The scene of the sharing meeting was photographed by Cai Zhen
On the evening of August 18, li Jingze, a famous writer and critic, Xiao Bai, a contemporary writer who has just won the Novella Award of the Seventh Lu Xun Literature Award for his work "Blockade", Huang Yuning, a cutting-edge writer spanning the three worlds of translation, publishing and creation, and Mao Jian, a professor and writer at East China Normal University, gathered at sinan Literature House to have a heated conversation about the publication of Huang Yuning's first novel collection, "Eight and a Half Parts", and Mao Jian served as a guest host for normal activities.
During the event, Li Jingze shared his "sneak peek" reading experience with the readers who came to the event as the "preface recommender" of the book; Xiao Bai recalled his impression when he first read Huang Yuning's works, and the joy of finally seeing the works today; Mao Jian proposed the relationship between Huang Yuning's novels and films and TV series from the perspective of film critics; and the writer Huang Yuning himself shared her experience of transforming from a translator to a writer from the perspective of creation and translation. At the sharing meeting, readers also actively dialogued with the four guests, and applause and laughter broke out from time to time.
"Eight and a Half Parts" by Huang Yuning, Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House
Unearth new structures of relationships and desires
Huang Yuning is a famous contemporary writer, translator, publisher, and also a star storyteller of the "Get" app. She has translated the works of many foreign writers such as F.S. Fitzgerald, Henry James, Agatha Christie, Ian McEwan, and is the author of essay collections such as "A Man's Castle", "Negative Reading, Masculine Writing", "Metamorphosis", "When False", etc. "Eight and a Half" is her first collection of novels, including eight fictional works she has created in recent years, "Call Transfer", "Three Forks", "Water", "You or Plants", "Happiness is within reach", "Mercury is Busy", "A Thousand Miles alone", "Literary Patient" and a semi-fictional work "Overseas Relations". Because in Huang Yuning's view, her personal fictional history began with this "Overseas Relations" five or six years ago, so this collection was published, and she decided to convert it into half a novel, combined with eight fictional stories - this is also the origin of the title "Eight and a Half Parts".
As mentioned by the guests at the event, "Eight and a Half Parts" is in some ways the same as the British drama classic "Black Mirror". Li Jingze pointed out that in the fictional stories she created, Huang Yuning has always consciously or unconsciously obsessed with a certain totem - "medium". Among them, typical such as "Call Transfer", "Three Forks", "Happiness within Reach", "Mercury is Busy" in the SMS, WeChat, Circle of Friends, Weibo, Column, Email, science fiction such as the holographic virtual wall in "A Thousand Miles to Ride Alone" and the robot and scoring system in "Literary Patient". Of course, there are also pre-modern mediums such as the floor slabs in "Water", but this medium further highlights the essence of modern media and traditional media in general: transmission, simultaneous isolation; understanding, and misunderstanding. It is in this sense that the author excavates the new interpersonal relationship and desire structure brought about by the development of the modern Internet, and in the intersection of reality and science fiction, with the help of highly condensed drama, the contradictions and ironies are vividly displayed.
Show great writing skills without hesitation
Turning to this book, we can find that almost all of Huang Yuning's stories take place in cities, sometimes in the bustling contemporary "international metropolis", sometimes in the old city of decades ago. Unlike the simple and poetic countryside, urban life is lively and prosperous, and urban life is also impetuous and indifferent, and such a complex urban environment is indeed the scene that readers are most familiar with and live in every day. Like the characters in the book, the people of the city, no matter what class they are in, look at each other, but also estrange from each other, envy each other, and envy each other. Especially the middle and quasi-middle-class men and women in the book, they face pressure, they are in a complicated situation, they are helpless, they are forced to face their own weakness and trouble.
In his preface to Eight and a Half, Li Jingze likened Huang Yuning to "young Atwood" and "female McEwan", and said of Huang Yuning and her works: "She worships and expects miracles, she is hopelessly addicted to drama; all her novels, each of them, begin with a devious, crazy idea, a miraculous accident." ”
As a veteran translator with good world literature literacy, Huang Yuning has shown excellent writing skills without hesitation in writing these works. She sometimes adopts multi-character first-person relay narratives, sometimes incorporates stream-of-consciousness writing techniques, sometimes intersperses surreal imaginary scenes in the framework of realism, sometimes seamlessly connects fictional narrative techniques with non-fiction narrative content, and she even uses science fiction forms to pinpoint real-world problems. These characteristics, in addition to her long-term floating in the vast ocean of world literature, as shown earlier, also benefit from her love of theatrical conflict and the great power of the image culture in contemporary mass culture.