, and to learn how to live with diseases.

　　An Exploration of Race and Women

　　Racism is a difficult problem under the combined influence of political, economic and historical issues for many years, and in 2020, many works on this topic have been born in the world literary world; the Me-Too movement has been in full swing in recent years, and many masterpieces focusing on women's growth and crisis have also emerged in the United States, Britain, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan and other countries.

　　Jefferson Tenorio's novel The Opposite of the Skin is the most talked about and acclaimed book in the Brazilian literary scene in 2020. The writer's dark skin and ethnic identity give him a deeper and more detailed understanding of racial discrimination. The novel is narrated by a black man named Pedro, whose father was originally a public school teacher, but was mistakenly killed during a police street raid. Pedro understands and pieces together the story of his father's life, realizing that in his father's growth, love, work and life, racial discrimination is everywhere, and the whole novel is real and sad. French Reunion writer Geller Berem's first novel, Monsters Behind the Door, tells the story of the growth of de Cent, a little girl in Reunion, and shows a different side of the resort town of Reunion. Slavery has left a deep historical imprint on Reunion, one of france's most gender-unequal regions, and Descent, often threatened by violence by her patriarchal father, dreams of a life different from her father's and hopes of becoming a "writer of magic." The novel writes about her growth years from birth to the age of 20 from the perspective of Descent, and the tone is sometimes sharp and sometimes warm, and it is an elegant and funny and poignant work.

　　Another good book of the year focusing on women's lives is the novel "Starting with Time" by Korean writer Ding Se-lang. In recent years, the importance of women writers in Korean literature has become increasingly prominent, and in the Me-Too movement, "Kim Ji-young in 1982" has received a good response in Asia, winning a worldwide reputation for Korean literature. In 2020, women writers and their works show absolute advantages. "Starting from time before" from the time when people prepared the tenth anniversary of the sacrifice for the female artist Shen Shixian who opposed the sacrifice before she died, people gradually restored the life of Shen Shixian, an artist and writer who was at the forefront of the times, through the search for objects, although she lived in the past, she had the ideal characteristics of future women.

　　History and reality intertwine between virtual and real

　　Japan's book of the year 2020 is "Missing What Was Lost" by Takashi Murakami, which integrates Japan's aggression against Korea and ponders how to pass on the historical lessons of his father's generation. Thinking about the issue of war responsibility has always plagued many east Asian countries, and it is still a real issue of concern to many countries in China, Japan and South Korea. As an influential writer and critic in Japan, Murakami Ryu has been concerned about various social issues in Japan in recent years, and this new work, together with the war thinking works of Haruki Murakami and others, constitute a group of Japanese works reflecting on war.

　　2020 coincides with the 30th anniversary of German reunification, and several novels have emerged in Germany that aim to examine and reflect on The unity and integration of Germany and the socio-cultural changes. Former East German writer Lutz Celer's Star 111 focuses on the opening of the Berlin Wall and tells the story of two escapes. Son Karl, like other young people, came to Berlin, the land of inspiration, in a turning point, trying to pursue his dreams and become a poet, but the utopian carnival gradually gave way to a sober reality; Karl's parents were forced to give up the opportunity to pursue their musical dreams in the United States due to border closures and the construction of the Berlin Wall, and quickly fled after the reopening of the Berlin Wall, although they eventually came to the Hollywood Walk of Fame with their beloved accordion, but "freedom" is not without a price, as a "East German". From the outset, they encountered all kinds of prejudice and discrimination from the West Germans. The work truly depicts the influence and impact of the East Germans in the historical process of German reunification– although free from the constraints of the original system, another system that is not a warm vein is waiting for them to integrate. Writing about Germany during the transition period has become an important theme in contemporary German literature, and "Star 111" recreates an important historical moment in Germany, outlining a panoramic picture of German society in the transition period, which is refreshing to read.

　　Egyptian writer Rem Basyouni's novel The Children of Those People – The Mamluk Trilogy spans nearly 300 years of the rise and fall of the Mamluk dynasty in Egyptian history. The trilogy has a solid historical foundation, giving new life to the historic Mamluk Cairo, showing the collision and integration of the multiculturalism of Egyptian society during the Mamluk period, and the relationship between different religions and sects in the works is still very important for today's Egypt and even Arab society. Writers try to think differently about religious, historical and social issues, hoping that the world will objectively judge and understand others. Canadian writer Gil Adams' "Mountain Village Tramp" inherits the Western literary tradition and is full of historical elements. The work tells the adventures of father and son, and the story is humorous and warm.

　　The 2020 French Goncourt Prize-winning novel "Anomaly" attempts to understand the fragile world we live in from a surreal perspective, in which a plane flies to the space-time fault zone, each passenger has two bodies, as if entering the intersection of parallel worlds. People interact with their doppelgangers in a series of ways, involving war, disease, the environment and many other social issues. It is worth noting that in addition to being a writer, Elvie Leterier, the author of Anomaly, is also a mathematician and astrophysicist, in which the writer assumes that the world is a huge information illusion, and thinks about truth and illusion, showing a unique view of time and space. Just as the so-called fake is true and false, in this work, science fiction and reality are closely intertwined and deny each other, from which we can appreciate the powerlessness of writers in the face of various crises in real society. Another good book of the year with science fiction overtones is the novel "The Living and the Remnant" by Angolan writer Agualusa. The protagonists of the story are many writers who participate in literary festivals, and the characters in their own works seem to enter reality and interact with the living. Writing comes from life, life is also affected by writing, or life is writing, and the writer shows us the two-way interaction between writing and reality in the fictional world, which makes people realize that this is not a side of reality.

　　Whether it is a direct response to social problems, or a current reflection on historical themes, or a critique of reality under the cover of science fiction, or a two-way interaction between writing and reality, the international literary scene in 2020 has shown people the realistic position and responsibility of literature. Literature thinks about how to deal with the future by examining history and reality. In the reality of normalization of epidemic prevention and control, it is good to have literature. As Espinosa, the author of Lose, put it in the preface: "When you desperately need something else to heal yourself, you need books like this." "It is in these tragic and joyful writings that literature constructs another world for us, brings people a little comfort, and makes lonely people no longer lonely. Literary reading transcends the isolation of space, gives survivors another freedom of thought, and brings warmth and courage to people.

　　(The author is the editor of the journal "Research on the Dynamics of Foreign Literature")

Source: China Social Science Network - China Social Science Daily Author: Su Yongyi